Justin Glowacki

Alias Usten Glavasky (WWI service records)   Russian spelling Устин Романович Гловацкий (Главацкий)

Born 15.08.1888    Place Zhabinka, Brest, Belarus    Ethnic origin Byelorussian     Religion Russian Orthodox

Father Glowacki, Roman   Mother Glowacki (née Sladziev), Tatiana

Residence before arrival at Australia served at 4th Siberian Infantry, 1909 to 1912

Arrived at Australia

            from Far East     on 23.05.1913     per Inaba Maru    disembarked at Brisbane

Residence before enlistment Rockhampton, Qld

Occupation 1915 cook, 1918 steward, railway lengthsman, 1919-20 cook, 1921 gardener, 1930s caretaker, since 1938 ship's steward

Service

service number 2143   enlisted 1.04.1915 POE Rockhampton, Qld

unit 9th Battalion; 49th Battalion   rank Private

place Gallipoli, 1915, Western Front, 1916-1918

final fate RTA 23.09.1918       discharged 12.12.1918

Naturalisation 1940

Residence after the war 1918 Brisbane, 1919 Coolangatta, Brisbane, 1927-1930 Paris, 1930-1936 Warsaw, 1936-1938 London, 1938-1940 Australia, served in the British Navy at WWII, after the war lived with family in Sydney

Family wife Stefania Glowacki, daughters Olga b. 1933, Teresa, b. 1932, both born in Warsaw, daughter Barbara b. 1946 in Sydney

Died 5.11.1964

Materials naturalisation (NAA)

digitised service records (NAA) (Glavasky)

alien registration (NAA) (Glavasky)

Application for permit to enter Australia  1    2  (NAA)

Personal statement and declaration by alien passenger (NAA)

Glowacka, O [Olga] - naturalisation (NAA)

Glowacka, T [Teresa] - naturalisation (NAA)

From Russian Anzacs in Australian History:

‘One day, when we were sitting around the table having hot potatoes in winter’, Justin Glowacki’s daughter Barbara remembers, ‘I said, “I’ve just been at school and we spent the whole lesson talking about that fantastic man called Simpson.” And my father absolutely saw red and started screaming, “That idiot! He killed more people with his stupid behaviour than he saved. He’d be carrying a stretcher and the next minute he’d be doing funny shapes to the Turks, saying, Here I am, jumping up and down, and the wounded person’d get shot.” And he said, “How many donkeys and wounded people got killed because of his stupidity!” He used to say that he had bellyaches so he would not have to work with Simpson, because going out with him was very dangerous.’

    Justin Glowacki’s own life-story was full of adventures. He was the great-grandson, if the family tale can be believed, of a rich landlord, who frequented the czar’s palaces. Justin started his career in the Australian army as a cook but, on the ship over to Egypt, ‘He was changed from a cook to a batman’, as Barbara tells it, ‘he looked after officers, because they realised that he was a gentleman, he knew a lot about cultured things. … When he was disembarked at Gallipoli, they assigned him to a stretcher-bearing unit, because they were looking for short men.’ He was a stretcher-bearer there but it couldn’t have been with Simpson since Glowacki disembarked at Gallipoli on 2 September 1915 and Simpson had been shot almost four months earlier, on 19 May. Well, there might have been other Simpsons along his way …

    Glowacki had an encounter at Gallipoli which would prove useful later in his life — ‘he helped a man survive, by going and picking him up, and carrying him all the way back across the beach to the boats which were taking the wounded back to the troop-ships. It was Frank Savary’s cousin or family member whom he actually saved. And the fellow asked his name, he had been an officer. He remembered him’, Barbara relates, ‘and so after the war Frank Savary would do anything my father asked.’ Years later Frank Savary would rescue Justin’s family trapped in Poland during the Second World War […]

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