August 1966  Pacific Islands Monthly

In the early hours of August  1,  1966  at  Concord Repatriation Hospital, Sydney, death at last claimed Edward Llewllyn Gordon Thomas --Tolala. PIM thereby lost a long-time contributor and a valued friend. The South-West Pacific lost its foremost chronicles of pre-1914 history. He was 76. He had been in hospital for the previous month, but had, in fact,been in increasingly poor health since September, 1945, when he emerged from three years internment by the Japanese in Rabaul.  He had lived in semi-retirement at Campbelltown, NSW, since then. In this last decade his physical contact with the world around him constantly diminished, but he had crowded sufficient variety into his early years to cover a whole life span. In his latter years he was able to live on these memories better than most, and through his "Talk-Talk column in PIM, he created new friends, and his own niche in the continiuing pageant of New Guinea affairs. He was an American by birth--born in Chicago Jan.5,1890. His father was an Army man, but the family seems to have had its roots in Canada rather than the United States. The young Gordon Thomas, after he had completed his education in London, Wiesbaden (Germany), and Switzerland, he began a newspaper career on the family newspaper, The Camrose Mail, in Alberta. He later worked on The Vancouver Mail, but by the time he was 20, he was off to Australia. In 1911, he took a job as printer for The Methodist Mission that then had its New Guinea headquarters in the Duke of York Islands. New Guinea was then a German possession, and it was at this period that he formed contacts with German officials and colonists, many of which he retained to the end. What little has been recorded, in English, of the German period in New Guinea has come mainly from Gordon Thomas, especially  through his "Talk-Talk" column in PIM.  He left the mission in 1912 and went trading for the German firm of HASAG, one of the three big firms of German, New Guinea. At that time HASAG was an amalgamation of H.R. Wahlen interests and those of Queen Emma. In   1913,  Gordon changed companies again, going to Bougainville, Choiseul Plantations LTD. He served in the AIF in France during World War I When he returned to the territory, he was editor of the Rabaul Times, the local weekly for two periods; 1925-27 and 1933-50.

The rest of his years in the territory were spent in trading management, overseeing, and as an assistant oil driller at Matapau, in the Sepik District when NG oilsearch was  centred there. When the Japanese invaded Rabaul in January, 1941, over 300 civilians were trapped there. They were eventually shipped to Japan on the Montevideo Maru which was sunk with all hands before she reached her distination.                PRISONER OF JAPANESE For reasons of their own, the Japanese retained half-adozen civilians in Rabaul to work as rouse-abouts at the freezer and power station. Gordon Thomas was one of these and therefore escaped the fate of his friends, although the mental and physical effects of this internment he was to carry to the end of his life. He has left a long, unpublished manuscript about this period that is one of the more un-usual records of the war in New Guinea. Between the wars, under the psuedonym of Don Gordon, he wrote innumerable magazine articles, a book of verse (Echoes  of  the  South  Seas),  and  a  novel  (Tropic Equations) He married in 1912.  Mrs. Thomas died in 1961. Gordon Thomas will be mourned by friends all over the world and by consistant  readers of his  PIM  "Talk-Talk". PIM, without Tolala's memoirs of the "German times", his occasional lapses into Victorian sentimentality and his mild arguments with the post World-War II generation of experts, won't be the same.