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Spurs’: Hidden Basin, or Chugga-Kurri. The discovery brought to reality the legend of an oasis in that part of the
desert, which he first heard told over ten years previously in a Western Australian town.
In 1938 Terry planned another expedition with Ben Nicker, who had accompanied him on most other
expeditions, but had to cancel it in order to undergo extensive dental treatment By the time the opportunity arose
again, Nicker had gone to the Second World War and died in Greece as the result of a gangrenous injury.
In 1940, Terry married Ursula Livingstone-Learmonth. The marriage, unsuccessful from the outset, lasted only
four years and was dissolved.
During the Second World War, Terry worked with British Intelligence in Sydney, assessing the communist
element in Australia, before taking a commission with the New South Wales Department of Main Roads,
to document the role and achievements of that department during the war years, particularly the development of
the Stuart Highway. The result of this work was Terry’s sixth publication, Bulldozer, in 1945.
In 1944 Terry brought a piece of land near Darlinghurst, New South Wales, and by 1950 was completely settled
there and earning a living selling timber and firewood from the property.
In 1961, he led a mineral exploration expedition to the west of Alice Springs, into the Cleland Hills. There he
discovered ancient rock carvings ‘quite different from known Aboriginal art’. After a later expedition to study the
carvings specifically, Robert Edwards, Curator of Anthropology at the South Australian Museum, said, ‘These
staring faces [referring to about sixteen particular carvings] were certainly wearing in their mother stone when the
Pharaohs raised the Sphinx at Giza.’
Due to ill health, Terry was forced to retire from life as an explorer in the early 1970s and settled down to recall
his adventures on paper. His seventh publication, The War of the Waramullas, ‘hit the shelves’ in 1974.
Terry died in 1981 in a nursing home in Sydney, aged eighty-two. He was writing his eighth book at the time,
an autobiography titled The Last Explorer. His sister Charlotte completed the book, and it was published in 1986.
M Terry, The Last Explorer, 1980; Australian, 19 July 1924; Adelaide Advertiser, 2 June 1941; BP Magazine, December 1929, February 1930;
Adelaide Chronicle, 10 July 1930; Adelaide Observer, 27 February 1926; Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 1981; WA Parliament, Votes
and Proceedings, 1, 10, 1899.
DUNCAN McCONNEL, Vol 1.
‘THE SUBDUED’: see ERLIKILYIKA
THOMAS, EDWARD PENRY (1890–1972), was born on 9 May 1890, at Godalming in Surrey, England, and
entered the Royal Naval College as a Midshipman in 1904.
Thomas served with the Royal Navy in the 1914–18 war. He was ‘loaned’ to the Royal Australian Navy in
March 1931. In 1933 he returned to England and the Royal Navy, and retired three years later, with an Officer
of the British Empire (OBE) award for his services. However, in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War,
Thomas was again ‘loaned’ to the Royal Australian Navy, from the retired list of the Royal Navy. He served with
Captain’s rank in HMAS Cerberus, the training depot in Victoria, before moving to Sydney in 1940, where he
occupied a similar position at HMAS Penguin.
After seven months with HMAS Penguin, Thomas was posted to Darwin as District Naval Officer and Naval
Officer in Charge (Northern Territory) with headquarters at the shore base, HMAS Melville.
In January 1940, the naval staff decided to raise the level of Darwin’s senior naval appointment, then held by a
Lieutenant Commander, to that of Captain. Thomas received the appointment and reached Darwin in August 1940
with the title of Naval Officer in Charge, Northern Territory. A martinet with a touch of humanity, Thomas soon
became known to his men as ‘Uncle Penry’ or ‘God’. He presided over a steady increase in the navy’s Darwin-based
fleet of small ships, described by one officer as ‘a motley collection of down-at-heel vessels’ and clashed with
the powerful North Australia Workers’ Union over the handling of the Port of Darwin and with the RAAF base
commander, Group Captain C Eaton, over inter-service co-operation. Thomas ran a ‘tight ship’; but when Japan
entered the war in December 1941, the naval staff again decided to raise the status of the Darwin naval command
and appointed Commodore C J Pope to replace Thomas. Pope arrived in Darwin on 20 February 1942, but fell
ill. Thomas held the naval command when the Japanese struck on the previous day’.
Thomas received much of the criticism that followed the sinking of eight ships by the Japanese. He had ignored
an earlier warning by an American Asiatic Fleet commander that ships in the Darwin anchorage were too closely
bunched; he told the Lowe Commission of Inquiry that he had expected an air raid that day, yet allowed ships to
double-berth on both sides of the wharf and seventy wharf labourers to work on them. But Thomas could not guess
the scale of the attack to come; neither he nor any other allied source knew that there were four Japanese aircraft
carriers in the Timor Sea to the north of Darwin. He told the Lowe Commission that he ‘was willing to run the risk
of raid damage to get [the unloading] done’. He took a calculated risk—and lost.
Commodore Pope succeeded him on 23 February. In April 1942 he took command of HMAS Moreton,
the Brisbane shore base, and continued to serve there until 12 March 1948, when he retired, remaining in Brisbane.
In his retirement, he became Patron of the Women’s Royal Australia Naval Service section of the Naval Association
of Australia.
Thomas married his first wife, Valerie, at Dunoon, Scotland, on 11 April 1914. The couple had one son and
two daughters. Presumably, he married a second time, since, when he died in Brisbane in January 1972, Mrs Beryl
Thomas and his three children were listed as surviving him.