By KATH GANNAWAY
OBITUARY
Marjorie Edna (Whitley) Thomas
Born: 13 February, 1926
Died: 27 July, 2014
WARBURTON, and the Thomas families, have a lot to thank Margaret Whitley for.
In 1948 she was working at Green Gables Guest House and invited her sister Edna over from Adelaide for a holiday.
The rest is Warburton history.
Edna packed up her job and moved to Warburton where shortly after she met the love of her life, a handsome young man named Keith Thomas.
Edna was to become one of Warburton’s most loved and respected community workers and in 1996 was Yarra Ranges Shire Citizen of the Year.
Keith and Edna married on 4 April, 1952, and raised their two sons Wayne and Chris and daughter Anne in the community they loved.
In a beautiful tribute to his mother, Chris said her life could easily be summed up in two words … family and community.
“But it would be unfair to Mum to leave it at that,” he added.
She wasn’t a ‘valley’ girl. The fourth of Joseph and Myrtle’s 12 children, she was born in Braeside on 13 February, 1926. Myrtle died in childbirth at just 42 when Edna was 17 and she took on the role of mum to her younger siblings.
She was part of a close-knit family, but life was far from easy and she could recall working as a young child on her parents’ market garden growing flowers and vegetables before and after school, and going to market in Melbourne with her father in a horse and cart in the early hours of the morning.
When her brother Cliff went off to war, in 1939, it was the girls and dad who kept the farm going – and it was hard work.
She left home at 18 to join her sisters working at Russell Collins Restaurant in Melbourne, and later moved to Adelaide.
Married life started in a rented “little old run-down place” in Brett Road.
It wasn’t so different, Chris said, from the lives of many other women living in the country at that time.
In the parlance of the day, Chris said Keith was the breadwinner, Edna the homemaker.
“How lucky we were,” he said. “A mother to kiss us and to wave us goodbye in the morning as we went off to school sitting in the back of Dad’s old green Vanguard ute, and to welcome us home in the afternoon with freshly made cakes, biscuits or scones.”
Like many woman of her era, Edna was also the glue that not only held the family together, but that held many aspects of community life together.
She loved community life and had a naturally generous approach to being part of whatever was good for her family, and for her community.
Reading through a long list of associations, Chris started with the Warburton Ladies’ Bowling Club of which she was a foundation member in 1960 – and an active member more than 50 years on.
She wasn’t one to stand back and see how things progressed. Edna was an original member of the fundraising group for the Senior Citizens’ Clubrooms in the 1960s, and of Meals on Wheels in 1974.
Other affiliations were with the Lions Club of Upper Yarra, Blind Auxiliary, Red Cross, Warburton Theatre Group, Ladies Guild of the Presbyterian Church, Warburton Hospital, CWA, Scout and Cub groups, Warburton Tennis Club, Yarra Valley Roller Derby Club and Warburton Small Bore Rifle Club, Upper Yarra High School.
In her later years, she added Upper Yarra Probus to her activities.
Her contribution was immense whether it was as a volunteer driver, hospital visitor, providing floral arrangements, gardening, cooking for functions, cleaning, actively fund raising in various roles, or handing out how-to-vote cards, she was a hard-worker and a lovely person to have on the team.
She was a passionate and loyal member of the local branch of the Liberal Party who believed in their philosophy and was loved, liked and respected by people at all levels of the party.
Edna may have been surprised at the ‘Citizen of the Year’ honour, but for anyone who knew her, the surprise was perhaps that it hadn’t happened earlier!
She was involved with many organisations for decades and, as Chris said, “never blew her own trumpet or crowed about any of it.”
She was a great supporter of Keith, and the kids in their business operations and community and sporting interests – and anyone else who was on their teams.
No-one at a Thomas office ever went short of biscuits for morning tea.
A heart-valve operation 13 years ago was tackled in the same way as everything else – Edna just got on with the job of enjoying life, family, friends and community.
Edna’s greatly enjoyed her seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren who loved her intensely as ‘Mumma’.
As a wife, mother, mother-in-law and grandmother, Edna was an inspiration and role model who will be remembered as amazing, peaceful, caring, loving and … as Chris recalled, “almost without fault”.
Her one and only fault, he said, was her unwillingness to relinquish her trademark cane basket.
It want everywhere with her. Edna never went anywhere empty-handed.
“Now she is on her final journey, hopefully empty-handed this time and someone else will take care of her,” Chris said in a closing remark to a beautiful eulogy.
Edna passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by her family on 27 July, 2014.
Her passing is a great loss, and sadness, to her family and to the Warburton community.
