cartoonist and caricaturist, worked at Castlemaine, Victoria, c.1855-65, becoming well-known for his comic drawings of local identities, especially members of the legal profession. One of his victims destroyed a caricature of himself displayed in a shop window; in the subsequent court case Thomas was awarded damages of 15 shillings and the victim fined a shilling. The publicity generated is said to have created strong local demand for Thomas’s work, although it little profited him. An alcoholic, he was arrested at Daylesford for vagrancy in 1865. Afterwards, he moved to Melbourne. From mid-1867 he was in Tasmania, having succeeded Henri D’Emden as cartoonist on the Hobart Town Punch . Cartoons initialled 'G.T.’ appeared in the fortnightly issues of the magazine from 1 June to 9 November 1867, then J.H. Manly apparently took over. An article published in the Hobart Town Mercury on 3 June 1867 stated that Thomas had recently been engaged from Melbourne and he is clearly the same person as the Castlemaine Thomas. Stylistically, his illustrations do not alter. The reporter considered Thomas’s drawings to be 'a decided improvement upon anything which has hitherto appeared, and when the gentlemen in question becomes better acquainted with the colony he will doubtless be able to produce some capital cartoons’.

His illustrations for Hobart Town Punch include: The First Question for Parliament (13 July 1867), dealing with the problem of the colony’s neglected and delinquent children; Waiting for a Place (14 June 1867), which caricatured the defeated candidates in the October 1866 election still queuing outside parliament in the hope of vacancies ('We are Seven’); and The Pleasures of a Night in the Victorian Bush (14 June 1867), a humorous look at the perils of rusticity. Welcome the Coming, Speed the Parting Guest , published on 18 December 1869 to mark the (extremely comfortable) retirement of the chief justice, is initialled 'G.H.T.’ and is his only identifiable illustration in the subsequent Tasmanian Punch (December 1869-21 May 1870). There may, however, be others since no complete set is known and some unsigned works could also be by him.

Most of Thomas’s extant Victorian drawings are in the collection of the Castlemaine Pioneers and Old Residents’ Association in Castlemaine Art Gallery. All 15 comic sketches held depict local personalities and events and are either in pencil or pen-and-ink, e.g. An Odd Fish , a caricature of Vincent Pyke, who represented the Castlemaine electorate in both the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council, and Bull’s Run (ill. DAA ). Other Victorian drawings are in a private collection but no originals of his Tasmanian cartoons are known (presumably they were destroyed in reproduction).

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989