Every November, Osler Thomas returned home to Hong Kong for Remembrance Sunday. This year, he died aged 88 the week before he was due home.
His sense of public service was inculcated from an early age. His father, Dr Harold Thomas, was Chinese by descent but given a British name at school, and became the medical superintendent of Tung Wah Hospital. Hong Kong's early Eurasian community was often socially marginalised, both by the Chinese and Europeans. Thomas was determined that his family's story would be different. "My father always maintained that if we were better educated, better spoken, better mannered and conducted ourselves better than the others, no one could ever, with justification, look down upon us."
He left St Stephen's College, Stanley, in 1938 as head prefect and dux of the school, and started medical studies at the University of Hong Kong.
Thomas was a lieutenant with the Field Ambulance of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps when Japanese forces invaded in 1941 and overran the aid post at the Salesian Mission in Shau Kei Wan. Medical personnel were taken behind the buildings and massacred. In the mayhem, Thomas dived into a nullah, feigned death among the corpses and blood, surviving a bullet wound to the face.
When darkness fell he crawled away, and a woman in a squatter hut gave him civilian clothes. Days later, Thomas' father learned that his son was still alive, and sent an ambulance to bring him back home.
Some months later, Thomas joined a party of University of Hong Kong students going to what was called "Free China" - areas not held by the Japanese - and joined up with the British Army Aid Group. For much of the war, he was based behind Japanese lines at High Island, Sai Kung. Known as Post Y, the unit maintained communications between resistance groups and the city.
Thomas insisted he did "nothing heroic during the war; just tried to be in the right place at the right time, know the enemy, and offer my best efforts always".
Awarded a military MBE at 24, he continued his studies at Guy's Hospital, London, and returned to Hong Kong in the early 1950s as a consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon.
A reluctant emigrant, Thomas moved to Sydney in the late 1960s, mainly "because my daughters' school results would not have got them into HKU in those days", and established a new life.
But he retained close connections with Hong Kong, referring to it as "my heung ha", or ancestral village.
Twice a year he and his wife Lily, whom he met at university before the war, returned home for several weeks to Blarney Stone, his parents' old property at Pok Fu Lam. "The trees planted by my mother are still there, and the view hasn't changed much since my childhood," he said.
At Osler Thomas' funeral in Sydney last week, the Hong Kong flag was draped on the coffin at his request. His daughter, Audrey, returned to the heung ha to lay the BAAG wreath last Sunday at the Cenotaph.
