Book Review

This handsome paperback recounts an extraordinary life of service to Australia – some of it written by the subject himself, more of which later – and delivers a rare insider’s view of a fascinating period in our contemporary history. Along the way, to lighten the political journey, there plenty of laughs and ‘oh my God’ moments, along with some sadness, not least because the subject became ill after completing the first four chapters, leaving his wife Iola Mathews OAM to pick up the pen. 

As it happened, the transition was near seamless, thanks to Iola’s experience as a senior journalist (at The Age) and her understanding of Race’s ambitions, experiences and thoughts. 

But first, his unusual name, ideal as he explains, for a political candidate seeking to be remembered by the electorate, although his parents were not to know his destiny.  

‘They named me Charles Race Thorson Mathews, [and] the name Race turned out to be very useful in later life, particularly in politics, as it stuck in people’s minds... when I stood for federal parliament in 1972, the slogan ‘Race for Casey’ was very helpful, printed on posters and the T-shirts worn by our campaign workers.’ 

Yet his progression through life was anything by gimmicky, for Race was an excellent student with a strong work ethic and, soon enough, a keen sense of social justice. At the prestigious Melbourne Grammar a teacher called him ‘indolent’, a word he looked up in the dictionary and resolved to spend the rest of his life proving wrong. A pity the teacher couldn’t live long enough to read about the man who served with distinction in both state and federal parliaments and gained two PhDs. 

Race’s social awareness evidenced at school when he drew up policies for the Labor Party during a mock parliament session. They included breaking up large private monopolies, rehousing slum dwellers, placing the railways under Commonwealth control and introducing free university education. The year was 1950, two decades before Race would work as an advisor to Gough Whitlam, win the seat of Casey and play a role in a government that would indeed end the fees on university courses. 

By that time, sadly, his first wife Jill had died of cancer, leaving him with young children, although later, after a chequered courtship, he married Iola and formed a loving and productive partnership that would last to this day.  

An earlier diversion was his dalliance with then-PM John Gorton’s glamorous private secretary Ainslie Gotto, who was rumoured to be having an affair with her boss. As Race held the equivalent position with Whitlam, he asked his boss if the affair should continue. Whitlam had no worries, simply saying, ‘You've got to be very careful about your pillow talk. 

Many towering figures inhabit the pages, from the era’s leading journalists and MPs - Hawke, Wran, Bob Carr, Bill Hayden – to legendary officials such as the ‘It’s Time’ speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, Charles Perkins and John Menadue.  

Based on Race’s recollections of the dismissal of Whitlam, as recorded by Iola, this milestone event devastated Labor... ‘The Dismissal profoundly shook my faith in Australia democracy... It was a constitutional coup. I saw it as a demonstration that we were a much more class-ridden society that I had supposed, and that this was the Australia establishment asserting its God-given right to office.’ 

He firmly believed that while the Whitlam government was only in for three years, ‘It changed Australia for the better.’ 

Continuing his lifelong search for better forms of government and social organisation, inspired by Fabian socialism, Race spent much time studying the cooperative movement, including credit unions and worker control of production as exemplified in the Mondragon community in the Basque area of Spain. He saw this as incontrovertibly a product of the Church’s social teachings and the Young Christian Workers movement.  

Losing his federal seat, he returned to active politics, this time in Victoria, winning a state seat and serving in Labor cabinets, including as Minister for Police and the Arts, a portfolio The Age dubbed ‘pigs and prigs’.  

As if life wasn’t busy enough, Race threw himself into advanced studies, gaining a PhD for a ‘beautifully written and crafted’ thesis published as Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society. Its focus was distributism, the theory of widely distributed property ownership, drawing on the impact of distributism philosophy in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum. 

‘Race had recently discovered that the cooperative movement was linked to the Catholic social justice movement,’ Iola writes. 

Not content with one PhD, Dr Race Mathews them embarked on anther, a Doctor of Theology through the University of Divinity and the Catholic Theological College, Melbourne, His thesis was ‘[Cardinal] Manning’s Children: Responses to Rerum Novarum in Victoria 1981 to 1966’,  

Again, he triumphed and ‘Doctor, Doctor’ Race, as friends called him, continued his life of the mind, leaving state politics in 1993 to work in academe, focus on reforming the ALP and researching and promoting the cooperative ethos. 

His lodestar, as Iola records, has always been empowerment, not telling people what they want to hear - ‘the politics of seduction’ - but employing subsidiarity to empower them and their communities to take control of their own affairs, as far as possible. 

- Reviewed by Robin Osborne