This handsome paperback recounts an extraordinary life of service to Australia – not all of it written by the subject himself because he became ill after completing the first four chapters, leaving his wife Iola Mathews OAM to pick up the pen.  

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 but gimmicky, for Race was an excellent student with a strong work ethic and a keen sense of social justice. At Melbourne Grammar a teacher called him ‘indolent’, which he resolved to spend the rest of his life proving wrong. The teacher did not live long enough to read about the man who served with distinction in both state and federal parliaments and gained two PhDs.   

Race spent much time studying the cooperative movement in the Basque area of Spain, including credit unions and worker control of production. 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. 

Race also threw himself into advanced studies, gaining a PhD for a ‘beautifully written and crafted’ thesis on distributism, the theory of widely-distributed property ownership, drawing on the impact of distributist philosophy in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum.  

Not content with one PhD, Dr Race Mathews embarked on another, 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’.   

‘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.