Unending struggle to make a better world was much valued

RACE MATHEWS March 27, 1935-May 5, 2025

My beloved husband Race Mathews died peacefully on May 5, 2025, from Alzheimer’s disease, aged 90. He had a rich and fulfilling life as a family man, politician, academic, author and reformer, and served at three levels of government – local, state and federal.

Charles Race Thorson Mathews (known as Race) was born on March 27, 1935, in Melbourne to Ray Mathews, an accountant in the taxation department, and Jean Mathews, a homemaker. They came from a long line of working-class families and were passionate Labor supporters. Race had a very happy childhood, with two younger brothers, David and Bill.

Race Mathews in 1974 standing next to his mobile electorate office.

Race began his political awakening by reading left-wing books in the library of Melbourne Grammar School and participating in the school’s mock parliament. At Toorak Teachers’ College he met his first wife, Jill, and married at 20. They had three children, Sean, Jane and Vanessa and moved to outer-suburban Croydon, where Race served on Croydon council, as well as becoming active in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and running the Fabian Society. With his friend David Bennett, he developed Labor’s policy on education and helped Gough Whitlam bring about “Intervention” (reform) in the Victorian ALP in 1970.

From 1967 to 1972, Race worked for Whitlam as his principal private secretary, (principal adviser) which he later said was “the most tumultuous, and by far the most rewarding” time of his career, when he helped develop Whitlam’s policies on education and Medibank (later Medicare). In 1970, tragedy struck when Jill died of cancer aged only 34, soon after giving birth to a daughter, Alida, who lived for only 24 hours. Race’s parents moved in to help care for the three children, who were still very young.

Race and I met in 1971 when I was a journalist at The Age, and we were married in 1972. A few months later, Whitlam became prime minister, and Race was elected MP for Casey. He served in the Whitlam government from 1972-75, chairing two parliamentary committees. During that time, we had two children, Keir and Talya.

In 1976, Race became principal adviser to Victorian opposition leader Clyde Holding and then Frank Wilkes. In 1979, Race was elected MP for Oakleigh in the State Parliament and in 1982 Labor won government with John Cain as premier. Race served in the Victorian government for a total of 13 years, including five-and-a-half years as minister for police and emergency services and minister for the arts (which The Age dubbed “the Minister for Pigs and Prigs”), and one year as minister for community services.

Race and Iola Mathews in Phuket in 1997.

While minister for police and emergency services, he modernised the police force, tightened gun laws and improved Victoria’s disaster response, especially after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. As minister for the arts, he opened the Arts Centre on Southbank, established the Spoleto International Festival of the Arts, the Melbourne Writers Festival and oversaw Victoria’s 150th celebrations. His two portfolios of police and arts overlapped in 1986, with the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by the Australian Cultural Terrorists, who wanted more funding for young artists. The painting was returned two weeks later unharmed.

As Minister for Community Services, he strengthened child protection and oversaw de-institutionalisation of the intellectually disabled.

After leaving parliament in 1992, Race taught politics at Monash University and completed a PhD. For the next 25 years he was very involved in the co-operative movement, gained a second doctorate and wrote several books. These included Australia’s First Fabians: Middle-class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour Movement, (1993), Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society (1999) and Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria, 1891-1966 (2017).

Mathews, centre, launching his book Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society, with Labor colleagues Gareth Evans and Kim Beazley in 1999.Credit: Belinda Pratten

In his 70s, he was involved in fresh attempts to reform the Labor Party in Victoria, wanting local members to have more say and the factions to be “on tap, but not on top”. He also campaigned for reform of the parliament and helped establish the Accountability Round Table and was its first chairman.

In addition to politics, Race’s interests included books, music, films and family. He was interested in science fiction as a boy, founded the Melbourne Science Fiction Club in 1952 when he was 17, and opened two World Science Fiction Conventions in Melbourne in 1975 and 1985.

Throughout his life, he was driven by a passion for fairness and justice, and a commitment to equality, democracy and empowerment. He was a natural leader, with a talent for forming organisations and guiding and inspiring others. For nearly 50 years he ran the Australian Fabian Society, which served as a think tank for the Whitlam government and later the Hawke-Keating governments.

In 2016, Race was asked to write a memoir, and completed four chapters, covering his life up to the age of 20. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he abandoned it, so I later completed it as a biography, using his own words from his speeches, articles, newspaper clippings, books and an oral history. He outlined his failures as well as his successes and admitted that he was a “babe in the woods” in terms of factional politics.

Race Mathews: A Life In Politics by Iola Mathews.

Race Mathews: A Life in Politics was published in October 2024, and Race was able to enjoy the launch, shortly before he went into a nursing home. In April 2025, he had a fall, and his health declined, but he was able to vote in a pre-poll for the federal election and was aware that Labor was ahead. On election night, we felt he was with us in spirit, and he took his leave two days later.

Among Race’s best qualities were his intelligence, wide-ranging knowledge, idealism, integrity, dependability and kindness. We valued his unending struggle to make a better world, his lack of complaint when he was let down or felt rejected, and his generosity of spirit; he thought the best of people. His philosophy was summed up in the last line of his book Of Labor and Liberty, in which he quoted from the movie Terminator2: Judgment Day: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make of it ourselves.”

Race leaves me, his wife of 52 years, five children Sean, Jane, Vanessa, Keir and Talya, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.