Thomas Walker went from fraud to high-flyer in parliament

Despite burning a seance client to death and shooting a clergyman while drunk, Thomas Walker gained a life of power and privilege.

Thomas Walker, who became Western Australian Attorney-General and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. Picture: State Library of Western Australia

Even by Australia’s colourful standards, burning a seance client to death and shooting a clergyman while drunk was an unconventional route to a high-flying political career.

But spiritualist Thomas Walker never did do things by halves.

Walker is the subject of a new episode of the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters:

His story is told in new book Girt Nation, by David Hunt, who says English-born Walker was working as a medium in Toronto by age 16, using phosphorus to trick customers.

“Walker would summon the spirits of the recently departed, and this illuminated writing would appear in the dark, meant to be the writing of the spirits,” Hunt says.

“Unfortunately, during one seance, he actually set himself on fire with his phosphorus, and the client who was in there with him helps him to try and put out the fire and suffers serious burns to his hands and feet, and dies three weeks later from his injuries.”

A coroner’s jury found Walker caused the man’s death – but Walker had fled Canada the morning after the accident.

Author David Hunt. Picture: John Appleyard

Later, Walker travelled to Australia, where spiritualist William Terry, the subject of last week’s podcast, marketed the young man as “the boy orator” on the speaking circuit.

Future prime minister Alfred Deakin chaired Walker’s first Melbourne spiritualist lecture, which Walker delivered in a trance while controlled by Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar and occultist burned at the stake in 1600 for saying Mary was not a virgin and sacramental wine was not the blood of Christ.

But in his mid-20s, Walker did the unthinkable – denouncing spiritualism.

“He says in 1882, ‘I was faking it, I was just putting on a good show, and I am now an atheist’,” Hunt says.

“He then dedicated a lot of his life to uncovering spiritualists and phrenologists and spoon benders as frauds.”

Walker became a politician in NSW and Western Australia, and was known as an anti-war campaigner, republican, birth control advocate and death penalty opponent.

In 1892, he shot a clergyman while drunk in Redfern in Sydney – but claimed the gun accidentally discharged when he pulled his tobacco out of his pocket.

Despite yet another scandal, Walker rose to become WA’s Attorney-General.

“So to think that you become the first law officer of an Australian state after setting one of your seance participants on fire, and running away from a manslaughter charge, shooting a clergyman while drunk on the streets of Sydney,” Hunt says.

“None of that stopped him from having an incredible political career.”

Listen to the interview about Thomas Walker with David Hunt in the In Black and White podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or web.

See In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday for more stories and photos from Victoria’s past.