I first encountered Race Mathews in the early 2000s, around the time of the publication of my biography of Jim Cairns. He struck me as reserved and cerebral, but generous. As national secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, he invited me to deliver a talk about the biography at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Following Cairns’s death in late 2003, Mathews initiated a Jim Cairns Memorial Lecture as a joint endeavour between the Fabian Society and several university ALP clubs. What struck me about this was that Mathews and Cairns had been from different wings of the Labor Party, the former probably the most fervent disciple of Gough Whitlam, a philosophical and leadership rival to Cairns, and yet here he was helping to preserve the memory of Cairns. It suggested a refreshing ecumenicalism, an open-minded, enquiring spirit.

Iola Mathews’s affectionate but considered biography of her husband of half a century confirms this and more. Now aged eighty-nine and living with Alzheimer’s disease, he emerges from its pages as an indefatigable and significant Labor activist and social reformer. He has been that relatively rare thing in the party: a trader in ideas, an intellectual in politics. Until reading the book, I had not quite grasped his myriad roles: schoolteacher, shire councillor, agitator for reform of the Victorian Labor Party, clinical speech therapist, Fabian Society dynamo, principal private secretary to Whitlam in Opposition, policy architect, ALP member for the federal seat of Casey (1972-75), principal private secretary to state Labor opposition leaders Clyde Holding and Frank Wilkes, ALP member for the state seat of Oakleigh (1979-92), a senior and activist minister in the Cain Labor government, academic and author, and elder statesman and conscience of Labor. His has been a full and impactful life.