(1941-1962)
Staff
and students returning to the University after the 1962 Easter break
were in a state of grief and shock. The annually bemoaned ‘road carnage’
had claimed a life of national importance. Bill Thomas was 21 years
old when he died on Easter Sunday and headlines in Farrago and the Bulletin
of 5 May show the impact of his death. The front-page banner of Farrago
read simply ‘Bill Thomas Killed in Crash’. A lengthy eulogy by Vincent
Buckley followed. Peter Coleman’s obituary in the Bulletin was headed
‘Death of a Hero’.
Both praise Thomas’s political achievements, all the more extraordinary
for the fact that, in Buckley’s words, ‘before he was old enough to
possess a vote of his own, he had become one of the men most hated by
the coercive forces in the Victorian Labor Party, most liked and admired
by the politicians, thinkers and trades union men who opposed those
forces’. Coleman noted, ‘Bill Thomas was a new type in Australian politics…the
student who plays a prominent part in national politics’.
A student of Political Science, Thomas was a frequent contributor to
the journals of public affairs. An article excoriating the Victorian
ALP Executive’s disregard of federal decisions, ‘Victoria’s Artful Dodgers’,
was mailed to the Bulletin only hours before he died. At the time of
his death, he was President of the Melbourne University ALP Club, an
organisation which he had revitalised and reformed, turning it into
a significant force in Australian political life. He was one of the
prime movers of Student Action, a nationwide movement dedicated to the
abolition of the White Australia Policy.
If Buckley’s prediction that ‘the legend that was in full bloom before
his death will no doubt continue to grow after it’ was not fulfilled,
Thomas nonetheless transformed the University for his contemporaries
and his death greatly impoverished Australian political life.
