Neil Thornton: A life most extraordinary

Neil was born into a dairy farming family in Denman.

Denman is at the junction of the Goulburn and Hunter rivers – and the family farm, The Glen, was located 5km out of town on a bend in the Goulburn.

The eldest of four boys, Neil was – unlike most dairy farming children – not put to work before and after school milking cows every day.

Life at The Glen was in many ways idyllic.

He had doting parents and brothers with whom he could play and explore.

Nonetheless, times were hard and every able family member had to participate in arduous chores like fumigating rabbits.

This task involved finding and filling in all the holes in a warren bar two.

Rabbits, and eels caught by lantern light from the river, formed a significant part of the family diet.

Neil had a lifelong loathing of both meats.

Going to school for Neil involved dragging a recalcitrant draught horse the 5km to Denman and then clinging to the same beast as it bolted all the way home.

Start of schooling was delayed until, at 8, he was judged competent to ride this horse.

Eventually, his three brothers joined him atop the animal, making an astonishing sight for bemused onlookers as it careered up the main street of the town.

Falling off made for a long walk nursing bruises.

Neil’s father Reg was a decorated veteran of the Great War, fighting in the field artillery in Gallipoli and on the Western Front.

Reg was wounded several times, including twice by gassing.

Although he was a generous community-minded man, RSL sub-branch president and Alderman on Muswellbrook Shire Council for many years, he avoided discussing his war experiences.

When war broke out in the Pacific, Reg re-enlisted and was posted as a senior NCO to Victoria Barracks in Sydney.

Although Neil’s mother and the younger boys were billeted, the Army would not accommodate a boy who at 14 was old enough to work, so Neil was obliged to get a job and pay for his own lodgings and board.

Working at the National Mutual insurance office in Sydney, he was employed as a messenger running correspondence and errands all around central Sydney.

On these errands he passed by bookshops and was lured inside by the fascinating titles on display.

He soon learned the fine art of judicious skiving in acquiring a lifelong love of reading.

In July 1945, Neil voluntarily enlisted and, in an extraordinary stroke of seeming ill luck, was posted to the Myambat depot a kilometre up the road from The Glen, so Private Thornton was obliged to spend his leave time on farm work.

One day soon after the war’s end in August 1945, the commander of the muster parade asked for volunteers able to type to be sent to Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF).

Young Neil had already learnt well the mysterious ways of the Army and, although unable to use a typewriter immediately, fell out.

He reasoned that by the time he got to Japan, the Army would have forgotten all about any need of typists, and so it turned out.

En route to Japan, Neil was left to his own devices in the vast military base on Morotai Island and found an abandoned US Army library where he filled his kitbag with a selection of literature then unknown in Australia, such as the Dos Passos USA trilogy.

After some time employed cleaning up flattened cities including Hiroshima, he was posted to the Army newspaper to report on intra-service sporting events.

He was exposed to sights and experiences during his two years’ service with BCOF in Japan that, like his father, he found himself unable ever to discuss.

These experiences, and no doubt exposure to radiation, left Neil with damage to his health that was to resurface later in life.

He was discharged from the Army in 1947 suffering from neurasthenia, a condition that manifested itself at that time in tics and a stammer.

These later disappeared, but deeper scars remained.

Voluntary active service entitled Neil Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme support in gaining his matriculation as an adult student and then to some assistance going to university.

Thirsting for beauty and wisdom, he took additional poetry classes at the Workers Educational Association where he met a soul mate in Merle Wilson, a middle class suburban girl.

They became lifelong partners and married in 1953, shortly after a stroke killed Neil’s mother – the first of a series of family tragedies.

Neil read philosophy under John Anderson at Sydney University, where he and Merle became active members of the Libertarian Society that later became the Sydney Push notorious for libertarian thinking, hard drinking and bohemian lifestyle.

Drinking, learned in his service in Japan, was his only vice.

Employment requiring skills in philosophy was no easier in the early 1950s than it is now, so Neil parlayed his experiences in farming and reporting for the Army newspaper into a job as a journalist with the NSW Department of Agriculture.

He was determined to pursue further study despite the birth of a son, Harold, in 1956 and so quit his secure job and enrolled as a postgraduate student in political philosophy at the Australian National University the following year.

He was given a paid research fellowship a few months later.

In those far-off days, such positions included accommodation, and so the family moved into the comparative luxury of a newly-constructed university flat in Turner.

In a nearby university flat were the young Bob and Hazel Hawke family, who became friends.

Daughter, and well-known actress, Sigrid arrived in 1959, but this happy event was overshadowed by a lightning strike killing much-loved brother Ian, the second eldest of the four boys, back at Denman.

In 1961, Neil took up a tenured lectureship in government at the University of Queensland’s School of External Studies.

The family moved to Brisbane with all its possessions packed into a 1946 Humber Hawk.

The journey remains notorious in Thornton family folklore for delays caused first, by the children coming down with chicken pox on the day of departure, and then by repeated mechanical issues culminating with engine seizure in Stanthorpe.

At the University of Queensland, Neil was a slave to his students dispersed throughout Queensland and Papua New Guinea, taking hours over each assignment to provide carefully considered comments.

Among his students, many of whom he welcomed as friends into the family home, were politicians like Jim Killen and future prominent academics like Brian Costar.

He frequently toured outback Queensland to meet with pupils and give tutorials in unlikely environments like hotel bars and station homesteads.

At the University of Queensland, Neil and Merle found themselves in an island of intellectual ferment and progressive politics amid a sea of conservative obscurantism.

They actively joined in a huge variety of progressive causes, including the struggles for indigenous and women’s rights and peace and nuclear disarmament campaigns.

They formed lifelong friendships with fellow activists like Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and Bill Hayden (also a student).

When Merle famously chained herself to the bar of the Regatta Hotel in 1964 in order to win for women the right to drink in “public” bars, Neil headed up the support team handing out pamphlets and standing ready to bail out the protesting women.

A few years later, the whole family was arrested at a Vietnam Moratorium protest. 

In 1966, the family moved to London where Neil completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

His thesis on John Stuart Mill’s theory of liberty was published in its entirety as a special honour granted to exceptional academic writing.

Neil managed this despite the torment he suffered when he was unable to return to be with his family when his father Reg died in 1967.

He returned to the University of Queensland in 1969.

In the 1970s, Neil’s political and community activism led him to join for a few years the Communist Party of Australia, but he left disillusioned by the party’s intolerance of ideological impurity, authoritarianism and reluctance to denounce atrocious actions of Soviet and Chinese regimes (although it had denounced Stalinism).

He had his last hurrah as a political activist in joining the picket lines of the 1985 Queensland electricity strike, where he was arrested several times.

A grandson, Ben, was born to Sigrid in 1985 and this impelled Neil’s final move, retiring to Melbourne in 1987.

For his final few months at the University of Queensland, he managed the feat of commuting weekly by bus from Brisbane to Melbourne, where his beloved Merle was already established.

He continued academic work at first full-time and then part-time at the University of Melbourne and RMIT until the mid-1990s.

This move was again attended by tragedy when his long-troubled youngest brother Bruce drowned himself in the Hunter River.

Neil was denied the comfortable retirement he had well earned, however.

In the early 2000s, the psychological and neurological damage inflicted on him in devastated Japan returned in the form of untreatable chronic pain.

This condition gradually reduced a naturally gregarious and intellectually curious man to a physical cripple unable in the end to participate in the pleasures of ordinary life.

He was grateful at the last for the support of the RSL, which was provided in an unstinting and generous manner despite Neil’s lifelong opposition to the organisation’s political positions.

Neil Thornton was above all a kind, considerate and caring man dedicated to intellectual engagement with the world.

In an increasingly narcissistic society, he was in the best sense of the word selfless.

To the frustration of his family, he could not bear for money to be spent on buying good clothes or small luxuries for him.

When dining with family or friends at restaurants, Neil would insist on ordering for himself the cheapest meal, but on paying for everyone else.

Following a bout of pneumonia in 2012, he required a higher level of care than could be provided at his Collingwood home.

He was lucky to be accepted at the wonderful Fitzroy nursing home run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Sumner House, and so was able to continue to frequent the coffee shops he had come to love.

Neil’s final illness was sudden.

He died peacefully in Frankston Hospital closely attended by Merle and his two children; and treated with great compassion by superbly dedicated and communicative medical staff.

Typically of the man, he struggled on with his many health woes until the whole family was assembled for Christmas.

He would not put his family to the pain he had suffered in being absent for the death of his own father.

Neil is survived by his wife Merle, brother Robert, son Harold, daughter Sigrid, grandson Ben and granddaughter Jaz.

He was immensely proud of all of them and it can honestly be said he will live on in the loving memory of all who knew him.

It was always his wish to be buried in Denman, where he rejoins his parents and two tragically-killed brothers.