Michael Thwaites

Michael Rayner Thwaites (born May 30, 1915 in Brisbane , † November 1, 2005 in Canberra ) was an Australian scholar, poet , secret agent and activist of the Moral Re-Armament movement.

Life

Thwaites attended Geelong Grammar School, one of the most prestigious schools in the country, in his hometown. In 1937 he graduated from the University of Melbourne . He was a Rhodes Fellow at the University of Oxford . In 1938 he was awarded the Newdigate Prize for his work Milton Blind , and in 1940 Georg VI. awarded him the King's Gold Medal for Poetry . Thwaites was the first Australian to receive these two honors; to this day he is the only Australian Newdigate winner.

During World War II , Thwaites volunteered for the Royal Navy and served as an officer in a reserve unit . In 1999, in Atlantic Odyssey , he described his memories of the missions on the escort ship of a destroyer in the submarine hunt . After the war, he returned to Oxford to finish his studies. In 1947 he became a lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne.

Although Thwaites had no previous experience with intelligence work, he was recruited in 1950 by its director Charles Spry for the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO). This corresponded to the recruiting practice of the 1950s, which brought criticism to the ASIO for exploiting university clusters. Regardless, Thwaites proved to be an excellent intelligence worker.

In 1954 he played a key role when the Soviet diplomat and spy Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov defected to the Australian side and thus triggered the Petrov affair . Thwaites conducted the interrogations and later spent 18 months with Petrov and his wife Evdokia in an ASIO shelter in Sydney . Later he always insisted that Petrov had decided to unmask himself and that the timing should not influence the election to the House of Representatives , as the ALP chairman Herbert Vere Evatt claimed at the time; Many Australians still believe this today. Thwaites also stuck to his opinion that Petrov was an important source in connection with the Cold War , providing the names of around 600 Soviet secret agents operating around the world. This resulted in the work Truth Will Out: ASIO and the Petrovs . Thwaites was also a ghost writer for Petrow's autobiography, Empire of Fear .

In 1971 Thwaites left the ASIO and became an assistant in the Australian Parliamentary Library. This post allowed him to devote himself more to poetry, which had always been his preferred genre . His best known poems are The Jervis Bay , The Prophetic Hour and Message to My Grandson . His collected works from 1932 to 2004 were published under the title Unfinished Journey . Together with his wife Honor, he wrote the patriotic hymn For Australia to a melody by the English composer Henry Purcell .

In 2002 Thwaites was promoted to officer in the Order of Australia . He was an honorary member of the Trinity College of Melbourne .

Works (selection)

• Milton Blind . Oxford 1938
• The Jervis Bay, and other Poems . New York 1942
• Poems of war and peace . Melbourne / Canberra 1968
• Truth will out: ASIO and the Petrovs . Sydney 1980. ISBN 0-00-216439-6
• The honey man, and other poems . Braddon 1989. ISBN 0-9591339-4-1
• Atlantic odyssey . Oxford 1999. ISBN 1-900312-35-2
• Unfinished journey: Collected Poems . Charnwood 2004. ISBN 1-74027-249-8

swell

1. ^ The Guardian, Nov. 18, 2005, accessed March 24, 2007