Thwaites, Michael 1915–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 30, 1915, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; died November 1, 2005, in Canberra, Australia. Librarian, spy, and author. Thwaites was an award-winning poet who also spent many years as a spy for Australia, heading the country's counter-espionage efforts until 1971. He attended the universities of Melbourne and Oxford before the onset of World War II. Thwaites was commissioned in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving in the British Channel, on Arctic patrols, and throughout the Atlantic. Despite being on active duty, he managed to continue writing poetry as he had done for many years; he had already won the Newdigate Prize in 1938 for his collection Milton Blind (1938). He also won the King's Medal for Poetry in 1940 and wrote his most famous poem, "The Jervis Bay," in 1942. After the war, he accepted a post as a lecturer in English for the University of Melbourne. In 1950, however, he was approached by Charles Spry, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), who asked Thwaites to join his counter-espionage group. Thwaites, a patriotic man who believed that Communism posed a threat to the free world, accepted the offer. For the next twenty-one years he worked at ASIO, most famously becoming involved in the case of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. The Petrovs were defectors from the Soviet Union, and Vladimir had been a KGB agent at the embassy in Canberra. Thwaites was able to learn many secrets from them and even ghost-wrote their bestselling book, The Empire of Fear (1956). Retiring from the spy world in 1971, Thwaites took the more restful post of deputy head of the Federal Parliamentary Library in Canberra. This allowed him to spend more time on his poetry, as well. Along with his early works The Jervis Bay and Other Poems (1943) and Poems of War and Peace (1968), Thwaites later completed The Honey Man and Other Poems (1989) and Unfinished Journey: Collected Poems 1932–2004 (2005); he also penned the autobiography Atlantic Odyssey (1999). Thwaites was duly honored for his accomplishments in 2002, when he was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Thwaites, Michael, Atlantic Odyssey, New Cherwell Press, 1999.

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), November 15, 2005, p. 58.

Times (London, England), November 17, 2005, p. 67.