People Australia

Richard Dixon, n.d.

Tribune (Sydney), 10 March 1976, p 5

Clifton Reginald Walker, also known as Richard (Dick) Dixon (1905-1976) railway employee, trade union official and Communist functionary

Birth: 26 May 1905 at Forbes, New South Wales, son of native-born parents Henry Kidd (Harry) Walker (1862-1933), a miner, and his wife Emily, née Wilmott, who ran boarding house. Marriage: as Clifton Reginald Walker on 25 March 1939 at the Registry Office, North Sydney, to Dorothy Jean (Jean) Button (1868-194), born at Hobart, Tasmania. They had one daughter. Death: 7 March 1976 in his home at Bankstown, Sydney. 

• Leaving school aged 14, he worked in bicycle shop, as a Post Office messenger boy, and with the railways as a clerk.
• He was secretary, Australian Railways Union sub-branch. Spent most of the 1920s in Lithgow where he was active in the Plebs League and joined Communist Party of Australia in 1928, influenced by two militant miners, Bill Orr and Charlie Nelson. He was a member of the Central Committee of the party from 1929.
• Visited Soviet Union 1930-1932, returning with his changed name to divert the security services.
• ‘Dixon’ was a full-time CPA functionary for the next forty years. Editor Communist Review, 1934-1940. Assistant secretary of the CPA from 1937 to 1948. President of the CPA from 1948 to 1972.
• He worked full-time for the party for over forty years and was loyal but colourless and judgmental and an especially hard-minded and inflexible Stalinist.
• Cause of death: hypertensive cardiovascular disease. 

Sources
Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (Sydney, 1998); Malcolm Henry Ellis, The Garden path (Sydney, 1949); Jean Devanny, Point of departure; the autobiography of Jean Devanny (St Lucia, 1986); John Playford, Doctrinal and strategic problems of the Communist Party of Australia, 1945-1962, PhD thesis, ANU, 1962; Tribune, (Sydney) 25 May 1955, 10 March 1976.