People Australia

Ralph Gibson, 1960

University of Melbourne Archives, 11343/75665

Ralph Siward Gibson (1906-1989) author, lecturer and Communist organiser

Birth: 19 February 1906 at Hampstead, London, England, son of Professor William Ralph Boyce Gibson (1860-1935), philosopher, and Lucy Judge, née Peacock (1872-1953). Marriage: 16 March 1937 at the office of the government statist, Melbourne, to native-born Dorothy, née Alexander, late Clarke (1899-1978), a divorced social worker and fellow Communist. Death: 16 May 1989 at East Malvern; usual residence Richardson Street, Oakleigh. 

• Educated at Melbourne Grammar School, Melbourne University (BA, 1927) and Manchester University (MA, 1930). Founder and Secretary, Melbourne University Labor Club, 1925-1927, president Labor Guild of Youth, 1926-1927. One-time member of ALP and British Labour Party; prominent speaker at political meetings in British 1929 elections.
• Joined Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1932. Visited Soviet Union in 1933 and became Victorian secretary of the Friends of the Soviet Union. Jailed for political activities, June-July 1933. Active in Movement against War and Fascism in the 1930s, attending International Peace Congress, Brussels in 1937.
• Gibson was a full-time functionary and member of the Victorian State committee of the CPA from 1933 for nearly 50 years (long terms as either secretary or president). He was a member of the Central Committee of the CPA from 1937, for nearly 40 years. Editor of Guardian after World War II.
• An apologist for the Soviet Union but nonetheless a significant intellectual who rejected offer of university lectureship to give his life to the CPA. Prolific pamphleteer and author, including memoir of his wife.
• “Gibson might be taken as an extreme example of the Melbourne radical tradition — earnest, improving, closely engaged in civic life, intellectual serious and sometimes censorious of the hedonism up north…the most selfless of men and all the more impregnable to doubt in his luminous intensity”. (Macintyre)
• Cause of death: cardiac arrythmia (1 hour), sick sinus syndrome (9 weeks), chronic bronchial asthma (30 years) and carcinoma of prostate (5 years). 

Sources
Stuart Macintyre, Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (Sydney, 1998;) John Sendy, Ralph Gibson (Melbourne 1988); John Playford, Doctrinal and strategic problems of the Communist Party of Australia, 1945-1962, PhD thesis, ANU, 1962; Alastair B. Davidson Doctrinal and strategic problems of the Communist Party of Australia, 1945-1962, PhD thesis, ANU, 1962; Tribune (Sydney), 20 July 1966; 10 August 1966, 12 March 1986, 24 May 1989; Recorder, 157, June 1989.