People Australia

John Sendy, c.1943

National Archives of Australia, A9301, 122330

John Alan Sendy (1924-2004) clerk, Communist Party official 

Birth: 1 June 1924 at North Adelaide, South Australia, son of Harold Roy (Roy) Sendy (1891-1972), grocer, later orchardist and farmer, and Elizabeth Annie, née Lloyd (1893-1981). Marriage: date and place unknown to Dawn Ivy. Death: 4 August 2004 at Inglewood, Victoria. Religion: [Anglican on service record]. 

• His family was involved in Left Book Club lectures and discussion groups and joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1942 as did John.
• Was a 6 foot (190 cm)-tall  gardener working as a vegetable-, vine- and almond-grower at Athelstone, South Australia, when he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force on 10 February 1943. Served as a corporal in the service police in Victoria. Was demobilised on 19 February 1946.
• After World War II he worked as a clerk at General Motors Holden factory in Adelaide. From May 1948 he was employed as a CPA functionary.
• Secretary of the South Australian State Committee of the Communist Party of Australia. From 1951 to 1953 in China and the Soviet Union he studied Marxist theory.
• His wife Dawn was SA State secretary of the Eureka Youth League in 1960.
• He and Dawn moved to Victoria in the 1960s. He was national president of the CPA from 1972 to 1974, when he left the party after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
• In retirement at Kingower, near Bendigo, Victoria, he published an autobiography, Comrades Come Rally! Recollections of an Australian Communist (Melbourne, 1978). In 1988 he also published a biography of Ralph Gibson.

Sources
John Playford, Doctrinal and strategic problems of the Communist Party of Australia, 1945-1962, PhD thesis, ANU, 1962, p 431; papers Accession No. YMS 16365, State Library of Victoria; Andrew Hewett, 'John Hendy', Search Foundation, https://www.search.org.au/john_sendy, accessed October 2024.