At 95, Thelma McCarthy clearly remembered the NSW Parliament of the 1970s and 80s, and regarded being awarded Life Membership of the Australian Labor Party as a team effort.
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Her late husband, William "Bill" McCarthy, decided it was time after the Labor Government of his wartime RAAF mate, Gough Whitlam, toppled in 1975.
Thelma said she had run out of excuses why he should not run.
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"I remember it so well. At lunchtime he came home and I was watering the garden. And he said to me, 'Thelly, I've decided to throw my hat in, and I hope you will come with me, but if you feel you can't I'll go it alone'," she said.
"I hopped in the car and drove out and said I would talk to him later. And I came back and thought, 'Well, if I can't beat them I'll have to join them.'
"And then he said to me 'I promise you that our lives won't be any different to what they are now. Wherever I go, you go.' He kept that promise to the very last day."
He was elected as Member for Armidale in 1978. Thelma laughed, remembering the run-up to that very first election.
"They said they didn't have a public toilet in Tingha. So, the sitting Member, David Leitch, said, 'Right, you can have a public toilet in Tingha.' So, that was the headlines," she said and then chuckled.
"Then Bill rang up the Minister for Public Works and said, 'What about this toilet for Tingha? Put the sewerage on!'."
"So, Bill advertised that the toilet would go into Tingha. On the day Bill was sworn into Parliament, he received this telegram, 'From Tingha toilets to a Seat of Parliament. Hallelujah!"
She said being awarded Life Membership to the party meant a lot to them both.
"We were a team, a partnership."
"We had a lot of magnificent workers and Labor Party people.
To Thelma, Bill was a great advocate and his achievements were here for the taking.
"There was nothing. There was not a social worker, we got the women's shelter through Gough, but the schools - every time it rained Walcha school had to have buckets under everything," she said.
"Old schools, 100 years plus old, all those sorts of things. It was huge."
She said Bill had done a great deal of work on the Armidale by-pass and it remained as his biggest legacy.
Thelma remembered how her dad had once joked: "I've been made life member of the jockey club, life member of the RSL, life member of the agricultural club, trouble is, I'm fast running out of life," he said
"But I'm not, I've got a lot of living to do," she said.
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