Born in the USA, Tom began his political career while still in high school, joining a civil rights demonstration. Arriving on campus in Berkeley in 1966, he received an education in trouble-making and became a chronic demonstrator. When he wasn’t doing that, he was studying languages, which also took him to Germany as an exchange student during 1967-68, where he joined his first socialist group, the German SDS.

After returning to Berkeley he found his way into the International Socialists (I.S.), a group originating in the Trotskyist movement which had played an important role in the 1964 Free Speech Movement. This set him on an enduring political course. One of the group’s theoretical leaders was Hal Draper, later the author of an important series of books called The Revolutionary Theory of Karl Marx..

Tom moved to Melbourne, Australia at the end of 1971 and played a significant role in the emergence of the Australian I.S.

He was a leader of the I.S. until the mid-1980s. There then followed a complex history of fights and rearrangements. He's now a member of Socialist Alternative..

Tom has been on the scene of stormy political episodes. He risked arrest marching illegally through Berkeley during Ronald Reagan’s state of emergency in 1969, helped lead ten thousand angry workers through Melbourne after the sacking of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, and reported major strikes for the left wing Battler newspaper. He was in the streets during the riots that brought down Indonesia’s Suharto dictatorship, and was arrested by Indonesian police who broke up a political conference near Jakarta.

Using his language skills, Tom has produced first-hand, on-location accounts of the 1974-5 Portuguese revolution, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, the Philippines after Marcos’ fall, Gorbachev’s self-destructing USSR, and the upheavals that toppled Suharto. He authored/co-authored three books in the Indonesian language, using the pseudonym "Julian" in the hope it would keep the Indonesian police guessing. Tom is also a member of the International Board of the journal Revolutionary History.

He’s the author/ co-editor of five books in English, mostly covering Australian labour history. The best known is Into the Mainstream, his controversial treatment of the decline of Australia’s Communist Party. The most recent is United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia. Tom is now working on a study of World War II, which he promises will be his most provocative book yet.