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Last June a Sydney salesman named Bazil Thorne and his wife Freda won -L-100.000 ($225,000) in a state lottery to raise money for Sydney's new opera house. They vowed that they would not let the money go to their heads. They went right on living in their modest brick duplex in suburban Bondi and invested their new wealth. The only member of the Thorne family to get excited over the windfall was eight-year-old Graeme, a third-grader at a private school called Scots College.

"I'm Graeme Thorne, the -L-100.000 boy." he boasted to classmates. One morning last month, neatly turned out in his Scots College uniform. Graeme Thorne called goodbye to his 3 1/2-year-old sister Belinda and started toward the corner 300 yards from home, where a schoolmate's mother was to pick him up for the drive to school. A few minutes later the carpool mother called to ask: ''Isn't Graeme coming to school today? He wasn't at the corner."

Fearfully, Freda Thorne called the local police. An hour later, as a policeman sat in the Thorne living room taking notes, the phone rang. "Is this Mrs. Thorne?" asked a man's guttural voice. *'I have your boy." Wordlessly. Freda Thorne passed the receiver to the policeman. "I have your son." the voice repeated. "I want -L-25,000 by 5 o'clock tonight, or I'll feed him to the sharks."

"We Never Thought." It was the first child kidnaping for ransom in Australia's history, and it raised a big fuss. "Some how we have never thought that it could occur in this country." said New South Wales's Premier Robert Heffron sadly. Whenever the Thornes left their home, carloads of reporters and cameramen tagged along. The family pastor. Anglican Minister Clive Goodwin, who had offered to serve as go-between with the kidnapers, withdrew after two days, explaining that so much publicity made his intermediary's role "no longer possible."

Bazil Thorne drew out -L-25.000 in -L-10 notes, publicly assured the kidnapers: "God will forgive you if you let my boy go unharmed." But the Thornes' harrowing telephone vigil was interrupted only by calls from ghoulish hoaxers. Last week, as Sydney police stubbornly continued to check out meager clues, a clutch of chidren playing around a ledge rock several miles from the Thorne home discovered a bundle of "rubbish." Inside the bundle was the body of Graeme Thorne. who had been killed within 48 hours of his abduction.

Time for Action. Australia was swept by the kind of outrage that followed the 1932 Lindbergh kidnaping in the U.S. "This case." said the Sydney Daily Telegraph, "must never be closed until the killers are behind bars or the govern ment puts into action -- on the gallows -- the overwhelming inclinations of the people." New South Wales's Labor government is dead set against capital punishment, but at week's end Premier Heffron promised to consider "drastic increases" in the state's maximum kidnaping penalty of ten years. Public pressure was building up for Australia's national government to adopt something like the U.S. "Lindbergh Law." which makes transporting a kidnapee across state lines a federal offense, punishable by death.

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