If any one life story can tell the tale of social and economic change in Australia in the second half of the 20th century, it would be Gordon Barton's.
Yet when he died aged 75 in April 2005, it took a while for anyone to notice. Proof of the obscurity into which Barton had faded is the fact that it was not until several months after his death that Melbourne writer Sam Everingham first heard of him. Intrigued by what he heard, Everingham decided to write a biography of Barton, the recently published Gordon Barton: Australia's Maverick Entrepreneur, thereby progressing from complete ignorance of a subject to published biographer in three years, which must surely be some sort of record.
I have something of an advantage here, because I first heard about Barton when I was four years old when the fledgling Australian Reform Movement (subsequently the Australia Party) put together a ticket to contest the half-Senate election in NSW. Barton headed the ticket, supported by well-known figures Harry Seidler, Ken Thomas and Peter Mason.
The fact that a copy of one of the ARM campaign advertisements is reproduced in Everingham's book earned it a tick from me before I even started reading. Fortunately, it deserves ticks on other grounds too, chiefly for weaving Barton's different simultaneous activities into a coherent narrative.
Barton was first and foremost a businessman. For decades he fought to be allowed to deliver freight in a market-oriented way, both in Australia and Europe. He acquired his first trucks while still a Sydney University student in his early twenties, in the era when state governments were attempting to stem losses on rail freight by imposing extortionate taxes on road freight, or even prohibiting it.
One of Barton's early trucking endeavours was to bring onions from South Australia, where they were cheap, to Sydney, where they were not. However, NSW law prohibited onions being carried by truck, while in Victoria nothing at all could be carried by truck on Sundays.
It took the Privy Council's 1954 ruling in the Hughes and Vale case, that no government had the right to protect rail by prohibiting the interstate operation of trucks, to enable trucks to operate across state boundaries. Of course, the intrastate restrictions still applied, forcing Barton into ruses such as routing all freight from Melbourne, bound for rural Victoria, across the Murray to Moama, so that it became interstate freight.
Barton expanded his business to the point where in 1962 he was able to purchase one of his two major competitors, Interstate Parcels Express Company (IPEC). The company had only been founded in 1958, but by offering door-to-door delivery it had revolutionised the freight market.
As IPEC expanded its road business, it naturally also wanted to move into air freight. But there it had to deal with the two-airline policy. Remarkably, the amount of freight carried by air was actually falling in Australia at that time because the incumbents, TAA and Ansett, offered a spectacularly bad service. Yet the Menzies government fought tooth and nail to prevent Barton being allowed to get import licences for aircraft with which he intended to operate air freight services.
After 15 years of trying, IPEC finally received permission to operate a national cargo service in 1979. However, it was far from fair and open competition. The Fraser government still reserved 80 per cent of the business for Ansett and TAA, and imposed restrictions on what sort of aircraft IPEC could use, precluding the most efficient option. Finally, in 1981, freight was divorced from the passenger part of the two-airline policy and sanity prevailed: business could transport freight by air in the most efficient manner.
So what were Gordon Barton's politics? He had started out in the Sydney University Liberal Club, but as a vocal opponent of Menzies' Communist Party Dissolution Bill, that vehicle lost its appeal. As with so many of his contemporaries, it was the Vietnam War that got him stirred up. Never one to take small steps, Barton's intervention into the debate came by way of $1,782 and a full-page letter in the Sydney Morning Herald attacking US and Australian policy on the day in October 1966 that LBJ visited Sydney.
Within days, the outpourings of support for Barton's views led to the formation of support for what was originally called the Liberal Reform Movement, soon was renamed the Australian Reform Movement, and eventually became the Australia Party. Everingham describes those who founded the party at Barton's Castle Cove home as "for the most part disillusioned Liberals -- hard-nosed businessmen, visionary academics and despairing clergymen". Any consideration of the Australia Party's support base demonstrates that the concept of "doctors' wives" was not some completely new phenomenon of the Howard years.
The Australia Party was certainly a factor in delivering a middle-class alternative to Labor, and Everingham records that "commentator Malcolm Mackerras concluded that Whitlam owed Labor's victory to Barton's Australia Party". In that 1972 election, the AP vote reached as high as 13 per cent in the ACT. However, by 1974, Barton was disillusioned with the direction the party was taking, initially quitting as convenor and then withdrawing his financial support. The Australia Party was eventually folded into the Australian Democrats.
If anyone thinks running a major freight transport business and founding a political party were enough excitement for one lifetime, they have not read the Barton biography. Included in his curriculum vitae were building Australia's first legal casino, at Wrest Point in Hobart, running Angus & Robertson booksellers and publishers, publishing the influential Nation Review and starting Melbourne's first Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Observer.
And that's before we start on Barton's complicated private life. In a 1974 Woman's Day interview, he scandalised conservatives when he revealed that he had girlfriends in various parts of the world and compared sexual variety with eating out, saying, "You don't go to the same restaurant all the time." He argued that "a man's first responsibility is to enjoy his own life", and certainly the reader of this work finds a catalogue of amusing and often bizarre anecdotes involving Barton in suits of armour, or Madame Lash coming to dinner, both in and out of character.
While this philosophy led to much enjoyment, it also caused significant pain to others at times (such as when he forced abortions on his lovers in the 1950s) and to himself, with his excessive drug use in later life. Indeed, much of the last couple of decades of Barton's life makes for sad reading, as a series of poor judgments saw him lose businesses and almost all his wealth, and suffer poor health, including the loss of his hearing.
"Maverick" is an overused word, but its use in Everingham's title is certainly justified. Barton was a restless personality, always full of ideas and always challenging authority. The fact that he lived in Indonesia until the age of nine, and then lived most of his later life in Europe, may indicate a lack of deep Australian roots, an impression perhaps reinforced by his faded fame. Yet, while he was here, he certainly stirred the place up which, on balance, was probably a good thing.
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