Gordon Barton by Sam Everingham

Gordon Barton: Australia’s Maverick Entrepreneur,

by Sam Everingham;

Allen & Unwin, 2009, $35.

Sam Everingham’s book on the life of Gordon Barton is a uniquely bi-polar sort of romp through the life and times of what the author well describes as “Australia’s maverick entrepreneur”. It’s bi-polar in the sense that the reader is never quite sure which side of Barton’s brain (or personality) is being discussed, examined, exposed or on-sold.

Is it the young Gordon Barton, bent on impregnating as many of the female members of the Sydney Push as he can; the dedicated anti-Vietnam War activist; the asset stripper who was happy to use interest rates of 20 to 25 per cent (up to 70 per cent annually) from the suburban loan-sharking company DAC to finance corporate takeovers; or is it the Sydney-based businessman with a wonderful feel for social justice, fun and media adoration?

A chilling paragraph is the description of Barton arguing with a manager of his trucking business about how to lift profits. Like a Roman centurion, he asked for the payroll journal and simply ordered every tenth man to be sacked. In another paragraph we find Barton fitting phony fuel tanks and filling them with water and hiding lead in the body work, so he can register a four-ton truck as weighing eight and a half tons—thereby allowing an illegal overload of four and a half tons. To the book’s author this is “lateral thinking at its best”.

So in the pantheon of failed Australian entrepreneurs, just where does Gordon Barton sit? If it is really true that George W. Bush said, “The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur”, we might well ask whether we have a word for Gordon Page Barton. As an asset-stripper and corporate raider he certainly blazed a trail for the likes of Robert Holmes a Court, Alan Bond and Christopher Skase, and he certainly got into as much bother as Eddie Groves. Wikipedia gives Barton a stingy twelve lines—Sam Everingham’s book manages to fill over 400 pages.

Gordon Barton was born in Surabaya, in the Dutch East Indies, in 1929, to a Dutch mother and an Australian father. Schooled by his mother and a correspondence course until he was nine, Barton arrived in Australia in 1939 and was placed in Sydney Church of England Grammar School. His father George was stuck in Indonesia until his release from a POW camp in 1945.

Young Barton lived with his mother, Kitty. They survived on a fifteen-shilling-a-fortnight pension after the death of his brother Andrew, who died while serving in the RAAF. Barton also earned money cutting lawns, gardening and doing odd jobs. Fluttering on the stock market saw the beginnings of his business and money-making interest. In 1947 he won a scholarship and enrolled at Sydney University. He studied Law, Economics, Arts and the philosophy of Professor John Anderson.

Also in 1947, young Gordon was told by a vocational-testing psychologist that he should meet more people as he was inclined to be introspective. Well! Talk about meeting people. He never stopped! He joined Sydney University’s Freethought Society, the university’s Liberal Club, wrote for the student newspaper Honi Soit and pushed his way into the Sydney Push. Introspective Gordon also managed to organise twenty-one students to dress up as fairies and dance around the clock in Martin Place. (The author has young Barton, in 1947, listening to parliament on a “transistor radio”—a rare feat, as the first transistor radio didn’t arrive until 1955.)

Barton managed to plot with fellow student, the Rolls Royce-driving, Bertie Wooster-speaking Francis James, to try to usurp the Liberal Party. By this time Barton was the university Liberal Club’s president and James its vice-president. Another friend was Jim Staples, active communist and later to become a partner in Barton’s trucking and freight delivery adventures. Much later, Jim Staples became a federal judge.

By 1951 Barton and a partner, Harry Ivory, had invested in a truck and were smuggling onions from South Australia into New South Wales in late-night, back-road, cross-border raids. Soon Barton was in the thick of Australia’s postwar road haulage battles, fighting the government railways, and the airlines, for a slice of the lucrative freight delivery business. Buying out or destroying competitors, Barton’s IPEC (Interstate Parcel Express Company) and Ken Thomas’s TNT (Thomas National Transport) were soon to have a near monopoly on the nation’s freight and next-day delivery services. Barton and Thomas operated a cartel, which stifled competition and smothered opposition, for decades.

As the Barton saga unfolds it becomes clear that newspapers and the fledgling television news and current affairs programs of the 1960s and 1970s caught Barton’s interest as a means to promote his most important product—Gordon Barton. Whether it was battling with Prime Minister Menzies over importing aircraft for his freight business, staging anti-war rallies against Australian troops in Vietnam, launching political parties such as the Australian Reform Movement and the Australia Party, seizing control of Angus & Robertson and Federal Hotels or just launching a Sunday newspaper in Melbourne, Gordon Barton was news.

Getting bored with IPEC and the freight business, Barton and some friends formed a company—originally well named as Mantis Corporation (as in preying, not praying), it evolved into Tjuringa Securities. According to Everingham, Barton’s idea was “creating a new venture specialising in takeovers, asset-stripping, mergers, clever company restructuring and on-selling of assets”. According to Geoffrey Robertson QC, then a clerk at Allen, Allen and Hemsley, his lawyer boss (Graham Cooke) became “obsessed with keeping Gordon out of prison”. As you read these chapters you get a whiff of Sir Abraham Haphazard in The Barchester Chronicles when he asks, indignantly, “What on earth has the law got to do with morality?”

Morality and asset-stripping seem to have little in common either. Barton’s most trusted lieutenant was Greg Farrell. Their first Tjuringa victim was an old Tasmanian car dealership and importer, H.C. Heathorn, whose property assets, worth four times the company’s share value, were soon gobbled up and dispersed. The Tjuringa think-tank met each Monday and discussed such unlikely schemes as buying a Sydney crematorium and removing the ash-rich soil for real estate development, or getting control of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They soon settled on stealthily acquiring iconic assets like Angus & Robertson and Federal Hotels.

Federal Hotels allowed Barton to snap up the newly-issued casino licence for Federal’s Wrest Point Hotel in Hobart (Australia’s first) while the Angus & Robertson deal, acquired through his IPEC Insurance, handed him a certain respectability. As the financial editor of the Sydney Morning Herald remarked, “For the first time in living memory, at least, it comes under the control of a dominant personality who is at once very money-conscious, young, tough, has his share of university degrees and reads books.”

According to Sam Everingham, Federal owned “some of the nation’s best known heritage hotels: Lennons in Brisbane; Hampton Court in Sydney; the Savoy Plaza, the Menzies and the Federal Hotel in Melbourne; Hotel Australia in Adelaide and [the prize] Wrest Point Hotel in Hobart.” Most would be eventually demolished. Melbourne’s famous Federal Hotel was destroyed for an ugly office development.

Barton and his colleagues followed the age-old dictum, “If it’s not illegal, it’s possible.” Tax was avoided by moving money through a daisy-chain of interlocked companies. These companies held cheque books on each other’s bank accounts and used non-existing funds by constantly writing cheques which took five days to clear at the various banks they used. When magnetic cheque numbering was introduced they found they could delay clearance by putting pin-pricks in the numbers. While all this was taking place Barton was claiming the moral high ground in Australian politics.

Barton’s political arm was the Australian Reform Movement, which later became the Australia Party and finally segued into the Australian Democrats—the irony of which was the motto, “Keep the bastards honest”. Barton’s failure in the political arena saw him move into that unofficial level of government—newspapers. He had spotted the lack of a Sunday newspaper in Melbourne and started the Sunday Observer. Undeterred by there being no newsagents open in Victoria on Sundays, Barton organised milk bars to sell his paper and boys on bikes to deliver them. Then there were the attempts to get local milkmen to deliver the paper with the morning milk, but the Transport Workers Union (TWU) soon spiked that.

Then in October 1970 Barton launched the more upmarket Sunday Review, which he sold in the east coast capital cities. It featured a poem by Bruce Dawe, record reviews by Pick-a-Box star Barry Jones, and articles from the Spectator and the New Statesman. As Everingham points out, “It was hardly surprising [that it was more profitable than the Sunday Observer] given it only employed around five full-time staff.” Sunday Review was marketed as “lean and nosey, like a ferret”.

In an effort to recruit the TWU to help distribute his loss-making newspaper (losing about $13,000 a week) Barton struck a deal with the ACTU’s Bob Hawke whereby he would sell them a half-share in the Sunday Observer for getting the TWU on board. The deal also involved a union interest in Barton’s Buckingham Stores but at a crucial moment Buckingham’s flagship Sydney premises burnt to the ground. As the book points out, capitalists were trying to give unionists access to newspapers and the union was saying give us some shops so we can become capitalists. The Sunday Observer closed in March 1971.

Halfway through this book the reader can at least rest a little at the photograph section before again being caught up in the fray. Gordon Barton collected companies and dubious business deals the way Imelda Marcos collected shoes. It just never stops and you begin to marvel at Sam Everingham’s attempt to unravel the various Gordon Bartons that he encountered along the way.

As with his unsuccessful political parties, Barton’s newspapers could also be reinvented. The Sunday Review turned into the Review under former Oz co-editor Richard Walsh, who flew down from Sydney to Melbourne each week to run it. Then Barton did a merger deal with the Sydney fortnightly, Nation, which gave birth to Nation Review. The new venture attracted a swarm of journalistic bees. Among those who gave the Nation Review its sting were Mungo MacCallum, Barry Oakley, Morris Lurie, Francis James, Max Teichmann, John Hindle and Anders Ousback. And then of course there was that great journalistic bumblebee, Bob Ellis.

It’s a pity Everingham didn’t expand a little on the Nation Review stoush between Bob Ellis and John Pilger as to which of the two had best covered the 1971 Bangladesh war. According to Richard Walsh, “Pilger alleged that Bob didn’t go to war at all, that he imagined the war out of the famous Room 399 at the Grand Hotel at Dacca. Bob in his insouciant way, said he had a choice between writing fine words and seeing the war. And he chose to write beautifully.” Former Nation Review editor Peter Manning remarked on the paper in a 2007 lecture, “It was irreverent, lewd, scurrilous and if it were a fish, it would have been a bottom-feeder.”

In 1978 Barton failed to sell Nation Review to Phillip Adams (fortunately) apparently because of its portfolio of about sixty defamation actions. He later sold it to Geoffrey Gold. It closed in 1980 after its readership had dropped from 150,000, in its heyday, to 15,000. Having failed to capture fully the attention of Australia’s reading public, Barton’s final fling was an investment with American Crocker Snow in a journal called WorldPaper, which at one time had a readership of one million readers in twenty-seven countries, but failed to ever pay Barton a dividend.

Undeterred as ever, we next find Barton taking on the world. On his world travels he had noticed the excellent road network in Europe but the lack of freight hubs and a co-ordinated road freight system. Barton spotted the potential of developing his IPEC model into the UK and Europe road haulage system, if he could solve the customs and border barriers. For this he used Margaret Thatcher’s daughter, Carol, whom he discovered washing champagne glasses at Melbourne’s Windsor Hotel. And for this part of the story you will have to read Gordon Barton: Australia’s Maverick Entrepreneur.

At the end of Sam Everingham’s book you are no closer to the enigma of Gordon Barton, a man consumed by his fantasies of wealth creation, social justice and sharp practice (his) than you were at the beginning. Everingham’s research has been extensive. His step-by-step journey of Gordon Page Barton, from rags to riches and back again, is very exhausting … but you wouldn’t miss it for quids. Gordon Barton died in 2005 in Spain, having spent most his final years, almost penniless, in a decaying villa overlooking Lake Como, Italy.

As Geoffrey Robertson says on the book’s cover, “His was the Icarus trajectory, but he felt the sky before he fell.”

Besides his regular reviews in Quadrant, John Izzard is a frequent contributor to Quadrant Online.