CHAPTER THREE
WORKING AROUND THE LAW

If I have something to say, people take me seriously.

Gordon Barton, 1954

By late October 1952, Gordon Barton was close to completing his university degrees. It was in his night-time degree, honours Economics, where he excelled, taking distinctions regularly. His honours thesis—‘The Marginal Efficiency of Capital’—flagged something of the intellect that would make him his fortune.

Barton applied for a Fulbright scholarship as well as one to the Australian National University in Canberra. He applied to institutions as diverse as the University of Queensland (law lecturer); the South Pacific Commission in New Caledonia (research assistant); the Australian Stevedoring Industry Board (executive officer); the United Nations in New York (economist); and the Commonwealth Treasury Department (clerk). Treasury accepted his application but the prospect did not excite him. His priority right now was to be well remunerated. ‘Better still if I could at last crack this most obstinate nut, the road transport business,’ he wrote in March 1953.

For customers, road freight was a significant improvement on the sea and rail service, but it meant the government railways were losing valuable revenue. In response, in 1952 the New South Wales Government reinstated road tax on vehicles of 4 tons or more—the income subsidising the unprofitable railways. As well, road hauliers were bullied in the courts. With the high taxes, the majority of smaller road freight operators were forced out of business.

Despite this tax, Barton believed there was money to be made in haulage. He and Harry Ivory were no longer carrying goods but Jim Staples was competent mechanically and a friend Barton trusted. He suggested that they go into partnership. Continuing with the Ivory & Barton name, the pair sourced a Reo truck with the help of a rather enormous bank loan. Barton also borrowed from his parents and a few university friends. It would be a matter of only months before he and Staples were able to repay these loans.

To Barton and other truck owners, the road tax was a breach of the Australian Constitution which provided for free trade between each state. Nevertheless, rather than risk his vehicle being seized, he always paid up. Still, the two law graduates always attached a written protest when the payment was due.

Late in 1952, two Sydney–Brisbane hauliers, Hughes & Vale, protested against these discriminatory taxes, appealing a conviction for unpaid taxes due to the New South Wales government. They lost their case, but with financial backing from fellow operators, appealed in the High Court. In April 1953 the High Court also rejected the appeal. Nevertheless, the case was regularly making the news and the road industry refused to give in. Their last chance was an appeal to Britain’s Privy Council. If the case was won, it would instantly add £500 to the value of every truck on the road. Road freight was sure to be transformed overnight. Barton and the rest of the industry waited.

Meanwhile Barton had his first close encounter with corporate America—interviewing for a potential role with IBM, which at the time made accounting machines and electric typewriters. The salary was huge compared to earlier offers—some £1000 just for his training year. Barton was shown pictures of IBM’s ‘new electronic brain which thinks 10000000000 (etc) times faster, better and cheaper than any other similar machine’. He was of course looking at one of the world’s earliest computers. Barton wrote sceptically to his father: ‘It is also compact and can be put into an average basement as against the two floors required by the previous model. Wonderful help in the home: does Junior’s sums, income tax returns—but doesn’t help with the washing or feed the baby.’

A role came up with a Canadian firm, involving much overseas travel. However, he would need to be in Switzerland within a month and globetrotting for six years. To wind up his affairs, ‘get inoculated, cleared, passported and permitted before the end of the month would put me in hospital’, Barton admitted.

While his trucking concern continued, he began working each afternoon as a junior solicitor with Malcolm Hilbery in his city law practice. Hilbery’s senior partner Hilary Links had suffered a nervous breakdown and could not be motivated to make even the smallest of decisions, let alone sign documents. Still, as an initiation into regular hours and his intended legal career, the job suited Barton well.

In September 1953, her son safely ensconced in a legal office, Kitty Barton flew out of Sydney—her first time in a flying boat—to join her husband at last in the expatriate community of Port Moresby. Having relied on each other for so long in Sydney, Kitty and her son had become in many ways alter egos. Barton admitted to his father, ‘It is quite clear that this could not go on indefinitely as I am already far too dependent on her . . . If one gets too used to care and affection on this scale one gets to expect and need it always . . .’

While he was ready to cut the cord, his mother was not. In the tropics Kitty missed her son dreadfully and she wrote every two to four days. After reading her first letter, Barton must have felt her nagging presence beside him still: ‘. . . Please don’t neglect your health and eat sensibly & at reasonable times . . . to make your own breakfast is really easy, but give yourself time to do it at leisure. Drink plenty of milk, and also eggflips . . . We both have lived and do still live for you alone.’ In fact the young man was in the habit of consuming about five oranges, two raw eggs and a half pint of milk for breakfast each morning.

Kitty insisted her son share all his news, good or bad, in long letters to her. She wanted every detail of his business and social exploits. Barton would later admit his parents ‘saw me as an opportunity to succeed in life in a way that they could not’, recognising also that his mother’s own traumatic childhood made her fight more fiercely for him. Kitty Barton was one to press homilies: ‘Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not . . . education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent.’ Some saw her as a Dutch version of Rose Kennedy.

If some of her long list of questions went unanswered, Kitty would pester her son for a response in his next letter. She would read her son’s replies over and over, fretting if he missed a week or more. His mother was quick to scold him. ‘If you could only see our great disappointment, when the mail comes in & no letter from you, I don’t think you would ever let us wait again.’ Kitty lectured her son on what she wanted to hear about and how to end his missives: ‘. . . please don’t finish your letter to us with: Yours truly. It sounds too business like.’

Perhaps as a legacy of the tough time they had suffered during the war, Kitty Barton was tight with money and tried to instil the habit in her only child: ‘I keep on worrying, because we notice that you are not too methodical & careful with your money.’ Gordon would dutifully reply with his profits for the quarter, the latest gossip from their social circle, a book he had loved and often a long description of a film he had seen (film star Ingrid Bergman was his pin-up girl). As well as legal work and trucking, he continued to play golf—and even the occasional game of cricket.

Barton and Jim Staples continued to use Kitty’s Wollstonecraft flat as an office for the trucking business. As well as carting potatoes and onions, their trucks now hauled refrigerators, demountable homes, even telephone exchanges. Jim Staples did much of the driving. There was plenty of cartage work to be had, particularly materials for the massive Snowy Mountains scheme, and they soon employed a driver. When piecemeal work came in, Barton might offer it to his rival Ken Thomas, at a commission.

Their trucks often broke down in remote parts of Australia, anywhere from an icy mountain pass to the plains of south-west Queensland. Rather than send for an expensive repairman they could ill afford, Barton would don his overalls and drive hundreds of kilometres to meet the stranded vehicle. Once there, he might spend days covered in grease and dust, conferring with his driver to diagnose and fix a mechanical problem. As emus and kangaroos stared, he and his driver would camp out next to the truck, lighting fires against the cold.

There were times when, short-staffed or needing to get a lot of driving done quickly, Barton would spent 48 hours straight in the monster—as he nicknamed their truck—on a 1600-kilometre round trip. It was usually to ensure the vehicle was back in Sydney for a new load come Monday morning. His legal work continued.

Barton considered taking on the internship necessary to qualify as a chartered accountant. His plan—to specialise in taxation and bankruptcy. Meanwhile, his investments in stocks were becoming more sophisticated. He learnt the intricacies of the market quickly, and was soon buying and selling not only stocks but futures. The bank approved him an overdraft of £700. He far preferred such a gamble to the horses.

At Hilary Links’ legal firm, the senior partner sat and doodled. Barton knew Links’ practice could not afford his salary, so he refused to accept one. He was content enough to have the office as a workspace and somewhere for freight clients and staff to leave messages.

In efforts to grow its client base, Ivory & Barton were proving themselves to be one of the most proactive freight businesses in the marketplace. Barton had in fact come to really enjoy the challenges inherent in the logistics of road freight. By mid-March he was ready to purchase a second and third truck. He carefully calculated that although diesel vehicles were heavier, so subject to higher road tax, the cheaper price of diesel oil meant he would be ahead at the end of each year.

Not content to simply do legal work and run a trucking business, in April Barton decided to take a metaphysics course at the university under John Anderson. (He had never taken any of Anderson’s courses as an undergraduate.) Kitty Barton warned her son not to be so reckless when he hardly had time to write her letters. To Kitty, John Anderson was a corrupter of souls. She wrote, ‘I just don’t like his moral behaviour and you have to think of your name, especially if you want to do well in Law’.

Her son was more concerned with the corruption of the soul and moral value that came of meeting businessmen and lawyers every day. Andersonian philosophy he regarded as a powerful body of thought, ‘the most considerable single intellectual influence . . . among educated Australians’.

In regard to being overworked, Barton accepted that as a given. He was more concerned with maintaining his mental health. ‘My three lectures a week will be three islands of civilised activity . . .’

Although Barton was in two minds about committing to a legal career, he and Staples still made plans to set up as barristers. By April 1954, Barton was fairly certain he would go to the Bar before the year’s end. However, he had done nothing about locating chambers. The university appointments board continued to send job vacancies. Barton was attracted to several overseas-based trade commissioner roles as a way to see the world. He applied as a just-in-case measure.

But the young man loved the independence of self-employment. In his eyes, few others were having as good a life. In relation to settling down with a partner he confessed to his parents, ‘I just don’t like the idea of being married to one woman for a long time’. He had not been encouraged by the examples of his married friends. What put him off was ‘simply lack of excitement’.

In reality, Barton was reluctant to move into another milieu, whether the foreign service or the legal community. He was well aware of the potential to earn good money as a barrister, but he did not have the patience to sit in an office waiting for briefs to come in. He wrote to his parents:

Emotionally I seem to be living in a bit of a vacuum. I do not seem to be able to raise very much in the way of enthusiasm for any particular vocation, whether it be of the personally ambitious sort, or of the variety which hears the bugles of History or the Voice of God. I am sentimental enough—I get really angry, probably more than most, at examples of barbaric behaviour, whether on the scale of the atrocities in Kenya or . . . by the men who pull out cats’ teeth and claws to use them to train greyhounds.

Additionally, to Barton, driving a truck was ‘a real change from the somewhat effete life of the Sydney dilettante. I have been able to read books, study the things I want to study, talk with the more intelligent circles of University society to which I have easy access, if I have something to say, people take me seriously . . .’

Nonetheless, the bar seemed an inevitable step for a young man of his erudition. By late July 1954, Jim Staples had located barristers’ rooms in a run-down Phillip Street building owned by Sydney Council just south of the Martin Place corner. By the end of September the prospective barristers had shifted in.

Despite its superiority over rail transport, the road freight industry had a history of adverse conditions, tough competition and government interference. Maintenance problems requiring regular repairs had plagued Barton’s business for years. Tired of breakdowns, a major client took its business to Barton’s rival Ken Thomas. Barton learnt a lesson—secondhand vehicles could be an expensive mistake. They were finding it hard to make much of a profit, yet Barton remained optimistic.

To offset their losses, Barton and Jim Staples become preoccupied with a new money-making venture. They would sell second-hand prefabricated sheds to farmers. Of course if the sheds were delivered by road the pair were guaranteed the freight business. Ordered from the US to accommodate post-war migrants, the Australian government had an oversupply of the sheds—known as Nissen huts—that had never been used. Barton negotiated a much discounted price—the government just wanted to be rid of them. The buildings came in pieces which had to be treated, sorted, sandblasted and repaired. Steel nuts, bolts and other parts were zinc-coated to prevent rust. For every order, materials needed collecting, boxing and transporting. It was no simple business. The pair spent weeks coming up with blueprints for strengthening them with new timber, drawing up how-to instructions for their erection.

Most city-made prefab sheds had elaborate windows and doors. Their version had neither. Barton had met plenty of farmers in his time driving. He knew they wanted no more than the basics. He and Staples devised an advertising and sales campaign, which included sending their how-to instructions to every builder they could find in country districts and a refund to any unsatisfied purchaser. Slowly sales grew until they expanded into selling various other farm structures on commission.

Barton’s first published advertisement to recruit a stenographer for the office was typical of his dry wit : ‘. . . with sense of humour for congenial position without prospects . . .’ Unfortunately the girl they hired couldn’t spell, talked incessantly, said unfortunate things to clients and drove the pair to distraction. It was several weeks, however, before they worked up the courage to tell her she had to go.

Barton continued to spend much time with Yvonne Hand, by now known as Vonnie. He found her intelligent, well-read and consistently good-natured. The pair had a mutual respect and affection that went beyond friendship. Dark-haired, adventurous, very intelligent and beautiful, Vonnie had romantic notions of changing the world for the better. She had by now graduated in Arts and had found employment in her chosen field—social work. She took it very seriously, giving away significant parts of her earnings to those in need.

Vonnie was an incredibly compassionate, sociable girl and there were a number of men wooing her. To Barton, if he were ever to marry, ‘it would be inconceivable that I would look any further’, though he saw Vonnie as having ‘very little experience of life’. Vonnie was meeting such a range of down-and-out battlers through her social work that she scoffed at this suggestion. However, what Gordon was referring to was sex.

During November 1954, Vonnie’s father was to become the catalyst for Barton’s first significant legal advice. Vonnie’s parents were salt-of-the-earth types: her father, Ray, a road builder; her mother, Daphne, an earnest, godly type who loved reading.

Ray Hand was a 50 per cent shareholder in a highly successful cement firm. He had, however, been recently ousted as a director by his colleague. His £30,000 was trapped in the firm and it was clear his fellow director was trying to force him to sell his equity below its true value. Hand’s barrister had advised him that there was nothing to be done.

The young Barton agreed to do some reading on the issue himself. After a week of nights spent studying the law, he soon convinced the barrister that there was a sound case for an Equity suit. Four months later the case was decided in Mr Hand’s favour. Thrilled, he insisted Barton take £250 as a fee. The young graduate felt he might be suited to law after all.

Meanwhile, the verdict in the London Privy Council case on behalf of the Hughes & Vale road freight hauliers was finally brought down that same November. The hauliers had won. The historic judgment that no government has the right to protect its railways by restricting the interstate operations of road carriers reversed Australia’s High Court decision. The New South Wales government was walloped with a huge bill for Hughes & Vale’s entire court costs. The judgment threw open interstate road freight.

‘We were at the barrier’, Barton would recall sixteen years later, ‘lean and hungry’. Still, he was doubtful whether he could be reimbursed for the back taxes.

By the end of 1954, Barton’s Wollstonecraft landlord had had enough of his riotous Christmas parties. On Christmas Eve, Barton received an eviction notice. He had 30 days to vacate.

On top of the previous year’s noisy carousing, at his huge party two weeks earlier somebody had vomited from the terrace onto the concrete yard below. No-one had cleaned up the mess. Further, Barton was breaking the terms of the lease by running a business from the flat. That and the nuisance complaint were enough to oust him. He immediately shifted business activities to the city office. He wrote to his mother, assuring her he would fight the order if necessary. Fortunately six weeks later the landlord withdrew his case.

When in February 1955 Kitty Barton continued to pester her son about getting a barrister’s wig and being admitted to the Bar, he assured her that when the trucking and shed sales businesses were on their feet and could run independently with a manager in charge he would turn to law.

In April, the city council won a case forcing Barton and Staples to vacate their city offices. The site was needed for other purposes. The pair moved to a modest office above a garage at 135 Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo. On the outskirts of the city centre, the new office was sunnier, quieter and offered easier parking with a café handily next door.

Jim Staples and Barton became regulars at the bohemian Home Café, on the tree-lined Victoria Street in Kings Cross, up the hill from their office. After working late they would sometimes go for a meal at Vadim’s—an institution amongst better-off bohemians, intellectuals, European émigrés and his one-time friend Francis James. It was the only place in Kings Cross then open after midnight.

Since reaching puberty Barton’s handsome features had magnetised women. Busy with growing his business, he had no interest in settling down with a partner, though the girls he slept with would become smitten, declaring him ‘much too loveable’. One confessed, ‘I rashly stated in my last letter that . . . I’d be platonic if you wished. I take it all back. I couldn’t, it’d be impossible. I give you fair warning I’ll seduce you any and every opportunity I get.’

Judy Wallace occasionally ate dinner at the Home Café. On one such night Barton came in, recognised Judy and her friend, and asked if he could join them. He insisted on paying for their meals, though as he walked out Judy recalls him declaring romantically that he had just spent his last penny. Judy found the man charming, interesting and intelligent. His recent rebellious presidency of the university Liberal branch gave him some frisson to intelligent women. Judy recalls, unlike other men she knew, Barton would engage women in conversation as an equal.

Living in his mother’s Wollstonecraft flat, Barton began a relationship with Judy Wallace. Their liaison would continue off and on through 1955 and 1956. While besotted with him, Judy was driven mad by his refusal to make plans ahead to see her. Instead he’d just turn up late at her flat when his trucking business allowed it, hoping she would be home and available. Once when she wasn’t there Barton took out her flatmate instead.

He was not one to use a condom and contraceptive pills were unheard of in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, Judy fell pregnant. Abortion was illegal in Australia at the time, and Barton was in no way ready to marry Judy, let alone support a child. Instead he paid for an open-minded doctor acquaintance in the Push to perform an abortion. Judy shudders at the memory of the doctor’s rudeness and insensitivity.

A well-liked acquaintance had obtained a lease on the abandoned Barrenjoey lighthouse cottage on the headland at Palm Beach. He decided to hold a party and the word quickly spread. Because it was such a uniquely wonderful venue and the host a popular fellow, masses of people turned up.

Judy went with Barton in his huge second-hand American Chevrolet. (He liked big fast cars. Later he would switch to an eight-cylinder Packard with a bonnet that stretched forever; later still came a Dodge Phoenix.) The pair found themselves in a long procession of artists, journalists, literati, bar-room anarchists and poets, gamblers and con-men, walking across the sandhills and climbing the steep steps to the lighthouse. On the headland, the sandstone lighthouse-keeper’s quarters was a large wide-verandahed sandstone cottage with a wondrous view out across black ocean and sky. Judy recalls ‘each room became a stage with its own backdrop or murals and different cast of characters . . . telling tales, singing songs’.

The pair partied until after dawn. As the sun rose, the revellers stumbled down from the headland. Judy’s high-heeled shoes broken, Barton carried her down the steep bush track, over wet sand and green, lichened rock, delirious with the beauty of life. The next week the pair dined at one of the city’s expensive new restaurants, drinking French champagne. As her partner treated her to the Grand Marnier soufflé, Judy realised she had never dined in such opulence. Even for Gordon, such extravagance was unusual.

In the following months Judy fell pregnant again. Barton had by now sworn his love for her. This time she wanted to keep the child. Barton refused. It was around 1956 and financially he was still struggling. Judy baulked at going back to the Push doctor who had so demeaned her. So instead Barton located a backyard abortionist. Soon after the procedure, Judy developed an internal systemic infection, requiring hospitalisation. Too ashamed to confide in her parents, she almost died fighting the infection. Not only was Judy distraught, but so was her lover.

Judy later realised that a number of her Push girlfriends, including Lillian Roxon, had had numerous pregnancies to Push men who failed to use protection and suffered subsequent abortions. At least one woman Judy knew went through so many terminations, it destroyed her ability to bear children when she was ready to settle down.

The Burragorang Valley and its lush meadows south-west of Sydney were to be transformed to make way for Sydney’s new water catchment—the 2 million litre capacity Warragamba Dam. Barton had obtained a lease on a quirky old cottage in the valley from the Water Board. Inviting groups of friends to stay for the weekend, he was intent on enjoying it before the beautiful valley was flooded.

There was an incredibly rough road winding down through the valley. Kangaroos, pigs, horses and stray sheep with wool dragging down to their hooves grazed in the silence. Judy remembers the abandoned houses, roofs half crushed under branches heavy with lichen, grass growing high above each window-sill.

On one weekend in which she and Barton visited with friends, Judy recalls spreading a rug on the cottage floor, laying out cheese, salami, ham, olives, liverwurst, tomatoes and bread. The group dug in greedily, before settling down to play cards while Judy watched Barton, scrunched up against the wall alone.

Later that night, another girl, a nightclub singer, turned up. Barton had dated her occasionally, and he had invited her for the weekend without telling Judy. When she arrived he fussed over her. Judy Wallace was mortified and furious. She remembers it ruining the weekend.

This was not the first time Barton would appal girlfriends by inviting an ex-lover and a current lover on the same trip. Another with whom he had recently slept wrote, ‘What sort of a thoughtless, or a malignant streak do you possess that you could have allowed me to go away on that trip when you knew you were taking Yvonne? . . . where the fact that you are keen on somebody else will be patently obvious? . . . I am afraid you have gone down in my estimation quite a lot . . .’

Now that the road tax had been lifted, freight rates dropped, service improved and the volume of interstate trade grew rapidly. Barton prepared to order two more trucks. However, profits remained meagre. As the government wartime surplus of materials for Nissen huts started drying up, the pair began importing prefabricated aluminium buildings— light, solid, rust-free, cool inside, simple to erect and cheap. Barton saw them as perfect for shearers’ quarters, workers’ houses, construction sites, mining towns and the Pacific Islands. Barton had learnt one needed to be bold when spending money on advertising. Still, it was a huge risk if business failed to follow. The rural boom meant that farmers were his main target.

By June the transport business was making £50 to £100 weekly. In late July 1955, Ivory & Barton hit the jackpot. A large distributor wanted the firm to transport refrigerators—1400 in the next month. It was an impossible equation for an operator of Ivory & Barton’s size. They would need at least seven trucks carting solely fridges. Nonetheless, Barton quickly established a temporary solution—using contractors until he could purchase more vehicles.

In August 1955, after nearly two years in New Guinea, Kitty Barton returned to her son and the Wollstonecraft flat with her husband George. Her son’s letter-writing responsibilities were at an end.

Barton now ensured the business provided a useful role for his father. He needed a good accountant, and for George Barton it was a welcome change from his dead-end Burns Philp posting in Port Moresby.

Despite his humpback and stooped gait, George Barton would arrive every day at the Ivory & Barton Woolloomooloo office looking spruce in his braces and bowtie. He never talked much, but instead would spend his time sorting consignment notes. Though he was deaf as a post, thin and physically fragile, George seemed recovered from any physical ailment resulting from his wartime incarceration.

Ivory & Barton was at last incorporated into a proprietary company. Amongst the directors were Barton, his father and Jim Staples. Another colleague, Jim Somerville, was also made a director. Barton began to groom Somerville to take over the day-to-day management, with the view to taking a holiday in Europe and on his return to finally take up as a barrister. However, as 1956 wore on Jim Somerville’s enthusiasm began to wane.

Barton had never begrudged working long and irregular hours, but Somerville always refused, announcing he had ‘better things to do with my time’. By October it was plain that Somerville was simply not fitting in. Finally Barton exploded. Angry and disappointed, he had clearly chosen the wrong man. (Close friends would observe over the years that Barton never raised his voice when angry. The only telltale sign was a twitching in his right eye.) He wrote to Somerville, explaining bluntly that he had to go and suggested buying him out. Barton’s intentions of grooming a successor so he could take up as a barrister were fading.