I have a guilty feeling about going on holiday. I have this feeling that if I have people working for me, I should be there.
Gordon Barton, 1972
Barton had little time for a relationship. Hanging out with the likes of Darcy Waters and the Sydney Push crowd taught him that there was no need to make your bed too early in life. Despite the traumatic terminations, Barton and Judy Wallace continued to see each other intermittently. Around the time his parents returned from New Guinea, Barton also revived his relationship with Vonnie Hand. Friends remember Vonnie as always firm, slightly waspish, personable and bright.
There were times when Gordon would complain to Vonnie that she was suffocating him with affection. She remembered that New Year’s Eve they spent together on a beach gazing at the stars. Now Vonnie wanted Gordon’s commitment. He refused, admitting he didn’t want to marry her.
Vonnie was hurt; it was impossible for her to see where she fitted in to his life. Just a week or two into January 1956, she departed alone for Europe. Aboard ship, with a host of other twenty-something travellers, the parties and sexual liberties were wild. At first Vonnie was flattered that one fellow or the other would always insist on walking her back to her cabin. It never occurred to her that they were fishing for more. As she watched the carryings on of room-mates in her shared cabin, Vonnie felt isolated. She swore that when she returned to Sydney, it would be by plane or in a single cabin with a door she could lock.
After receiving a letter from Gordon analysing their past relationship, Vonnie put her cards squarely on the table:
You would never talk to me about love-making when I asked you to would you?
I liked feeling spiritual about you too and wanted to worship or sculpt you and had no way whatsoever of expressing myself except by being unhappy & frustrated. I shall probably always be a little bit afraid of sex as the sensation is . . . like falling downstairs, slippery dips and all those other things in Luna Park which filled me with such horror that I couldn’t even scream. I vaguely felt that if I really released my hold on myself that I wouldn’t get up the stairs again . . .
However horrible as you are I’d like to be with you again before it is too late. I am afraid dear one that I still feel diffident about you . . .
Now I feel sad and convinced ‘all is lost and all is over’. Should I just put you down as a youthful experience and myself as a very lucky girl? I love you very much and shall now sleep with sad, sweet thoughts.
Vonnie was certainly far more prudish than the man she loved. Sometimes she wrote passionate missives, then decided against posting them. Watching the opera Scheherazade, she blushed as the slaves and harem women rolled on the floor together, throwing themselves wantonly into the lovemaking scenes. To Vonnie it was bad taste.
While he hoped to join Vonnie at some stage in Europe, for the present, Barton was distracted by his own issues. The recent Hughes & Vale victory had encouraged him to make his own claim for reimbursement of illegally collected road taxes. His and Staples’ legal knowledge helped immensely. He issued a writ in the Supreme Court suing the Commissioner for Motor Transport for over £1500 in payments.
Staples recalls rushing back from a delivery to Adelaide to give evidence. He arrived in court late, in his grease-spattered leather driving coat, looking every bit the simple working-class man. For the presiding judge listening to Staples’ qualifications in law and some particular expertise in the very section of the constitution being debated, it must have been a surreal moment.
The government was intent on proving that the written protests Barton and Staples had made at the time were not bona fide opinions about the illegality of the tax. However, when Barton declared that he would also challenge based on Section 92 of constitution law by filing a special case, he forced a High Court hearing. Section 92 reads: ‘The imposition of uniform duties of customs, trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free.’
The Queen’s Counsel wheeled out against the young Barton would have been daunting to most. However, the 28-year-old Barton engaged his own QC—John Holmes, and his senior counsel, Denys Needham. As the case plodded on, Barton grew increasingly resentful of government and its pig-headedness.
Meanwhile in Russia, Communist Party secretary Khrushchev had famously denounced the ‘cult of personality’ that surrounded Stalin, accusing the Russian leader of crimes committed during the Great Purges. Jim Staples lost no time in roneoing copies of the contentious speech and inserting them into the Australian Communist party news-sheet. Before Barton knew it, his friend had been expelled from the party for his actions.
In September 1956 Barton and his small team shifted out of their tiny Woolloomooloo office to a whole building at 1 Arundel Street, Glebe. The two-storey corner building was thin, angular and unusual. It had once been a funeral parlour. From its first-floor windows Barton could gaze at the sandstone Baxter Lodge gatehouse of Sydney University, directly across Parramatta Road. It was so close he could almost make out the carved bas-reliefs of the ten faculty shields in the gatehouse wall. Barton had of course conquered three of these faculties already.
The growing transport business made newspaper headlines when Barton and Staples solved the immense distance problems in trucking overland to Western Australia by arranging to have the Commonwealth Railways haul their huge trucks on its rail wagons from Port Augusta across the Nullarbor Plain to Kalgoorlie, from where they were driven another 600 kilometres by road to Perth. This road–rail arrangement would soon become accepted practice within the freight industry.
When Barton wrote to Vonnie during the London winter, apparently to confess to a number of other women, including secretaries, he had slept with in the recent past, Vonnie wavered. ‘In fact now I have a cold apprehensive excitement that perhaps we didn’t know one another after all’, she replied. Vonnie feared that if and when he did arrive, they would have grown apart.
Vonnie’s doubt did not get her down for long. She loved Barton intensely and missed him constantly. Fun-loving, and full of the joy of living, she continued to write of her doings with impish asides: ‘Perhaps you have a new, even more fascinating secretary who destroys my letters.’
In another letter she admitted, ‘I don’t think you realise just how much I ache with frustration if I let myself think of you sexually . . . no-one who did not resemble you in every physical detail would be quite right to fulfil the special ache.’
Meanwhile, Barton was having a tough time in Sydney. Often he found himself working through the night to sort out the latest problem.
‘You are probably an ulcerated bald businessman by now incapable of the hedonistic life I am leading’, Vonnie wrote playfully in one of her September aerogrammes.
In December 1956 Vonnie urged Gordon to join her: ‘I do wish you would come here before I come home as I’d like you to meet all my favourite people . . . Do please tell me of your plans after January or I shan’t believe that you miss me at all. For some reason or other I never quite forget you and still come over in great rushes of affection for you.’
February 1957 came and, busy in the High Court, there was still no sign of him coming to meet her. Back in Sydney, Barton had in fact been dating Judy Wallace again. Judy had fallen in love.
Meanwhile Vonnie was about to fly home, admitting she would have returned to Australia far earlier had she not been awaiting Gordon’s ever-postponed trip.
Barton was in a quandary, though perhaps it was the catalyst he needed. In late March he called Vonnie, promising he would arrive by May for a four-month holiday. Vonnie fretted: ‘Maybe we won’t like one another? . . . The very prospect of seeing you devastates me but the suspense is much worse.’
Finally in late April 1957, the business quietened down. Barton had begun to recognise the pattern of slow and busy months each year. In June road freighters cut their rates most desperately, so this was the time to be in hibernation. Barton left his father George and Jim Staples to oversee things, assisted by his enthusiastic mother. His manager Ray Fletcher could run the day-to-day operations quite capably. So confident was he before he left, that he ordered another four trucks for delivery. While away, he would write to Fletcher, detailing what needed to be done.
During July it is necessary to make some assessment of the requirements of the coming season as the capacity required increases rapidly and with little warning in August. Availability of suitable contractors . . . should be at the top of the agenda by the end of July . . . the trucks and drivers must be of as good a quality as possible—carefully vetted as to past experience & reputation. One bad subbie can make a mess of a whole business . . .
This trip was likely the first time Barton had travelled by aeroplane, and certainly his first departure from Australia. He flew via Perth to Surabaya, spending a little time rediscovering the city of his childhood before flying on to Singapore and the elegant Raffles Hotel, Bangkok then on to Calcutta, Istanbul, Athens and Rome. Barton’s interest in world history and politics had begun as a schoolboy. Well-read on the places he visited, with a memory for facts he had studied years earlier, he would prove to be an ever-curious traveller. Before he left Australia, his mother Kitty had made him promise he would not try to look up her relatives in Holland. She wanted all links with her country of birth severed.
On 19 May, Gordon and Vonnie were reunited in Rome. Meanwhile from her Bondiflat, Judy Wallace had written to her lover, ‘What will I do if you don’t come back in four months? . . . you seem handsomer, kinder and cleverer than ever’. Judy knew she should try to forget Gordon Barton, yet she wrote, ‘I hope you are spending sleepless nights worrying about me’.
In Rome, Barton splurged on a small convertible Fiat sports car for Vonnie and him to tour in. The 28-year-old grew a beard for the first time—surprising himself when flecks of red appeared.
Vonnie had clearly not confided in her parents her love for this man. Whatever Barton felt, he had similarly not let on to his parents that he would be touring Europe with Vonnie unchaperoned. At home in Sydney, Vonnie’s mother started to panic when her daughter began to suggest the two were alone together.
Gordon wrote to his mother to reassure her. ‘Since we are visiting the same places & I have a car & for the sake of company it would be absurd if we travelled separately. Conventions are being observed as far as possible.’ He reminded his mother that youth hostels allocated separate dormitories to men and women anyway—single beds with mattresses of straw. It was no hardship—both had always been economical with their spending.
They would spend a languorous twelve days in Capri to get to know each other again. High up in the village of Anacapri they joined the crowds to celebrate the festival of the town’s patron saint, St Antonio. The pair cheered as a procession of townsfolk dressed as priests, acolytes, daughters of Mary and elders accompanied the huge statue as it wound through every major street.
The Fiat carried them north, through some of the most picturesque provinces and regions of western Europe—ten countries in all. In France, in the valley of Chamonix, with snow-covered mountains rising up on all sides of them, the pair watched the sun set. Their adventures were simple—roadside picnics with bread, cheese and wine. At night they would fire up their portable burner and cook soup and coffee. The lovers reached Paris in mid-July and as they drove in at night, Gordon was captivated. Never in his life had he felt so moved by a place.
Unfortunately, on 19 July he received an urgent wire from his manager Fletcher at home, as well as one from his parents. His father had always been a pessimist in the face of Gordon’s eternal optimism and in his son’s absence had continually fretted about the cash-flow situation. George Barton did not have the stomach his son had for debt. He declared the financial position of the business as ‘desperate’. Consequently, George had frozen any new spending. It meant Fletcher had not been able to act on any of Gordon’s written instructions. Additionally, George Barton had had a blue with Jim Staples. No wonder Ray Fletcher had been repeatedly pestered by George to ask his son to return.
Barton disagreed with his father’s financial concerns. There were plenty of creditors who owed the business money. Their own debts could wait. Gordon poured oil on the troubled waters. ‘If everyone is slow we must also be slow and without bad conscience.’
He was not convinced he had to dash home. What no-one realised was that just a week earlier, a High Court panel had ruled in Barton’s favour on the interstate tax permit case. Barton was about to be refunded approximately £1500 ($37,000) in permit payments—an outcome that would certainly assist the cash crisis.
In his reply to his father, Barton also confessed where things stood between him and Vonnie: ‘We intend to get married as soon as conveniently [sic] perhaps here in Paris. Don’t tell everyone yet.’ There had been a hint in his letter just a fortnight earlier: ‘We are also taking the opportunity to discuss personal matters of importance to us both &which will, I think, have an outcome acceptable to all’—Barton-speak for ‘we’re talking of tying the knot’.
Kitty Barton was a little disdainful at the lower middle-class background of this girl from Oatley, a riverside suburb on Sydney’s southern fringe that did not exist on her map of Sydney society. Other of Barton’s university girlfriends would recall Kitty Barton’s sneering disapproval of their presence. She did not need to say it. Her body language told them they were not good enough for her son. Kitty Barton expected her boy to marry up.
The business must have been in more of a mess than Gordon had wished, for there was no Paris wedding. Instead, within twelve days he was back in Sydney to sort out the crisis, having left Vonnie in London. They must have agreed to keep their engagement quiet for Vonnie concealed her ring finger when out with London friends. She missed him ‘in a numb, dumb fashion—probably like the dog that has been left behind’.
Within a week, he was able to write to say that his kingdom was not collapsing but merely a little worm-eaten. He went to visit Judy Wallace at her Bondi flat to tell her they could not see each other again.
Gordon’s attitude to marriage was rare for 1950s Australia. He did not hold by all the rigmarole that went with the institution of wedlock. Ever the non-confrontational type, perhaps he preferred to sidestep his mother’s displeasure at his choice. Whatever the reason, he wrote to Vonnie, now back in Rome, suggesting they simply elope.
Vonnie had to think of her parents, particularly her pious mother. Without a church wedding she knew they would be ‘terribly hurt’. She suggested a hotel reception ‘or else a simple country affair locally with a marquee . . .’
Gordon, however, was insistent. He had always made it clear to Vonnie that he was simply not the one-woman type. To make marriage vows to the contrary would be dishonest. There would be no wedding. Further, Gordon was inclined for them both to shift to Melbourne, perhaps partly to insulate him from the jilted Judy Wallace.
On 3 September Vonnie wrote from Rome:
I am so happy with the thought of you that I am terrified that it won’t last. Please don’t get complicated with anyone else for a long time . . . I love you and want to be with you so much—I really don’t mind being your slave & being possessed utterly by you . . . I have bought a wonderful film star outfit just meant for entertaining you in the evenings . . .
While away in Europe, Barton’s mind had not been idle. He had come up with a way of raising cash which, if successful, might allow Ivory & Barton to expand exponentially. The idea was to on-sell one of its own trucks and trailers to a driver, throwing six months of guaranteed loads into the deal. If the idea worked, it would inject significant cash into the business, allowing new vehicles to be purchased.
In the late 1950s the Australian market was opening up, with manufacturers starting to market and sell their goods nationally rather than just in their home state. It was the right time to be in interstate transport.
By October of 1957, Ivory & Barton had eight of its own vehicles on the road. The business had quickly expanded beyond Sydney and Melbourne to Tasmania, opening depots and employing new staff in Hobart and Launceston. Barton had done his homework well. A shortage of operators and the high rates able to be charged meant he was forecasting additional turnover of some £30,000 from the island.
Another idea had been to concentrate on an express parcel delivery service rather than just general freight. Fired up with its potential, once back in the office Barton excitedly proposed the concept to his partner. He was met with silence. Jim Staples could think of nothing more boring. He had his own plans to invest in patenting and building huge industrial and mobile cranes.
So Jim Staples proposed instead that Barton and he split the company into two separate ventures, dividing the Glebe premises in half. Barton and his father bought Staples out. But there was more to Staples’ exit. In his friend’s absence, he had not got on with the pessimistic George Barton. He could see that to stay in the business threatened to split his loyalty.
Fifty years on, Staples would recall: ‘I moved that part upstairs, and in due course sent it broke, as often happens with undercapitalised building entrepreneurs. You might think it was the biggest mistake of my life.’