CHAPTER ELEVEN
TAKING ON THE MEDIA MAGNATES

A lot of things I rather like doing are things that cost rather a lot of money. I like the idea for example of being able to start a newspaper. I thought that was a good thing to do.

Gordon Barton

Barton had always regarded Rupert Murdoch and Australia’s Packer family as media robber barons, bully boys sitting on top of the heap. On one hand Barton must have admired their success, while on the other he despised them for an absence of social principles and their lack of contribution to society. To him it was wrong that three or four old families should control 85 per cent of Australia’s print and television media. Barton knew many who had been savaged by the Packer family, including Francis James, editor of The Anglican.

People had been suggesting to Barton the idea of starting a newspaper ever since his famous Herald letter. Sydney by then had three Sunday papers, each with a circulation of over half a million. And its population was only slightly larger than that of Melbourne. But Melbourne had no Sunday paper at this time. To Barton it seemed clear there was an opening for a Sunday paper in the southern capital. He did some rough figures and calculated that a readership of just 300,000 to 400,000 would ensure profitability.

One of the few media people Barton trusted was John Crew, who had been so valuable to the Liberal Reform Group’s inception a few years earlier. ‘I’d like to start a Melbourne Sunday newspaper’, he told Crew. ‘I’d like you to run it.’ Barton specified it must have comics and a good sports section.

Crew’s experience was in radio and television—he had not worked on a newspaper since his youth, let alone run one. He was quick to point this out to Barton. ‘I really don’t know how to run a big operation like this.’ However, Barton had an innate confidence in people he trusted. Crew recalls being assured, ‘Oh, you can do it. We’ll keep an eye on you.’

So in 1969 Crew went down to Melbourne to investigate the options. It was soon clear that the established newspapers were not going near the idea of a Sunday edition.

Barton was prepared to start from scratch. For the first year John Crew would spend five days a week in Melbourne, flying home to his wife and four young children every weekend. Premises were located in a converted World War II Nissen hut at Fishermans Bend. The printing presses of suburban weeklies were contracted to print the fledgling paper. It would be christened the Sunday Observer , its first issue printed in September 1969.

Grahame Bunyan admits many decent friends whom Barton convinced to run his ventures ‘had absolutely no idea what they were doing. The financial situation was totally hopeless. There were no controls on what they spent.’ John Crew recalls Barton’s instruction to purchase appropriate furniture for the new offices then ‘ring Konstas and he’ll fix you up for it’. Crew ordered and paid for the furniture from Grace Bros. When he rang John Konstas, IPEC’s financial controller was horrified. IPEC had always bargained hard for the best deal from its suppliers. Konstas could have obtained a 50 per cent discount if Barton had thought to channel the purchasing correctly.

Michael Cannon—a well-known writer and historian—was employed as the paper’s editor. A highly regarded journalist who, unlike Crew, knew Melbourne, he was given the job of finding over twenty full and part-time staff.

It was in media executive Ranald McDonald’s short-lived evening weekday paper Newsday that Barton had spotted a cartoon by Michael Leunig. His satirical sketches made people think. Barton wanted Leunig and asked Crew to sign him up. He soon became something of a hero of the intellectual anti-establishment, though perhaps oblivious to his own talents. His editors recall often finding some of his best early work in the wastepaper bin.

It was going to be a tough battle—opening in a conservative city used to high standards of journalism at a very low price. The daily Melbourne Herald sold for just 4c and the Saturday morning papers for less than 10c. The Observer would be launched at 12c and would later rise to 15c.

Newsagents did not open on Sundays and would not do so unless instructed by their trade association. Given that the Victorian Authorised Newsagents Association (VANA) was controlled by the city’s two dominant newspapers, the Herald & Weekly Times and the Age, this was unlikely. Both had profitable Saturday editions and were concerned the Observer would eat into their revenue.

To win over the newsagents, Barton assured them that the Observer would organise 2000 delivery boys into a metropolitan field army to provide home delivery themselves, yet still give the newsagents their 33 per cent cut. All newsagents had to do was take orders for delivery. VANA refused. The Observer would be on its own.

Barton was determined the Observer would not be beaten. IPEC had dealt with distribution problems for decades. In a military-style exercise, Melbourne was divided into ten zones. Each zone would have ten agents with twenty delivery boys under each agent.

Barton wrote personally to every one of the boys’ parents pointing out in his stirring rhetoric that ‘this is the foundation on which millionaires are built’. Each paper-boy would receive 2 cents per copy sold. The best boy in each zone would have his pick of a watch, a bicycle or a Polaroid camera. There was to be a major prize of an all-expenses paid one-week holiday to the Great Barrier Reef for the overall winner and his parents, with second prize a week at Hobart’s Wrest Point Hotel.

Another possible distribution avenue was milk bars as they opened on Sundays. Many individual newsagents signed contracts allowing the Observer to be distributed through their sub-agency—the neighbourhood milk bar. When the newsagents’ trade association heard about this, it was furious. Many newsagents received calls coercing them to break the agreements. The industry body threatened maverick newsagents and milk bars with the withdrawal of their papers and magazines. Equally furious, Barton vowed he would see them in court.

On Sunday 14 September 1969 Melbourne’s Sunday Observer delivered its first issue. The paper almost totally avoided the sex, drug and crime content which was a staple of most Sunday tabloids. A number of well-regarded writers had contributed commentary-style stories to the first issue, although in-depth news was scarce.

‘This is possibly the first Sunday paper you have bought’, Barton wrote. ‘It is certainly the first I have published. I hope you like it.’ His raison d’être for the publication was uplifting and inspiring in its idealism.

Given the sterility and the musty smell of the nineteenth century fug of the Corridors of Power in Australia this country desperately needed better men and better ideas so we may cease to behave like frightened Americans abroad . . .

So that it becomes clearly understood that the purpose of government is to serve the people and not vice versa. So that commonsense and humanity displace political dogmas and slogans in our national debate. So that we may again be proud to be Australians.

It will be the political policy of this newspaper to support such ideas and such men. However as a good newspaper should, we shall try to keep our opinion to our editorials and to give space in our columns to those who disagree.

Our policy in regard to news is that it shall be objective, complete, concise and up-to-date. Our columnists will be expected to be independent, plain spoken and fearless.

Barton had already ordered a state-of-the art printing press from England with the ability to do fast, high-quality printing. John Crew recalls thinking it was far too early for such an investment. That was Barton.

In November 1969 financial controller John Konstas received a phone call from a Melbourne customs clearance agent. ‘Hello, we have a printing press here for clearance and delivery to Fishermans Bend in Melbourne. We need payment of half a million dollars as soon as possible.’

‘Sorry,’ Konstas said, ‘you must have the wrong number. We are a transport company—IPEC. We need a printing press like we need a hole in the head.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Konstas still recalls hearing the rustling of paper down the phone. ‘Do you know a Gordon Barton?’

Konstas’ jaw dropped. He admits now that his boss could often be forgetful in informing him of the sometimes enormous cash requirements that needed to be conjured up at little notice. Still, Barton no doubt saw the investment as money well spent. A 1972 entry in his ASIO file would damn the expensive machinery as the source of ‘some of the worst subversive and trouble-making literature for the anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid and radical student movements’.

Full page ads attempted to motivate readers to subscribe to the Observer:

WHEN YOU TAKE IN THE MILK, TAKE IN THE SUNDAY OBSERVER . . . cheaper than a pint of milk.

Haven’t you heard? A pint of milk costs you 10 cents a bottle. That’s $1.20 a dozen. The Sunday Observer USED to cost $1.44 a dozen. But not any more . . . not if you get it delivered. You can have the next dozen issues for $1 flat. That’s about 8 cents each. Just ask Gerry when he comes around next Sunday.

Most news reaching Australia on the Vietnam War had drawn from pro-American sources. John Crew began to seek other sources, which often contradicted the official accounts. Through Agence France-Presse, the Observer ran Australian renegade journalist Wilfred Burchett’s stories. Barton never particularly liked Burchett, but he believed he had every right as a journalist to report his version of the facts. Burchett was a war correspondent who, after the Second World War, had spoken out against atomic weapons and the banning of the Communist Party. (He had been the first Western journalist into Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped.)

Barton heard of photos of a US-led massacre of at least 175 Vietnamese civilians—mostly women, children and the elderly—at My Lai in Vietnam. The photos were not available in Australia so he called on his US-based friend Marion Manton to smuggle in the negatives. The images were horrendous, showing women and small children being shot in cold blood by US soldiers. Sunday Observer published the damning photographs in colour—the first newspaper to do so anywhere in the world—on Sunday 14 December 1969. Melbourne’s Archbishop Knox publicly complained. The Sunday Observer sent a telegram to Prime Minister Gorton offering the colour transparencies to a special sitting of parliament.

Such was the impact of the My Lai story, the Sunday Observer would receive several hundred letters from readers. Two weeks later the London Times followed the Observer’s lead, publishing the photos in its own pages.

Wilfred Burchett had lived outside Australia for most of his adult life. Fifteen years earlier he had lost his passport in North Vietnam. The Australian government, angry at his continuing pro-communist commentary (and particularly a propaganda film on the Korean War he had facilitated), had in all that time refused to replace it, despite the formation in Victoria of a ‘Burchett Passport Committee’ which presented a petition to Federal Parliament signed by famous philosophers, movie stars, authors and dignitaries from around the world. The government refused to budge—even on the issue of passports for Burchett’s three Australian-born children. Burchett could not even attend the funeral of his father in 1969. After a meeting with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1968, Castro offered Burchett and his family Cuban passports. It would be with these that the family travelled for most of the next four years.

Early in 1970 Burchett was about to leave Paris for Cambodia when he received a call from his brother in Melbourne to say their oldest brother Clive was close to death. Burchett decided on the spot to defy the travel ban and return to attend a memorial service for his popular brother.

He discreetly booked a flight from Phnom Penh onwards to Sydney. All he had as travel documents were a birth certificate and a laissez passer, issued in Hanoi, which allowed him limited travel, mainly to communist countries. However, the UTA flight had stopovers in Colombo, Singapore and New Caledonia. With his dubious documents, Burchett ran into trouble at each and the Australian authorities were soon alerted. They acted quickly, warning all airlines flying out of New Caledonia that a hefty fine would be applied to any airline that carried Burchett without a proper passport. He was stuck. The government was clearly pleased with itself. To Australian politicians, Burchett deserved what he got.

Meanwhile, at home, Australia’s leading cartoonists were having a great time supporting Burchett and his lawyer Frank Galbally. Galbally had requested Prime Minister Gorton allow his client at least a short visit to attend the memorial service. Gorton again refused to budge. Public support swelled and the government was forced to retreat to a ‘neither help nor hinder’ stance. A supporter had even come up with a scheme to smuggle Burchett to Newcastle on a coal ship.

To Gordon Barton it was unacceptable for a third-generation Australian to have to present a passport for return to his own country— let alone for the government to refuse to replace a lost one. So when Frank Galbally asked for Barton’s assistance, he had a willing supporter.

He would offer far more than the editorial Galbally was after. The Sunday Observer offered to cover Burchett’s hotel expenses in return for an exclusive story. Barton would also spend some $10,000 chartering a light plane to bring Burchett home. This was easier said than done, however. Noumea was beyond the range of most light aircraft. Ultimately extra fuel tanks were fixed to a twin-engine Piper Navajo. The plane waited in northern Queensland all Saturday 21 February for permission to depart. By the time permission came, it was en route back to Melbourne. Days would pass before another permit was issued. Barton suspected the government knew Burchett’s New Caledonian entry documents were about to expire and were delaying until the French had no option but to deport him.

It suited Barton to have Burchett arrive on a Saturday so the Observer could break the news story the next day. This meant the chartered aircraft sat on the tarmac in Noumea a few days so the spectacle could be coordinated. On 28 February, Burchett and an Observer journalist finally landed at Brisbane airport. Some 150 demonstrators waved angry placards: ‘Burchett Traitor’, ‘Burchett Back To Hanoi’. However, there were at least as many supporters from trade unions, and student and peace groups. It was a costly exercise, but this was the kind of theatre Barton loved. It also made great copy for the struggling paper.

Wilfred Burchett’s cause was one of many Barton supported financially. In 1972 he would pledge $5000 to support the parachuting of six anti-nuclear protesters, rafts and a month’s rations onto the French-owned Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific. Barton also led rallies in support of free speech and human rights. When libertarians Wendy Bacon and John Cox, editors of the University of New South Wales’ Tharunka student newspaper, were before the courts on an obscenity charge, Barton was at the end of a loud-hailer in Sydney’s Martin Place drumming up support, shaming the state’s archaic pornography and obscenity laws.

In June 1970, and later on 1 November, the Observer’s editor David Robie (Michael Cannon had stayed only four months) wrote an editorial effectively urging twenty-year-olds to reject the draft. The Victorian government decided to play hardball, charging publisher John Crew with seditious libel. At first Crew and his staff decided the charge was laughable. The law had not been used for decades. Nonetheless if found guilty the penalty could be harsh. Barton did not hesitate to employ an eminent QC to defend his publisher. In December 1970 Crew was found guilty. An appeal was lodged and the case descended into farce. Crew would escape with a minor fine and a bollocking from the judge.

Solicitor Peter Redlich acted for the Observer at around this time. There were a lot of stop writs coming in—mainly from politicians. These were legal posturings brought on by parties who had no intention of proceeding to court. Still, they tended to discourage further public jibes at their expense. At one stage the Observer took out an insurance policy against defamation, but there were so many writs that it was only a few weeks before the insurer cancelled the policy.

Consistently losing IPEC $25,000 a week, the new paper was also losing the distribution battle. Circulation had not yet reached 100,000— insufficient to attract good advertisers. With milk bars proving problematic, the Observer’s mainstay—paper-boys—could only sell so many copies. Advertising income was not helped by the anti-war line of the Observer’s editorial, which was unpopular with the Melbourne establishment. John Konstas wrote to Barton begging him to close the paper. ‘It was a crying shame to see the IPEC money pissed against the wall’, Konstas recalls.

Barton always saw the positive—the Observer’s losses reduced IPEC group profits, and so slashed the amount of tax IPEC had to pay. Moreover, he remarked, ‘The Observer is a contribution to the Vietnam cause’.

Among IPEC staff, the Observer was poison. It was not just the drain on company profits, its articles and editorial often lambasted the business tycoons whose companies were IPEC’s key customers. Some took their business elsewhere without an argument. Others would make angry calls, telling their IPEC sales manager what they thought of the maverick Observer and its proprietors.

The Observer’s politics were foreign to Greg Farrell and he would sometimes be furious at the fallout. However, given that Barton was dealing with the recent death of his wife, Farrell was prepared to be patient and sympathetic. Nonetheless, John Konstas believes that Farrell pleaded with Barton a number of times to close the paper. ‘Gordon of course would tell you that the Sunday Observer was one of the most successful undertakings he ever did’, says Konstas. ‘He enjoyed the power it gave him. He could ring up Jim Cairns and get straight through. It opened a lot of doors to people who he had not been able to access previously.’

Despite distribution problems, Barton refused to give in, reasoning that IPEC’s core business was distribution of small parcels on a national scale. Crew recalls IPEC trucks being rounded up to distribute the newspaper around Melbourne for a period. The situation was so frustrating that in 1970 IPEC attempted to obtain Supreme Court injunctions ordering VANA to desist from persuading newsagents not to stock the Sunday Observer and to inform newsagents of their legal right to freely handle and sell the paper. In response, VANA submitted that IPEC’s intention to set up a home delivery service amounted to a repudiation of the arrangements it had made with the association.

The Observer had hit a brick wall. Its injunction failed. The VANA policy was applied with increasing enthusiasm. So frustrated were the Observer’s circulation staff that they considered giving loss-of-profit payments to rebel milk bars and arranging alternative supplies of daily newspapers.

Barton came up with another distribution solution—milk. At the time milkmen provided the best organised daily home delivery system in Victoria—including on Sundays. The Sunday Observer had already advertised that subscribing could be cheaper than milk, so why not deliver it with the milk? Barton’s concept was to pay milkmen an attractive supplement to add the paper to their delivery rounds.

The dairy companies were enthusiastic, but the milkmen needed to be convinced. When John Konstas went to see the Transport Workers’ Union, it wouldn’t have a bar of the concept. It hated IPEC because of the company’s overwhelming use of non-unionised contractors. Konstas admits now that he was a little naïve.

In an attempt to get around the embargo on Sunday distribution while making better use of their impressive publishing resources, John Crew pointed out to Barton that at little additional cost, IPEC could produce a second weekly paper. It could be a paper distributed not just in Melbourne but to the three east coast capitals and Canberra using IPEC trucks. Planned as a more upmarket newspaper, it would be called Sunday Review. Costs could be minimised by relying on more freelance rather than salaried contributors.

By pitching the paper at the ‘movers and shakers’ (it branded itself as ‘the Independent Quality National Weekly’), Barton was able to entice the scholarly Michael Cannon to return to the role of editor.

The first issue of Sunday Review appeared on 11 October 1970. The contributors Cannon had corralled into writing for the first issue were an impressive line-up. The arts pages included a Bruce Dawe poem and record reviews by Pick-a-Box TV quiz king Barry Jones. A syndication agreement had been reached with the London Spectator and the New Statesman. From day one the Sunday Review proved more profitable than the Observer. It was hardly surprising given it only employed around five full-time staff. It ultimately marketed itself as ‘lean and nosey, like a ferret’. A few years later, a photo would be taken of Barton communing with a ferret. For many years, family and close friends would affectionately refer to him as The Ferret, a nickname he thoroughly enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in a final attempt to solve the Observer’s distribution problems, Barton and Crew decided to approach Bob Hawke, then the ambitious secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and put to him what should have been an irresistible proposal. Barton would sell the ACTU a half interest in the Observer for a nominal sum, in exchange for Hawke convincing the Transport Workers’ Union to come onside. While explaining that the paper would continue to have editorial and journalistic independence, Barton made sure to remind Hawke that the ACTU would receive politically favourable press and that the Observer had the facilities to become daily and go national.

Hawke could see the opportunities and was interested. Barton had something else of interest, however, having just acquired the Buckinghams retail chain. Hawke was interested in setting up a chain of retail outlets for union members—a sort of cooperative. A deal might have come to fruition but for a major fire which destroyed the chain’s Oxford Street flagship store in Sydney. Crew recalls, ‘It was an ironic situation where the capitalist was trying to give the unions access to newspapers . . . and the union was saying, give us some shops so we can become capitalists’.

Hawke and Crew were to get to know each other well over these months, although Hawke failed to sway union opposition to the distribution plan. To Barton it was a good example of the narrow thinking of the unions. He lost confidence in Hawke as a strong leader and strategist, and the failed deal sealed the fate of the Observer. Its low circulation figures and anti-conservative politics had continued to dissuade big advertisers. While its losses had halved from the early days, they still amounted to a massive $13,000 per week.

On the first Wednesday of March 1971 it was announced in the Observer’s Melbourne office that Mr Barton was flying in from Adelaide to address staff at eleven. Rumours began to circulate. Eleven am came and went with no sign of Barton. By 11.50 more rumours had circulated that there were behind-the-scenes moves to save the paper. Staff stood idly waiting as a television crew filmed.

Close to 12.30 pm there was a curt announcement over the public address system. Mr Barton had arrived. He soon appeared in front of staff in a dark suit wearing a small tight smile, not looking like a man about to sack half of the 80 staff. ‘I suppose most of you know who I am by now. It’s rather a momentous sort of day for me. Maybe it’ll be a day you’ll remember. It’s not an entirely happy day.’ He paused. ‘We’ve been losing money on the Observer at a rate that would make you believe money was going out of fashion.’

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian had begun publishing a Sunday edition, making it even tougher for the Observer. Barton admitted to feeling the Observer’s role had been supplanted. ‘The purposes the Observer served are now being served partly by these other newspapers.’

Kevin Childs, the paper’s editor, was angry. He led an outstanding stable of journalists dedicated to writing stories other papers would not allow. In front of the TV cameras Childs vented: ‘We exposed so many wrongs in Victoria . . . We’ve got stuff there that could have brought down the Bolte government . . . Mr Barton is very wrong when he says he thinks any other newspaper could take over this role.’

On Sunday 7 March 1971 the Observer ran its last issue. Total losses amounted to more than $2 million. The pain was at least somewhat dulled by the survival of its younger sibling, the Sunday Review.

Initially it was IPEC that funded the Sunday Review. Although its losses were far less than the Observer’s, after seven months Greg Farrell could live with the losses no longer. From mid-July 1971, Gordon Barton underwrote the paper himself. He dropped Sunday from the masthead and it became simply The Review. Barton had learnt from past mistakes. The paper would continue to operate on a shoestring budget with just a few permanent staff, each of whom regularly worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days.

Rather than shrinking, Barton ensured that distribution expanded to Adelaide, across the Bass Strait to Tasmania, and to New Zealand. Two months later a distributor was found for Perth, making it truly national.

Michael Cannon was not prepared to go on the journey Barton could see ahead for Review. He resigned but already Barton had his eye on a successor, Richard Walsh, with whom he had argued some years earlier that it was newspapers rather than political parties that could feed and influence public opinion. Walsh had advised Barton to start not a political group but a newspaper.

Geoffrey Robertson remembers at some stage recommending Richard Walsh to Barton as an editor for his papers. Walsh had been one of Robertson’s mentors at university and each had been president of the university’s Student Representative Council. In 1963 Richard Walsh and Richard Neville had launched a satirical weekly magazine in Sydney called Oz. Then, in 1964, the pair had received prison sentences, quashed on appeal in the District Court, for the magazine’s alleged obscenity. Oz ceased publication in October 1967.

Barton saw Walsh as bright, original, enterprising and not easily frightened. He phoned Walsh out of the blue. ‘About what you were saying that I should start a paper’, Barton began, as though the pair were resuming a conversation only broken off the night before. He reminded Walsh he had listened to his advice and had started a newspaper. Walsh recalls: ‘I was at this time a highly-paid advertising copywriter with a young family, but he did not attempt to match my salary—he actually offered me one-third of what I was then being paid for the dubious honour of going to Melbourne, where my family did not want to live, and attempting to resuscitate a newspaper that was in dire danger of suffering cot death. Gordon Barton could be very, very persuasive when his enthusiasm was on full throttle. Somehow he managed to persuade me he was saving me from myself and that advertising would ultimately corrupt me.’

Like John Crew, Richard Walsh refused to move to Melbourne so instead he would fly down every Monday morning, returning home each Friday night, staying mid-week in one of Federal’s Melbourne hotels.

Columnist, writer and occasional editor John Hepworth would later recall that Walsh ‘brought a great, restless, Sydney undergraduate, larrikin tradition to the paper which blended in well with the more serious intellectualism of Melbourne . . . He was bursting with ideas, and always encouraging writers.’

Journalist Tom Fitzgerald was like an Irish leprechaun—very welcoming, very inclusive, always on the lookout for interesting ideas. He and George Munster had launched the highly regarded national fortnightly Nation in Sydney in 1958. By mid-1971, however, they were in desperate straits financially. The arrival of The Australian newspaper and the recent launch of the Review were stealing the thunder from their slightly old-fashioned brand of intellectual journalism. When Barton approached the pair regarding a merger with his Review, Fitzgerald was only too happy to do so rather than see his baby die. The deal was done and Nation Review took its first steps out under the harsh Australian sun.

Many journalists of the time had sharp observations to make on Australian business, social and political issues. The problem was their mainstream employers were too concerned about maintaining their corporate advertisers to run such material. With Barton’s financial backing this was not a consideration that had to be taken by the Review. It soon became an outlet for some of the finest and most innovative journalism Australia had seen, its content equally divided between political comment and reviews of film, television, books and other cultural pursuits.

Regular contributors came to include Mungo MacCallum, Barry Oakley, Morris Lurie, Francis James, George Munster, John Hindle, Max Teichmann and Anders Ousback. Others wrote using pseudonyms. Later media historians would give the journal almost legendary status. ‘It was irreverent, lewd, scurrilous and if it were a fish, it would have been a bottom feeder’, said Peter Manning in an address to the National Archives in 2007.

Food critic Richard Beckett and The Age had earlier parted company after a row about his moonlighting at the Sunday Observer. A consummate cook, Beckett wrote Chinese cookbooks under the name Bruce Chan, was a gifted gardener and expert on subjects ranging from fox terriers to Australian axemen. At Nation Review, where he was twice editor, he developed the pen name of Sam Orr, a character who became synonymous with irreverent, often wildly funny encounters with restaurants and chefs, and classic accounts of places that would kill a brown dog. Until then, much of Australia’s restaurant reviews were ill informed and adoring.

Bob Ellis did a stint for Nation Review, submitting articles on Vietnam, the most memorable of which concerned a notorious wrangle between him and journalist John Pilger over who contributed the best coverage of the Bangladeshi War.

John Hepworth believed Nation Review ‘helped liberate Australian journalism from the straitjacket of conformity and conservatism’. Its significance was the way it took the lead in a reform of Australian print media, by introducing bad language, larrikinism and satire. Many argue that its relentless lampooning of Billy McMahon was invaluable to Whitlam’s successful 1972 election campaign. Nation Review also helped vent the public rage just three years later at the sacking of the Whitlam government by Governor-General Sir John Kerr.

Barton was indeed an unconventional media proprietor. He never attempted to impose his ideas on editorial policy, telling a reporter: ‘I never interfere with their opinions, which sometimes irritate me very much . . . Whether I agree with what is written or not, I do know that the conflict of opinion, the opposition of ideas, the stimulation, the irreverence of these things is something which stirs people into thinking.’

Although he was in Melbourne regularly, Barton was only once recorded as visiting his Nation Review premises. Instead, he would take lunch at Sydney’s Johnny Walker steakhouse in Bligh Street every eight weeks or so with his publisher. Says Walsh, ‘Very occasionally we would discuss business . . . mainly there was lots of joshing’.

Nation Review journalists were encouraged to poke fun at the establishment, regardless of the political fallout. As a result, like the Observer before it, the paper was used to getting libel writs on a regular basis. Most potential litigants had no intention of suing, aiming more to scare the Review into silence. Some, however, insisted on going to court.

Barton was disinclined for the Review to gain a reputation as a pushover, so when a libel claim was unfounded, he was happy to go to court. Following a story in April 1971, the awkward, old-fashioned federal Labor parliamentarian Arthur Calwell complained the article represented him as lacking loyalty to his leader and his party. He sued IPEC for defamation. This time IPEC was represented by Gordon Samuels QC (later Governor of New South Wales). A Supreme Court jury found IPEC guilty and Calwell was awarded $18,000 in damages. Typically, Barton insisted on appealing. However, before a judgment could be given, Calwell died in 1973. The case dragged on, until in 1975 it reached the High Court. While Barton eventually won the appeal, he had racked up huge legal bills and it proved difficult and politically unwise to pursue the one-time Labor leader’s widow or estate for expenses.

Where the litigant was not in Sydney or Melbourne but a regionally based politician with local support, it was difficult to mount a successful case against hostile local juries. Instead the paper would settle out of court.

The mainstream Australian press of the late 1960s had been thrown off-kilter, as journalist Derek Barry points out, by ‘political and social changes revolving around the Vietnam War, women’s revolt and the siege of authority’. The new ideas and excitement of the Whitlam era had called for a new form of journalism. It was Gordon Barton who had sensed this mood for change. Nation Review’s brief, as Richard Walsh put it, had been to take part in the creation of a ‘more stimulating, more sophisticated and more passionate Australia’.

A core readership of some 150,000 educated Australians would enjoy Nation Review’s sharp wit, erudition and style for close to ten years until by the end of 1970s when memories of Vietnam and the Whitlam era faded, readers tastes changed and their political ideals softened.