CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RESTRAINED LUXURY

I’m an introverted person and I like to be enclosed wherever I am.

Gordon Barton, c. 1970

Around the middle of 1972, Barton, his two children, Pipsqueak the dog and their housekeeper moved from middle-class Castle Cove to the heartland of wealthy Sydney into a harbour-front home in Vaucluse. This was where the powerbrokers and the old moneyed families lived—behind discreet hedges and down long meandering battleaxe drives.

As a nineteen-year-old Barton had written to his father: ‘It has always been my ambition to be able to live by the dictates of my imagination, for instance in a medieval-castle-in-the-black-forest-like retreat in the fastnesses of the mountain ranges . . . where I could create a fantastic garden, and live in a continuous orgy of aesthetic gratification.’ Over the previous five years, while juggling Tjuringa deals, political responsibilities, regular travel and his IPEC chairmanship, Barton had been working with architect Michael Dysart and two firms of builders (one went broke mid-construction) on the design and construction of a home that was a reflection of that ambition.

When he met Dysart in 1967, Barton had already bought the ideal block of harbour-front land—1a Coolong Road, on the corner of Loch Maree Place, overlooking Vaucluse Bay. A 200-year-old fig tree spread untidily across both the garden and the beach below.

Working with a firm called Habitat, Michael Dysart was young and starting to gain a name for himself designing two-level project homes. Barton wanted one, but as soon as Dysart saw the beauty of the block he discouraged the idea. The site deserved something great.

‘If he’d said to us, “My wife is dying, I’d like you to design a house very quickly so we can live in it”, then we would have done it differently’, admits Dysart. ‘We probably would have gone with the project house, because the house wasn’t yet finished when she died.’ Essentially a private man, Barton never admitted to his architect that he had a terminally ill wife.

Good architects should completely understand the different facets of their clients life, particularly their personalities. Dysart admits that in Barton’s case, ‘I don’t think I ever did’. It was very difficult to extract a brief from his client and to some extent it was like being Barton’s psychiatrist ‘because you had to drag out of him things that he really wanted’. At one stage Barton confessed to his architect, ‘Michael, I’m not who you think I am’. He did not want to be pigeonholed.

‘He never liked to commit himself fully because he liked to leave options open and think around the problem and talk about the issues’, recalls Dysart. He was ‘often quite indecisive about things relating to himself. He would agonise and deliberate, wouldn’t make his mind up . . . It would be quite frustrating because you wouldn’t get a straight answer.

‘He kept saying to me, “I don’t want a big palatial extravaganza because I’m not an extroverted sort of person. I don’t want big spaces and I don’t want dramatic . . .”.’

‘Try and describe what you feel you want,’ Dysart asked him.

‘I’m an introverted person and I like to be enclosed wherever I am’, Barton had admitted. ‘I don’t like to be in loose undefined spaces . . .’

It became clear to Dysart that the rooms he designed had to provide a sense of enclosure. The only thing his client particularly specified was a rack on the wall above the kitchen sink so when the dishes were washed or the dishwasher emptied the washing up could be conveniently stacked there. His housekeeper Frances Knight recalls he liked to do the dishes after dinner. Dysart suspects it grounded the man.

Dysart also recalls that at one stage he and Barton were talking about childhood, secrets, secret panels and passages: ‘He still had that enquiring, childlike mind’. Barton queried, ‘You haven’t given me any secrets in this house, have you, Michael?’

‘No, but it’s not too late’, Dysart smiled. Using ladders and stairs inside the wall cavities, the architect created a hidden passage from the laundry up to the children’s bedrooms giving them their own secret entry and exit. ‘I hope they found it’, he laughs over four decades later. (The children used it as a laundry chute.)

While Barton placed a high degree of trust in Dysart, he was a fussy client, exact about measurements. Given his feet were exactly one foot long, Barton would pace out a room. He had an amazing capacity for remembering detail. ‘If you said something he could quote it back to you six months later verbatim.’ If Dysart deviated from what they had previously discussed, Barton might remind him of a decision made months earlier.

The Vaucluse block dropped away somewhat, providing a generous space under the house. So a huge cellar was incorporated, large enough to stand up in. Initially Barton used it as a wine store, though it was not long before far more creative uses were found for the space.

Artist Laurence Beck provided a series of paintings for the house. Barton also admired the work of Leonard French, a Melbourne artist best known for his murals, tapestries and glass mosaic windows. French had created a dramatic stained-glass ceiling for the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne in 1968. Two years later the Art Gallery of South Australia had shown a retrospective of his work which Barton no doubt visited.

Barton identified strongly with the artist’s bold subject matter and themes—the human condition, mythology, darkness and light, violence and compassion. He commissioned French to design huge stained-glass windows to sit high above his new home’s grand staircase. So large it was almost a wall, and with its primary reds and blues it gave the foyer and stairs the look of a cathedral. A friend recalls the windows alone cost $100,000 to have built and installed.

Barton liked the notion of terracotta tiles throughout the house, but his slate-floored Castle Cove home had been uncomfortably cold. So instead he chose a very expensive, thick-looped flokati-style carpet of New Zealand wool—in rusty orange, to Dysart’s horror, though perhaps it was supposed to pair with the flecked orange in the stained-glass windows.

Planning and construction of Barton’s new home continued over many years. Dysart admitted ‘the house took a lot longer than it should have’, due partly to the change of builders midstream. In May of 1972, with some $280,000 spent, it was finally complete. Set back from the harbour, the property had an air of restrained luxury. Out on the street stood a large gum tree on which the house number was painted. The entrance was a narrow battleaxe drive. In the large carport sat two Mercedes saloons and, perhaps in her memory, Vonnie’s old Triumph sports car.

The house had no front door—instead one entered through the garage. A journalist at the time remarked that this ‘perfectly expresses’ Barton. Once inside, the house seemed to repeatedly turn in on itself like a Moorish home, weaving around a formal courtyard lined by a soft chaotic canopy of old, well-established camphor laurel trees seguing into the adjacent park. In the other direction lay a view of Sydney Harbour.

When reporters came to do stories, they would be struck by the quiet. There was no radio, no record player, just the throbbing rise and fall of cicadas and the rattle of yacht rigging when the wind blew into the adjoining bay. ‘Barton’s voice is low, and everyone else seems to drop theirs to match. Even visitors do it. You feel noise would distress him’, reporter Pat Miller wrote.

A gallery around the second storey hung over a heavily shaded courtyard below. Barton wanted a Mediterranean feel to this outdoor space. Family and guests dined along its long refectory table in the summer.

In the strangely monastic living room, naked gas flames against the wall gave off a medieval light. A Toledo sword hung on the wall above the mantelpiece. Wrought-iron lamps and candelabra added a touch of Spain. A possumgrey stingray, two feet wide, crafted from wool, swam up a white wall toward the cold light of another Leonard French window. A grey television casket sat in a niche in an opposite wall. Barton’s neat study occupied part of the living room, giving onto a patio with a clear view of the harbour.

Barton’s bachelor friend Shann Turnbull had installed a waterbed in his bedroom, a feature just then coming into vogue. Barton had often eyed it longingly. Not to be outdone, for his new master bedroom he ordered a four-poster king-size waterbed. With its dark wooden canopy it resembled something between a Hugh Hefner playboy pad and a fortress. Beneath the chocolate bedspread, the temperature was set permanently to 87 degrees. Problems with his sense of balance during his first year in the house meant there were times Barton could not sleep on the bed, and would settle down on the floor instead.

A vaulted white ceiling floated above the bed, while a spacious walk-in dressing room flowed into a private bathroom. Floor-to-ceiling slit-windows looked onto the harbour foreshore on one side and the courtyard on the other. Elegant brown, hand-woven woollen curtains could be drawn to give the bedroom the feel of a cocoon.

In the ensuite bathroom, the huge Roman-style bath was inlaid with a mosaic of ceramic tiles that created the illusion of sharp unevenness and looked as though they’d hurt to lie against. On a bathroom shelf were a metre-long model yacht and a volume of Pogo comics. Here Barton would habitually linger long under the shower, enjoying the vista of trees in the neighbouring park as he mulled over that day’s problems.

It was a beautiful house, but not cosy. Comfort was not Barton’s style.

Early in November 1972, Barton and his friend, business competitor Ken Thomas, were interviewed by the ABC’s Four Corners on the choices people make to participate or drop out of society. In particular, the interviewer wanted to explore the idea of whether busy businessmen were really happy.

Thomas had recently been forced out of his role as chairman of TNT because of his outspoken views and questioning of religious beliefs. For him it was the regimentation and anonymity of the enormous TNT structure that was an anathema. He was in a way glad for the release. Asked whether he considered most big businessmen he knew to be really happy, Thomas slammed the structures of such a life: ‘There’s pressure, there’s appointments, there’s luncheons, there’s saying the right thing . . . they have to think twice before they make any statement, especially a public statement. They can’t say what they think about government because they’ve got to be on-side with the government . . . about the Vietnam War, all sorts of important things, philosophical things, aetheism and so on.

‘They daren’t come out and say what they think because they’ve got so many obligations and so many complications. I couldn’t see how they could be happy when they’re not free.’

For Barton, happiness came from the sense of ‘doing something which is reasonably worthwhile and which is taxing your abilities. If a person who has been very active stops being very active, very frequently it destroys him,’ he said. ‘You can see the deterioration taking place . . . I think it’s a very sad thing . . . I don’t think people should be willing to be defeated by life . . .

‘Worst of all of course is people who turn their back on the whole spectacle . . . [it’s] a form of death . . . These people who go off and go fishing, I believe that’s a waste.’

Barton was clearly not going to be an early retiree and neither did he give his friend Ken Thomas any licence to throw in the towel. Two years after the interview, he would demonstrate the level of regard he held for Thomas.

Ken Thomas had set up one of his sons in a trucking firm called Tenex with depots up the north Queensland coast from Townsville to Cairns. A contraction of Ten o’clock Express, the Tenex claim was to deliver express freight by 10 am the day after despatch. The young Thomas was no natural businessman—he soon had Tenex heavily in debt. Ken stepped in early in 1974, but the debts looked insurmountable. A host of local suppliers had not been paid in two years.

Ken Thomas was distraught. A proud man, he could not bear the thought of bankruptcy. Freddie Gardiner recalls that when Barton heard of his old friend’s problem, he issued instructions. ‘What I want you to do is take it over, pay all the bills, and let us know . . . what the wash up is.’

Tenex’s total debts were some $300,000. Barton instructed Gardiner to, ‘Just write it off, and give Ken a job at $500 a week at IPEC as a non-executive director’. IPEC suddenly had more than 2000 extra kilometres of Queensland routes to manage. Within a year IPEC had turned the operation into a profitable concern, reorganising routes to mining centres west of Rockhampton.

Barton’s neighbour was the widow of society photographer Joe Fallon. Her home, Loch Maree, almost abutted Barton’s new house. A wonderful old stone mansion, it had cedar staircases, ancient Italian fountains in the garden and a beautiful redwood boatshed down on the water. Fallon had been friendly with both Sir Frank Packer and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. Legend had it that in the late 1940s, while in the Royal Navy, the Prince had bunked down in the boathouse with the odd girlfriend before his marriage to Elizabeth. It was the kind of cachet which Barton loved.

So when Loch Maree came up for sale, a little over a year after the family moved in next door, Barton bought it for $306,000 and adapted the house for his enclosed estate. To the horror of some friends, Barton eventually had the old mansion torn down. He saved the cedar stairs, installing them in Tjuringa’s city headquarters and kept the sandstone foundations and the ancient Italian fountains. In the Loch Maree garden, the Barton children discovered a tree-house, complete with a rope ladder entrance and catwalk exit. On the vacant block Barton had a stand of casuarinas planted years later. The man liked his privacy.

Many friends, including Marion Manton, considered another positive outcome of the acquisition to be the later renovation of Loch Maree’s redwood boatshed. Barton’s old sailing partner Kevin Dash was asked to convert it into a self-contained cottage with an attic guest bedroom. Barton also demanded a bathroom and kitchenette in the small space. Dash was dubious whether it could be done. His friend, however, was determined. It drew on all Dash’s creative skills to make the tiny space work. In the end he did create a gorgeous hideaway that would be enjoyed by an assortment of Barton’s friends over the following years. Recalls Marion Manton, ‘Where the main house was all granite and hard surfaces, the boathouse was more warm and more human’.

In years to come Margaret Thatcher’s daughter would stay there. Human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson and his new lover Kathy Lette were to secrete themselves there to escape the media furore that erupted when she quit her marriage to Kim Williams and he broke with Nigella Lawson, daughter of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson.

The unnoticed puppet-masters behind the introduction of legal gambling to Australia were Barton’s three close friends and colleagues Greg Farrell, Neil Ohlsson and Peter Wolfe, who spearheaded the introduction of roulette, blackjack, punto banco, craps and the more refined baccarat. For Barton, the challenge had been less about gambling but more about finding the money to build the seventeen-storey Wrest Point Hotel casino—the flagship property in the publicly listed Federal Hotels portfolio and Australia’s first legal casino. Shann Turnbull had been given the job of writing the prospectus for casino investors. It meant spending nights in Sydney’s illegal gambling dens in Kellett Street, Kings Cross, armed with a stopwatch and a notebook, recording average bet sizes, the number of players at each table and how many games were played in an hour. For each game, Turnbull would use the data to calculate likely annual turnover and profit margins.

A blowout in construction costs had put the Wrest Point development $6 million into debt. It was not something Barton and Farrell wanted IPEC to bear alone. Unable to obtain a loan on the casino from an Australian lender, Barton and his team devised a plan to issue new shares to raise the required capital. An extraordinary Federal Hotels shareholders’ meeting was called, three days prior to the casino’s grand opening in February 1973. The meeting would approve a doubling of capital to $10 million through the issue of 25 million additional shares. Three million of these would be reserved for Macao-based casino entrepreneur Stanley Ho. Up to a third of the shares looked like being taken up offshore. Barton talked this up as a first step towards creating an Asia-Pacific casino investment company, although it was an ill fit with Australia Party policies of maintaining Australian ownership.

Wrest Point Casino was one of Hobart’s first high-rise buildings. In the days prior to the grand opening on 10 February 1973, a hundred cases of French champagne and $20,000 worth of top quality silverware had been shipped in to cater for the hundreds of interstate and overseas guests, such as Alan Bond and Stanley Ho. Against the imposing backdrop of the 1270-metre Mount Wellington, a huge air balloon was launched over the Derwent River while clouds of balloons were released from the hotel tower to float down over the gathering crowd.

A welcome committee lined up in the chrome-and-glass foyer to greet the excited guests. Above them hung umbrella- and stalactite-shaped chandeliers. A 2.5-ton crystal chandelier had been salvaged from the Menzies, and was now the centrepiece of the sunken main gaming room. Woman’s Day assured its readers that there was ‘enough gold leaf, marble flooring and red and purple velvets . . . to make any Nevada man feel he’s right back home’. For the first time in Australia, hotel patrons would be offered a round-the-clock food service to keep them going through a night of gaming. A grand dinner was followed by a floor show starring American comedian Jerry Lewis. The star-spangled opening was beamed by direct telecast into Australia’s homes.

Casino culture was certainly not to Barton’s taste. It was its addictive nature that worried him, but given his belief in letting people make their own choices, he was against restricting it. On the opening night he went to pains to declare how magnificently the new casino shone.

Over the coming decade the casino’s cabaret room would feature the best of international showbiz—Max Bygraves, Cilla Black, The Seekers, Barry Crocker, Charles Aznavour—even Eartha Kitt. To Barton, Australia’s first legal casino at least made Hobart a more interesting place to visit.

By September 1973, Nation Review had become the journal of choice amongst professionals, academics and young people. It represented all that was progressive and open about Australia under Whitlam’s Labor govern ment. But as the Whitlam government began to lose popularity, its readership started to falter. This, combined with a lack of large advertisers, meant it began to trade at a loss. In an effort to increase revenue, a risqué personals section—the first of its kind in an Australian mainstream publication—called D-Notices was introduced for lovelorn homosexuals, heterosexuals and bisexuals.

Melb: Happily married couple, 33–36 yrs, desires to meet experienced swingers. Husband had vasectomy, will swing if compatible. No roughies please. First time for us. Discretion asked for and given.

Walsh’s old Oz co-editor, the long-haired rebel Richard Neville, was back in Sydney keen to set up a new paper. Richard Walsh had an idea. He suggested to Barton that by sharing production facilities, there might be a role for a publication for the 14–24 age group, although Barton was the first to admit he was out of touch with this market: ‘I don’t really understand that area of society.’ The personals section would shift to this new paper.

With a full-time staff of three, the 28-page Living Daylights was born. It boasted a colour front, middle and back page and sold at newsagents for 30¢. In a radio interview with Ellis Blain the same year, Barton would defend the experiment: ‘To me it’s important that a sophisticated country should have organs of opinion—irreverent ones, stimulating ones. I’d like to see more of them, started by people other than me. This country needs a greater depth of topsoil on the cultural scene.’

Again Barton exerted no editorial influence. The paper’s ‘bargain book basement’ section advertised books on subjects such as Indian hemp, sex, getting busted and Mother Earth news. There were ads for ‘decorator graffiti’ to wallpaper your bathroom and articles on gay liberation. In a television profile of the new magazine and its editor, a reporter claimed, ‘Publicity has promised that the new paper will be full of articles on drugs, sex, anti-science, anti-education and even anti-work’.

Interviewed to camera at his desk, Neville explained: ‘The level of sexuality in the Living Daylights will not be exciting to the wankers . . . We’re not interested in how you manacle a woman to the bed . . . and how a sadist should handle a whip . . . The paper will be concerned with some of the more fundamental and deeper issues confronting us as individuals.’ Neville went further. Its aim would be ‘to evolve a vision of Australia which is different, taking into account lots of different kinds of radicalism—the instinct to create a different sort of life and future possibilities for all of us’.

On the question of the inspiration for the name, Neville’s hands came together to indicate a globe. ‘The Living Daylights is our life force . . . individuality with a touch of libido and a touch of humanity.’

Unfortunately the financial fortunes of Nation Review only worsened. Living Daylights would survive just six months, its last issue appearing in April 1974. In a Woman’s Day interview that month Barton admitted:

When I was young I thought I could change the world. Then I thought that if I could make the world leave me alone, that was my ambition. Like building a fire and keeping the wild animals away. Now I think that . . . even though it only appears to be slowing things that are inevitable . . . one should scream as one goes under, rather than go silently.

Despite the distractions of his publishing and business empire, Barton continued his promotion of the Australia Party. At the New South Wales state election in November 1973, the Australia Party contested 34 seats. Fergus McPherson mapped out a 45-town tour for Barton— any place with a population over 5000. He would push abortion rights, sex education and environmental protection. Again the party failed to win a seat.

By February 1974 Don Aitken, professor of politics and an adviser to the party, recommended that concentrating solely on thinking people and professionals was unwinnable. They were not an easily identified group and in Aitken’s words the party’s desired target constituency— ‘workers, farmers, businessmen and Catholics are caught in a web of existing loyalties’. Instead Aitken recommended targeting women and young Australians—women because their growing political awareness was at odds with the male dominance of Liberal and Labor; young people because they were more pragmatic and more influenced by their immediate situation.

After eight years, Gordon Barton was flagging. He had meant to give up the national convenor role months before, but Fergus had put him forward before he could protest. At the New South Wales party convention on 17 February he announced he would not be heading the party’s 1974 Senate ticket.

His children were still young—Geoffrey was now six, his daughter Cindie ten. He had to ask, ‘How I could bring up two young children while spending up to six months of each year in Canberra? My business and political interests already keep me away from home too much.’

Nonetheless, Barton made sure that he and the then leader of the Opposition, Billy Snedden, were seen lunching together just a few days later at Primo’s in Elizabeth Bay. It was not the first lunch the pair had arranged. Barton’s stated reason for the meeting was to convince Snedden to give the Australia Party its second preferences in the upcoming Senate election. It seems likely Snedden was out to woo the Australia Party back into the Liberal fold.

When word got out of the lunch meeting, a media controversy was ignited. It was just what the cunning Barton would have wanted. Snedden came away with egg on his face—for him it was politically costly, requiring much back-pedalling to distance himself from any liaison with the young party.

Soon after, The Australian devoted a full editorial to ‘The increasing importance of the AP voter’. It argued that the two major parties were now so close in the polls that with its preferences, the Australia Party held the balance of power.

The media continued to solicit Barton’s opinion, who described Australia’s economy as being ‘like an idiot who keeps winning the lottery’. ABC-TV decided to film a day in the life of ‘the Don Quixote of Australian politics’ as part of its 1974 election coverage. The producers suggested it might be clever to film Barton dropping in on the Nation Review office. Barton phoned Richard Walsh, and with customary diffidence asked whether Walsh thought a visit would be okay.

While the ABC had assumed Barton regularly visited Nation Review to discuss his latest passions, in fact Barton had never done so. Walsh welcomed the idea. His staff maintained a great affection for the man whose money made the paper’s independence possible. Walsh and Barton agreed he would come by at the end of the day—5.30 pm. ‘Hooroo,’ Barton said cheerily as he hung up.

At the Nation Review offices a few days later, 5.30 had come and gone and there was no sign of Barton or the TV crew. Walsh assumed something had gone wrong—until he received a phone call. He could hear the clunk of money dropping—it was obviously a public payphone—and then Barton’s voice. He had lost the address, which he’d been carrying around on a piece of paper, and he didn’t know where the offices were.

The Catholic-dominated Democratic Labor Party was becoming bitter at the airtime given to Barton. Despite having five senators, DLP parliamentary leader Senator Francis McManus received about a quarter of Barton’s press and media coverage. Frustrated, McManus declared the Australia Party ‘a millionaire’s hobby’.

In the lead-up to the 1974 elections, for the first time the Australia Party ran a national television campaign with its slogan, ‘Put Australia before Party’. Despite his request for a backroom role, it was Barton who again delivered the party’s election policy speech on 28 April at his alma mater, the University of Sydney. Balloons in the party colours—green and yellow—floated outside the hall, while inside the ushers’ clothes and the flowers on the lecture theatre stage were also in green and yellow.

Determined to make their launch stand out and to highlight the party’s emphasis on closer relations with Asia, the organisers asked the Chinese government to send by satellite a Chinese recording of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It arrived together with a Chinese version of ‘Road to Gundagai’. Barton’s speech concentrated on Australia as a financial and trading centre, offering friendship to all countries and interference with none. Never one to shy away from radical concepts, the party also advocated the replacement of state governments with regional ones, as well as taxes on capital gains and net worth. A clear emphasis was given to personal fulfilment, quality of life and environmental conservation.

As Australia went to the polls in 1974, Barton recommended spreading preferences between Liberal and Labor in order to preserve the Australia Party’s credibility as an independent force. His advice was ignored.

At the May election the Australia Party won just 2 per cent of the national vote. Barton was tired of being the party’s key financier. The party’s campaign to recover election costs raised just $2000 from 3000 members. Barton’s nails were bitten to the quick. Still, he remained positive: ‘By and large I am a long-distance runner, not a sprinter . . . We’ve done famously without getting anyone elected. Our policies are discussed. They are even attacked by people like the DLP. . . . we have not given up.’

Despite the optimistic language, at the party’s national conference in late July Barton resigned as convenor. In October 1974, a three-page interview with Barton appeared in Sydney University’s Honi Soit newspaper. The interviewer was Malcolm Turnbull—then a 20-year-old Arts/Law student. Turnbull probed his subject on his recent resignation from the Australia Party, the future of Angus & Robertson, the economy, his views on the Labor Party, Whitlam and Jim Cairns. Turnbull sought, and Barton provided, considered opinions on the most capable Liberal leader (Fraser), urban public transport solutions and the Australian car industry. On his exit from the Australia Party, Barton was clear: ‘I believe that honesty is the most important of political values, and if being a successful politician means compromising that, then I am quite happy to be an unsuccessful politician.’ Early in 1975 he would cease his financial support, later admitting: ‘Not by nature a political animal, I was being forced to behave like one.’ Decades later Barton would muse over the party’s failings:

It was, in the light of hindsight, extraordinarily ambitious to try to change deeply entrenched attitudes in a few years. Nor did the AP fit into the usual Left-Right spectrum. Ultimately, it was not rational defence of the status quo that resisted the reformism of the new movement, but tradition, perceived self-interest, apathy and ignorance.

While he claimed that the party needed to be free of charges that just one influential and wealthy individual dominated it, the truth was that Barton needed to move on. Nevertheless, in a later (unfinished) personal memoir, he recorded his satisfaction with ‘involving a great many able and idealistic people in a very constructive and rewarding political commitment’.

Members had a strong sense of ‘belonging’ to something distinctive, according to Australia Party stalwart and professor of law, Tony Blackshield. However, their efforts to communicate policies clearly to a wider audience failed, the reasons for which lay in internal disagreement, the intricacy of some policies and the vagueness of others, the lack of any interest group power base and, ironically, the too-thorough reliance on expert research before finalising policies.

It would be seven months before a replacement national convenor was elected. After the dramatic November 1975 dismissal of Whitlam’s Labor government, many Australia Party voters lined up behind Whitlam at the subsequent election.

In May 1977, the Australia Party would merge with the New Liberal Movement and adopt the high-profile Senator Don Chipp as its leader, along with the new name Australian Democrats. Chipp had resigned from the Liberal Party earlier that year, having served as a minister in Gorton’s government until 1972. In that role he had gained popularity and national attention largely by abolishing the censorship of printed material, lifting the ban on many novels and allowing the sale of Playboy magazine. He was not promoted to Malcolm Fraser’s 1975 Liberal ministry. While Chipp had been accused of being a populist, Barton had no objection. ‘Not such a bad thing, I thought. The Party has enough idealists. It needs voters.’

The new party would maintain the principles developed under Barton’s patronage of honesty, tolerance, compassion and members’ participation through postal ballots, as well as a monthly journal for open discussion and balloting.

In 1973 a small group from the Humanist Society, the Council for Civil Liberties and the Australia Party came together to discuss a project of great significance for women in New South Wales. Until the early 1970s, many women wanting a termination were forced to seek a second medical opinion, were overcharged, were not being adequately counselled, were having terminations unnecessarily late and, as Barton’s girlfriends had experienced in the 1950s, were using illegal backyard abortionists. Women’s rights to terminate a pregnancy would become a major political and social issue.

It was not in fact legislative change that would permit terminations outside a public hospital, but a more liberal reading of the law. Justice David Levine’s ruling in 1971 broke new ground, allowing terminations to be performed in New South Wales outside a public hospital and on the grounds of hardship to the woman concerned. The landmark ruling meant that women were able to access safe and effective terminations, and those suffering a forced pregnancy by a violent partner no longer had to resort to illegal backyard abortions. Until then, the better illegal clinics had been expensive and survived only by paying protection money to the police.

Led by Dr Ian Edwards of the Humanist Society and his brother Brian, a working party was formed to act upon the Levine ruling by setting up a low cost, no-profit clinic for women requiring terminations. The idea was to raise finance from interest-free loans as well as gifts from supporters. Experienced obstetricians were willing to conduct the simple procedure for no more than the government reimbursement.

However, the group also needed supporters of standing and respectability who could provide significant financial support. Brian Edwards had worked for Gordon Barton and approached him. Barton had heard gruesome stories about botched abortions from his friend Godfrey Oettle, a senior New South Wales government forensic doctor who often performed autopsies on the victims of backyard abortionists. It is likely he also thought back to the agonies his one-time lover Judy Wallace had endured at the hands of such untrained abortionists. Barton would be joined by Clyde Packer, recently estranged from his media baron father Frank, and barrister Geoffrey Keighley. A medical advisory board of professors and associate professors from Sydney University was recruited and suitable premises for a clinic sought.

By February 1974 premises were found—part of the top floor of an old three-storey warehouse at 176 Parramatta Road, Camperdown. However, the space required a substantial fit out. The landlord was prepared to do this at his expense provided somebody could be found to guarantee the rent for three years. This was an ideal opportunity, yet neither the group—it was still an informal gathering—nor individual members had the financial resources required to guarantee three years of rent—none, that is, except Gordon Barton. So it was Barton who guaranteed the rent. At subsequent board meetings, recalls Brian Edwards, Barton’s ‘insights, his contacts and his broad business experience were invaluable’.

To incorporate the clinic as a non-profit organisation, Barton’s solicitors at Allen Allen & Hemsley were brought in. The project would require the approval of the New South Wales attorney-general. Given attorney-general Kenneth McCaw was known to be hostile to abortion, the group decided instead to incorporate the clinic in the ACT. Bureaucratic obstacles remained. In the end it took a personal appeal to federal attorney-general Lionel Murphy, who promptly signed the necessary documents.

The Preterm Foundation, as it was named rather anonymously, opened for business on Monday 24 June 1974. Only a week later more than 500 demonstrators gathered in nearby Victoria Park, adopting a resolution demanding the state government intervene to close the clinic. ‘This clinic is a travesty in our society, being directed towards the ugly destruction of unborn human lives’, the resolution stated. The demonstrators then marched down to the clinic itself.

The protests did not last. While it would later shift to Surry Hills, the clinic was so successful that six months later its doctors were performing 80 to 90 terminations each week. Within a year, it was reported, clients were asked to pay the $70 fee only if this was within their means.