Within a year after splitting from Barton, Jim Staples shifted to the Attorney-General’s Department before ultimately going to the bar. He would be appointed to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission by the Whitlam government in 1975. Once there, he quickly became the centre of controversy. In one judgment, he castigated the multinational BHP with the words:
Let them, then, twist slowly in the wind, dead and despised, as a warning . . . of the limits of persuasion by a public authority upon those who zealously uphold the privileges of property and who exercise the prerogatives of the master over those of our citizens whose lot falls to be their employees.
He was removed from heading an industry panel, and was instead despatched on an extended global trip to study human rights. When he returned, he achieved fame by awarding huge pay rises to wool storemen and packers. Constant criticism rained down on him and on the large and expensive institution that employed him. Judge Staples was subsequently forbidden from heading up Commission panels and, not without difficulty, was hurried to an early pension by the Hawke government in 1988.
At one point during the Vietnam War, Francis James flew into Hanoi. He also feigned an assassination attempt (with an egg timer) on US President Lyndon Johnson. James’ anti-war activities ended abruptly in 1969 when he was imprisoned by the Chinese on suspicion of spying. His release was not secured until three years later, after extensive negotiations between Chinese officials and Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (an old school chum). The Chinese government found James guilty of espionage. On his release in January 1973, his extraordinary ordeal was serialised in Australian newspapers. A person who believed deeply in the Christian faith, James was a man of secrecy, ambiguity and paradox. He remained a close friend of Barton’s until his death in 1992.
After Barton exited Ipec Holdings in 1983, Greg Farrell shouldered the company’s massive debts alone. He was warned he would lose everything unless he offloaded more. It was a painful period. Farrell’s bankers circled like hungry jackals. Unable to find a buyer for the hotels, IPEC Transport, the jewel in the crumbling empire, was Farrell’s only lifeline. He was forced to sell a 50 per cent share to Mayne Nickless. In 1984 the Northern Territory government, ostensibly concerned that Federal was not attracting sufficient high rollers internationally to its Darwin and Alice Springs casinos, passed extraordinary legislation to compulsorily acquire the properties for $58 million.
Five years later, in 1988, Mayne took up its option to buy the remaining half of IPEC Transport. Despite a non-compete clause, Farrell’s son Greg junior re-entered the transport game with a new transport business, specialising in computers and sensitive equipment. In 1989 the Farrell family would fully privatise Federal Hotels, ultimately significantly increasing its investment in tourism and accommodation in Tasmania. Greg Farrell died in 1997. Today the Farrell children are amongst Australia’s wealthiest families, thanks to the hard work and business savvy of their father.
After his departure from Tjuringa, Shann Turnbull embarked on a series of entrepreneurial business acquisitions and public listings. In 1975 he wrote the provocative and influential book, Democratising the Wealth of Nations. Invited to lecturer on reforming the theory and practice of capitalism, his treatise would transform his career from that of fortune-hunter to expert adviser to politicians and the global finance sector.
After leaving IPEC Europe in 1982, John Konstas would speculate unsuccessfully in a Sierra Leone diamond mine before returning to a management role for a Singapore-based firm, where he was faced with a work ethic that challenged his lackadaisical Australian approach. He would ultimately move into the management of resorts and accommodation. He is married to his third wife, and remains working full time managing an apartment complex on Australia’s Gold Coast.
After Barton’s split from Greg Farrell in 1983, Peter Wolfe stayed on with Ipec Holdings to orchestrate a plan to quarantine it from the enormous Southlands debts. Ultimately, his clever and hard-nosed negotiations saved the Farrell family from financial collapse. In 1989, Wolfe engineered the Farrell family’s full privatisation of the Federal Group, taking a hefty fee. All the listed companies he had been involved in are now in the hands of others. Retiring in 1990, Peter lives with his wife in Sydney and maintains part-ownership of Brigadoon Wines in Mudgee.
Rod Maclure stayed on as managing director at Ipec Holdings to ‘keep the seat warm’ for Greg Farrell junior, who increasingly took charge of the Federal Hotels business. When the Farrell family fully privatised the Federal Group in 1989, Maclure moved on. For the last fifteen years he has built a successful business exporting livestock (everything from camels to llamas) around the world.
Barton had turned his back on his lifelong friend and lawyer Graham Cooke by 1985. Cooke, who had built his career at Allens on the constant flow of legal work from Barton’s businesses, was left to lick his wounds when Barton’s work dried up. According to many, Cooke was bitter and extremely hurt by his friend’s betrayal. He took early retirement from Allens at the end of 1989.
Peter Janson’s menagerie of house-boys, birds, hunting trophies, Indian tapestries, Victoriana and colonial artefacts continue to share his life, albeit now in a five-storey inner Melbourne bluestone warehouse rather than the Windsor Hotel. He continues to travel extensively, has never married and remains a man about town in Melbourne society.
Before Barton commissioned him to assist with his Tiger Line shipping proposal for Tasmania, Ken Thomas had initiated the Save-A-Life-A-Day movement to improve road safety. His efforts would help bring about the introduction of random breath testing from late 1982. Barton backed his friend’s work financially. Thomas also promoted rail transport for safer inter-city freight movements.
In 1988, sixteen years after his inglorious departure from the TNT boardroom, Peter Abeles gave Thomas a peace offering, sending him to all TNT’s European offices. En route he and his wife visited the Bartons. When Thomas’ wife discovered a suitcase full of Barton’s sex toys and fetish wear, the 76-year-old was horrified. She would have nothing to do with him from that day on.
Thomas died in 1997, having spent the last decade of his life running a local manufacturing business. He never believed in acquiring wealth. Instead he spent what he made in charitable works and on bringing up his six children, and his nieces, nephews and grandchildren.
Gretel Pinniger (Madame Lash) would, in the late 1970s, service the needs of millionaire Clyde Packer before this liaison was outed and Packer fled to the US. Subsequently, Pinniger would develop an ‘arrangement’ with another of Barton’s friends, falling in love with her wealthy client. In the last decade she has taken up ‘4D’ painting and continues to hold court to willing visitors in her Palm Beach sandstone mansion in Sydney.
Having returned to Australia in 1992 after the failure of Barton’s Red Telephone Company, Fergus McPherson re-joined the public service, first in the Commonwealth Department of Administrative Services. McPherson joined the New South Wales Maritime Services when it was privatised in 1998. In that capacity he implemented policies to enhance greater pedestrian access to the Sydney Harbour foreshore.
After Bob Carr retired as premier, the environmental priorities of the Labor government were downgraded. McPherson resigned in 2007 to seek employment in a role more aligned to his belief of public service.
After the TNT sale in 1983, Ian Sayer continued to consult in the European transport industry for another five years. For the last 30 years he has been an avid collector of original World War II autographs and related historical documents. His home library now consists of some 25,000 volumes. His collection is world-renowned and a primary source for historians and researchers.
Sayer has written five books on Nazi Germany and US intelligence, two of them, including Nazi Gold (1984), becoming best-sellers. In recent years he has become a partner in International Autograph Auctions, a UK business specialising in the sale of autographs and historical documents. He lives in a mansion at Sunningdale in the Berkshire countryside with his girlfriend.
Just months after Freddie Gardiner resigned from IPEC in 1983, he and Bob Bass purchased 10 per cent of Greg Poche’s Discount Freight transport business, which by the 1990s became the only independent national company in the industry. In 1990, it was Poche who blew the whistle on the express freight cartel, taking his case to the Trade Practices Commission, although he ensured neither Gardiner nor Bass were implicated. Gardiner would finally sell out of Discount Freight in 1992. He and his wife are happily retired on Sydney’s outskirts.
While deputy chairman of IPEC Europe, Hugh O’Neill would found the French Brasserie St Quentin in London in 1980 with his cousin, food critic Quentin Crewe. The Savoy Hotel bought the four St Quentin brasseries nine years later, while O’Neill took up a hereditary seat in the House of Lords as the Third Lord Rathcavan. He went on to hold a variety of senior business and government appointments in the textiles, hospitality and tourism industries. In 2002, he and a group of friends bought back the original Brasserie St Quentin. He lives at Cleggan Lodge, originally a folly cottage in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Richard Walsh continued at the helm of Angus & Robertson Publishing for another six years after its takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. Angus & Robertson had again become highly profitable and was by far the most prolific publisher of Australian books. By 1986 Walsh was president of the Australian Book Publishers’ Association. That year he was recruited to head Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press, where he remained for 13 years.
Walsh became a founding member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and wrote six books. Always one for championing the new, he launched a topical daily Internet newsletter, the Zeitgeist Gazette, with David Salter in 2000, although it folded in less than a year. Today he lectures in publishing at Macleay College and commissions new books for Allen & Unwin.
Knighted in 1972, during the 1980s Peter Abeles was flying high as chief executive of TNT. Under his guidance, TNT established a presence in 180 countries. He concurrently served as chief executive and joint managing director of Ansett in the decade from 1982. In 1984 he was appointed to the Reserve Bank board, a position he would also hold for ten years. Named Australian of the Year in 1987, Abeles was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1991. Prime Minister Bob Hawke was an intimate friend, making Abeles godfather to his daughter.
While TNT had declared a $200 million profit in 1990, by 1992 it was in dire straits. Abeles had made huge mistakes and hidden these from the board. His colleagues admit he had developed an absolute belief that he could go on spending money no matter what. In September 1992 Abeles’ oldest friends, fellow TNT board members Ross Cribb and Fred Millar, were forced to vote him out of the chief executive role, ousting him from control of the company he had helped found. Abeles would remain as Ansett chief executive for just another two months, before stepping down to be replaced by Ken Cowley. It was a humiliating end for a man of such drive and determination. Abeles died in Sydney of cancer in 1999, aged 75.
Liz Weeding finally gave up her hopes of settling down with Barton once Mary Ellen had embedded herself in his life. Weeding resigned from her role as Tjuringa company secretary in 1978 and moved interstate. She would end up working for IPEC’s buyer, Mayne Nickless. She never found a man to replace Gordon Barton, nor did she ever have children. Barton continued to confide in her through his intimate correspondence. When Weeding heard Barton had died in 2003 she bought a paper shredder, destroying everything he had written her ‘in case they fell into the wrong hands’. Today she lives in a modest apartment in a city distant in place and memory from where she and Barton met.
When Barton pulled the plug on the Australia Party’s finances in 1975, Beverley Dyke was just 25. She left her role co-ordinating Australia Party administration, ending one of the most intense working periods of her life. Barton had inspired her to complete a degree majoring in Political Science and she would go on to build a successful career in media, communications and politics. As well as senior directorships and board positions, Dyke would ultimately build her own business. She is happily married and currently having a break from full-time work.
By the late 1980s, Rosemary O’Grady had learnt two Aboriginal languages, received a Walkley commendation for journalism, qualified in Law and encountered the killer bees in world finance as a corporate regulator. In 1987, as a legal aid lawyer to Aboriginal people in the West Kimberley, she fell foul of parties associated with what became known as ‘WA Inc’, and was forced to resign. Elders of the northern Kimberley then invited her to advise them on land entitlements. She subsequently filed a land rights claim on their behalf.
To Barton’s amusement, O’Grady’s argument—based on Western Australia’s peculiar nineteenth century colonial history of mineral rights on freehold land—threatened to upset the state’s assumed ownership of hugely valuable mineral deposits. This claim, had it not been opposed by those seeking to control the politics of land rights, would have delivered to the Indigenous elders a legal interest in massive reserves of bauxite, iron ore and other minerals. Powerful interests mounted a strong campaign against O’Grady, who in 1995 finally left the Kimberley. She now lives in Melbourne. Contrary to rumours occasionally circulated about her, she has never made money.
Ipec Holdings’ famed Bligh Street headquarters in Sydney’s historic New South Wales Club is now owned by billionaire and philanthropist Frank Lowy’s Westfield Group. In 2003 it became home to the Lowy Institute, a neo-liberal international policy think-tank. Gordon Barton would have approved.