Sam Everingham is the author of Wild Ride: The Rise and Fall of Cobb & Co.

Gordon Barton

Australia’s maverick entrepreneur

By Sam Everingham

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2009 Sam Everingham
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-243-4

Contents

Introduction,
1 Loss and Uncertainty,
2 Free Thinking,
3 Working Around the Law,
4 Time for Love,
5 Workaholic,
6 The Struggle to Fly,
7 Private Cartels and Public Injustice,
8 Dear Mr President,
9 Secret Men’s Business,
10 The Peter Pan of Politics,
11 Taking on the Media Magnates,
12 Angus & Robertson,
13 Cornering the Market,
14 Life of the Party,
15 Restrained Luxury,
16 Cash Crisis,
17 Feisty and Intelligent Women,
18 Style and Elegance,
19 Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines,
20 Taking on the World,
21 One Big Happy Family,
22 Borrowed Time,
23 Collapse of an Empire,
24 The Clarity of Cocaine,
25 The Hurlingham Horror Show,
26 Illegal Immigrants,
Epilogue,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,

CHAPTER 1

LOSS AND UNCERTAINTY

A man’s mind is the most valuable thing he possesses next to his soul.

Gordon Barton, aged seventeen

It was close to three in the morning as the beam of the Water Police launch searchlight fixed upon a lone figure in impeccable flannels and yachting jacket striding out confidently onto the private Double Bay jetty. The unruffled millionaire wanted to thank the authorities for rescuing his shipwrecked friends from a nearby Sydney Harbour island.

As the boat bumped against the jetty, it began to disgorge a rather unlikely party. A nervous transvestite in a brief leather skirt and bright red peasant blouse prepared to leap to safety. Tipsy and with his arms chained behind his back, he came close to toppling over as his high-heeled black pumps landed on the rough wooden planks. A blond, muscled German in a skimpy Roman gladiator outfit — somewhat drunker than his manacled companion — was next to alight. Even more distracting to the three police sergeants was a beautiful, bare-footed woman in a bedraggled leopard-skin jumpsuit.

It was fortunate the Water Police had not discovered the shipwrecked party earlier. Only two hours prior, one of the most respected men in corporate and political Australia had been chained on that same island in medieval armour — his wrists and ankles secured by manacles. His timely escape, paddling a one-oared dingy through the night to the safety of the mainland, would have made great copy for the morning papers.

Even six months out from his fiftieth birthday, Gordon Barton still enjoyed the thrill of living dangerously.

It was an ancient city. Founded at the end of the thirteenth century, the city of Surabaya on the long, densely populated island of Java had been in Dutch control since 1746. Sugar had been the port’s staple export crop for a century before Gordon Barton was born there. At the end of the nineteenth century it was the busiest port in the Dutch East Indies. The Australian trading conglomerate and shipping firm Burns Philp sourced much of its trade cargo from the region. By the time the Great War was bleeding Europe in 1914, Burns Philp had ten outposts scattered around the South Pacific, including one in Surabaya.

From the 1830s, expatriate settlers had built great open houses looking over their sugar plantations. Vines of bougainvillaea hung from their terraces, hedges of hibiscus constrained green lawns kept neat by garden boys. By the 1920s, Dutch colonials would cycle to work in their white tropical suits, a formal straw hat protecting their fair skin from the harsh rays. Their children played amongst the Javanese rice paddies, climbed palm trees, drank the milk of coconuts and became accustomed to feasting on exotic fruits unknown to Europe — papaya, rambutan, mangoes and sawah. Each European family employed a babu for the housework, a kokki to prepare their meals, and a young lad — a keban — to do the rough work around the house.

Antoinette (Kitty) Kavellars had grown up in Holland. Her father had apparently died when she was a small child. For some reason her mother had surrendered her to a Dutch convent. She never saw her mother again. The grief and anger grafted to that abandonment would scar her permanently. To her sons, their mother’s childhood, adolescence and Dutch relatives were always taboo subjects.

Hundreds of Dutch families had continued to migrate to a new life far from the bitter cold of Holland. Aged 21, now fluent in English, French and German, Kitty escaped convent life, fleeing to the Dutch East Indies where she became a schoolteacher. She found herself in a congenial society of young military and naval officers, government officials and plantation owners — an environment of colonial clubs, parties and picnics. Those who came to know her in later years uniformly recall her as someone who yearned to be a woman of substance.

This tiny Dutch schoolteacher, to escape a persistent yet pompous suitor, was to take a holiday to the island of Ambon in the Celebes. Being quickly informed of the arrival of an unattached young lady, and always on the lookout for such to ‘decorate his occasions’, the Governor sent a messenger inviting Kitty to his tennis party.

Meanwhile, George Barton had grown up in Charters Towers, inland from the coast of northern Queensland. He was the youngest in a family of eleven brothers — all small, thin, earnest Protestants. Faced with economic necessity perhaps as much as any spirit of adventure, George had left home aged just thirteen, taking a job with the pearling fleets based at Thursday Island in the Arafura Sea. By the outbreak of World War I, George captained his own three-masted schooner. Putting ashore at Ambon to take on water, he was also invited to a tennis party by the welcoming Governor.

The unlikely meeting of pearl fisherman and schoolteacher was to lead in 1920 to a marriage in Batavia (now Jakarta). When news of the wedding reached George Barton’s Queensland relatives, they were scandalised. It was rumoured the girl was a half-caste and, worse still, a Roman Catholic. George Barton simply cut off contact with all but his eldest, somewhat intellectual brother Basil, with whom he remained close. George and Kitty joined the large community of colonial traders and plantation owners in the Dutch East Indies, settling eventually in Surabaya.

Their first son, Basil, was already eight when Gordon Barton was born towards the end of the city’s dry season on 30 August 1929. A year later his parents shipped Basil away to boarding school in Sydney, so apart from annual school holidays, Gordon’s first nine years in this Dutch colonial outpost were those of an only child.

For the Bartons, life in their large and rambling house was very comfortable. With the customary six household servants and an amah, Antoinette had time, with the help of a Blackfriars correspondence course, to school Gordon herself until he turned nine. Gordon admitted it was his mother who taught him ‘to speak and write plainly and do sums in my head’. Gordon was made to watch ants as a model of virtuous industriousness. His mother taught him to swim and to play the piano. An old Chinese man was engaged once a week to teach him carpentry.

‘Not having known it, I did not miss the society of other children,’ he recalled. ‘When not at lessons I travelled in the world of daydreams in the company of the imperial heroes of The Boy’s Own Papers, and of the gentle and scholarly Arthur Mee, Editor of the remarkable Childrens’ Encyclopaedia and the periodical Childrens’ Newspaper.‘

A thin, creative child with dark, curly hair and deep-set eyes, Gordon grew up in a once-great Asian city in decline. Worsening world sugar prices and the flow-on effects of the Great Depression were causing a downhill slide in Surabaya’s economy. Nonetheless, this colonial outpost was protected more than most — unemployment amongst its European population would peak at just 10 per cent. The situation was far worse in Australia.

By 1934 Gordon Barton’s father was assistant manager of Burns Philp’s Surabaya interests — controlling its huge rubber plantations and negotiating trade agreements. The city was now one of nineteen outposts the firm maintained in the South Seas.

The heat of the tropics meant families rose at dawn, started work or lessons at seven or seven-thirty, finishing soon after midday. By one in the afternoon, the heat was soporific. Two hours’ siesta was followed by the ritual of the mandi room — a favourite place in every Javanese house in the late afternoon torpor. To mandi was to sit on the cool of bathroom tiles, soap yourself, then splash cold water over your body, scooped from a large square cement basin built into the corner of the washroom. The ritual of each languid day in the tropics wound down with tea served at four, followed by supper at six.

On his eighth birthday Gordon woke to find a train set carefully laid on tracks on the floor of his playroom. Not only the thrill of that eighth birthday surprise, but also an ongoing passion for train sets, would stay with him for over a decade.

In 1939, Gordon, like his brother before him, was accompanied by his mother on a journey south aboard a Burns Philp ship. Once aboard, the young boy was confronted with many refugee families from Austria and Germany. When he enquired why they had left home, their replies were either ‘the government’ or ‘Adolf Hitler’. These refugees talked of intimidation, confiscated property, midnight arrests. To the youngster, these people appeared to be ‘respectable, reasonable and likeable people’. Until now, Gordon had regarded Government as a benign authority. This evidence of something more disruptive and sinister was disturbing. Was it possible that governments did not always serve their people justly?

His mother warned her boy that some of these people were communists, many were misfits and troublemakers and almost all of them were Jews. Nonetheless, Gordon would later recognise these shipboard encounters as ‘a big step in my political education’.

On a sunny day in January 1939, after fourteen days at sea, Gordon and his mother docked in Sydney Harbour. Gordon was enrolled at a private boys’ school — the Sydney Church of England Grammar School, commonly known as Shore. Home-schooled, hence unused to a school environment of any sort, he was suddenly faced with the rough, arrogant and authoritarian environment of boarding school life. He hated having to wear a uniform and the discipline of a system that told him what to do without providing rational reasons as his parents had. His mother soon sailed north to re-join her husband. In Sydney, Gordon had only his older brother Basil, now studying Economics at Sydney University. The boy ached for his parents.

Basil and Gordon took regular trips up the northern beach coastline to Avalon, swimming together in the beach’s rockpool as the breakers crashed over the pool edge. Despite their age difference, Gordon became close to his brother, idolising him. Decades later he could still recall his brother’s words — ‘Our parents are not rich and they have made sacrifices to give us the best education. Don’t let them down.’

In September, just eight months after cementing a relationship with his brother, Basil enrolled as a trainee fighter pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force at its Bairnsdale training base in regional Victoria. Only eighteen, he had completed less than a year at university.

Gordon would recall: ‘In the patriotic fervour of the time it became even more important that I should not let him down … I applied myself to the new school lifestyle with dutiful energy …’

A year or so on, with World War II widening in its reach, the Dutch all over the East Indies were becoming concerned at Japan’s expansionist policies — the Japanese had already encroached upon China. If Japan entered the war, the Dutch East Indies, far from help, were at risk. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, the East Indies were cut off from their colonial protectors. George Barton sent his wife to the relative safety of Sydney.

Gordon was delighted. It meant he could persuade his mother to remove him from boarding school. Together they rented a pretty house in Mosman near the water. George sent money each month from Java to support the family. However, for the first time in her life Kitty Barton was faced with having to do her own housework. In 1941 she began making camouflage nets in her spare time. Although for most of 1940 and 1941 the war in Europe seemed far away, Gordon dug an air-raid shelter in their backyard.

On 7 December 1941 Japan entered the war, carrying out a surprise attack of the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The conflict had reached the Pacific and the playing field was suddenly altered. Two Australian warships were sunk off the coast of Malaya the same month.

Barton’s headmaster at Shore quickly called a meeting of housemasters to discuss evacuation possibilities for at least part of the school. After sending a party west to the Blue Mountains, the school decided to buy the rambling old Mount Victoria Hotel. At the western edge of the Blue Mountains it was far from the Sydney coastline. Boys from the preparatory school and junior part of the main school were to be transferred there. A month later, after some frantic carpentry, 75 boarders and a few day boys started lessons.

Kitty Barton and her son shifted up to a neighbouring mountain town, Blackheath. She was a tiny woman, small and weather-beaten from years living under a tropical Indonesian sun. Despite her size, she had incredible energy and a quirky sense of humour. For a short time she took in two other boys in Gordon’s year. His father continued to write weekly from Java.

John Cummings, a childhood friend of the Bartons, whose family had also spent time in the East Indies, recalls Kitty telling children that little boys were born with a bag of dirt inside them and no matter how hard you scrubbed it off, the dirt would find its way to the surface again. In Kitty Barton’s story, only when boys became teenagers was the dirt bag exhausted — opening up a chance of keeping them clean.

In the hot summer months, with the dense Australian bush at their doorstep, it was bushfires rather than gunfire which posed the most immediate threat to those living in the mountains. Flames would roar up to the fence-lines of houses, defenceless but for a strip of mown lawn or ground cleared of scrub dividing the great bush from settled land. Women and children lined up against the heat would cough as the hot roar of flames threatened their wooden homes. Tears streaming down their faces, they flailed the burning ground with wet potato-sacks.

In the summer of 1942 Gordon began his first year of senior school, riding his bicycle the few kilometres to Mount Victoria from their rented house in Blackheath. For him, the mountains offered the freedom he had been used to in Surabaya.

From a young age Gordon was to experiment with games combining elements of surprise and suffering. These were to become a theme throughout his life. John Cummings recalls being fascinated whenever he came over to play: ‘Gordon … had devised a treasure hunt for us. Each person was given the end of a piece of coloured wool and had to follow it to its end, where a small prize was to be found. This sounds simple but one of the rules demanded that the wool be wound into a ball as we progressed … This involved climbing trees, crawling through culverts, scrambling up rocks.’

The Japanese forces were fast advancing on foreign territories just north of Australia. In the first two months of 1942 they captured Rabaul, bombed Port Moresby, and invaded Timor and Java. Early in February 1942, Surabaya’s air-raid sirens wailed. The bombs began to fall on the city of Gordon’s childhood, thousands of kilometres north-west of Blackheath. George Barton began weathering air raids three to four times a day. Black smoke clouds obliterated the sun as military and oil facilities burned. In the same month Japanese bombers launched their first attack on Darwin — hundreds died in their first strike.

Little more than a month after the first bombs had prompted panic in the Surabaya streets, the Dutch East Indies fell to the Japanese.

In Blackheath all Gordon and his mother could do was listen to the radio news. In April, Kitty Barton received a letter from her husband: ‘The Japs are expected at any time. I have volunteered for the army. I will write again when I can.’

Only days after George wrote this letter in early March, the Japanese arrived in strength in Surabaya’s outskirts as air-raid sirens wailed continuously. Thousands of Indonesians poured out of the city. Amidst the chaos, locals looted factories, defence posts and offices. The Japanese quickly interned all male Europeans, civilian and military alike. The only exceptions were young boys and the elderly.

In time, more than a hundred prison camps were established throughout Java alone, two-thirds of them for civilians. High schools, convents, military barracks and whole neighbourhoods were fenced off and converted into prisons. The Japanese would ship civilian prisoners from Java to Taiwan and later Singapore. Others were just shifted from one Javanese camp to another. A quarter of Far East POWs and interned civilians would be killed or die in captivity.

Abruptly, George Barton’s monthly cheques stopped coming. Gordon had no idea if his father was dead, injured or a prisoner of war. It was to be three years before Gordon or his mother heard another word of his fate. Gordon recalled the period as traumatic, ‘I had a tremendous feeling of insecurity’.

At the end of May, the Japanese surprised Sydney’s defences, slipping midget submarines into its harbour and firing on Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Amidst her despair, the safety of the mountains at least seemed a sensible choice to Kitty Barton.

Now only Basil’s fortnightly air force pay would keep mother and son housed and fed. The pair were forced to shift to a Blue Mountains boarding house. Their life shrank to one room, one bed and a gas ring. The place creaked in the cold; the building crowded with hard-up divorcees, widows, transients and pensioners.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Gordon Barton by Sam Everingham. Copyright © 2009 Sam Everingham. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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