Gordon Barton was a brilliant and stylish self-made multimillionaire who enjoyed nothing quite so much as jangling the nerves of the Australian establishment.
Fifty years ago on Saturday, he set in motion what could reasonably be described as Australia's first truly independent political party of the modern era.
![Gordon Barton in November 1966.](/web/20161026224756im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/5/2/v/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs4rwt.png/1477064309578.jpg)
These days, when new parties and movements spring up like grass to occupy ever-larger paddocks of the Senate – and often enough, burn off like twigs and vapourise – it is difficult to recall the impact of Barton's Australia Party of the late 1960s and early '70s.
It won no seats, but, having taken a moral stand against the Vietnam War and capturing a mood of the times, its preferences were credited with ensuring Gough Whitlam's Labor Party won power in 1972 after 23 years of Liberal government.
Eventually, the Australia Party morphed into what became the Australian Democrats, which influenced Australian politics for three decades before doing what most small parties eventually do: it fizzled out.
No one will ever know what Gordon Barton might have thought of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, Nick Xenophon's Team, Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party, Jacquie Lambie's one-person Network or Family First's Bob Day – a senator who is becoming one of those stalks of burnt grass – let alone the embers of Clive Palmer's Palmer United Party.
Barton, like the party he founded and funded, is largely forgotten today.
He died in obscurity in Spain in 2005 after living overseas for many years, his fortune gone. He had by then assumed a Gatsby-like reputation, and he remains, to those who remember, much more colourful than most of the current crop of small-party leaders.
![At the Australia Party Convention in 1974: Bridget Gilling, Michael Donalan and Gordon Barton.](/web/20161026224756im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/5/2/v/b/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs4rwt.png/1477064309578.jpg)
He fitted the 1960s perfectly, his restless imagination attracting all sorts of exotic friends. He once described the decade as "a great time for making money, starting enterprises, for making love ... for most things."
He made his millions from building a trucking empire called IPEC, and he spent quite a bit of it on what at the time were considered radical pursuits.
![US President Lyndon B. Johnson in his paint-splattered car in Melbourne in 1966.](/web/20161026224756im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/4/u/g/j/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs4rwt.png/1477064309578.jpg)
He was vehemently against the Vietnam War and, having established two newspapers, let their journalists have their heads.
There was the short-lived Sunday Observer (Melbourne's first Sunday newspaper) and the inquiring, satirical, libertarian and anarchic Nation Review, which spent the 1970s redefining Australian journalism and attracting a well-educated, dedicated and largely left-leaning readership.
![Protesters take to the streets during Mr Johnson's Sydney visit.](/web/20161026224756im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/4/u/g/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs4rwt.png/1477064309578.jpg)
Before all this, on October 22, 1966 – precisely half a century ago – Barton won a lasting place in Australian political history when he paid $1782 to take out a full-page advertisement in Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald.
It was in the form of an open letter to the president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had arrived in Australia two days before on a three-day visit.
![All these years later, the time of the small parties - including Pauline Hanson's One Nation - has arrived with a vengeance.](/web/20161026224756im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/y/v/7/j/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs4rwt.png/1477486092884.jpg)
It began: "Dear Mr President: It is unfortunate that your welcome in Australia has been clouded by the deep disagreement in this country as to our part in the Vietnamese War. I am concerned that the thought, comment and actions of our government have reflected very little of this disagreement, nor indeed much awareness of what is involved."
His paid letter went on at length to excoriate US policies, and those of allies such as Australia, in Vietnam.
"It is no small thing to be willing to kill people in a remote country, which has offered us no provocation, merely to safeguard what we conceive to be our political interests. I believe such a policy will fail by its moral bankruptcy alone," Barton's letter thundered presciently.
Sydney Morning Herald _ Saturday, October 22, 1966 on Scribd
The letter caused a considerable stir. The Vietnam War was widely popular, or was at least accepted, in Australia at the time. The new Australian prime minister, Harold Holt – who would win an election only a month after Barton's letter was published by a bigger margin than Bob Menzies ever enjoyed – had adopted as his slogan: "All the way with LBJ."
However, anti-war demonstrations were also gaining pace, and in Melbourne a demonstrator had thrown red paint at Johnson's motorcade, splashing his Secret Service agent, the wonderfully named Rufus Youngblood.
The letter to the US president from a wealthy businessman gave legitimate political expression to many who felt they had nowhere to go in their opposition to the war.
"From the time the ad appeared, Barton's phone did not stop ringing with messages of support," journalist Mike Steketee wrote later, reviewing a biography of Barton by Sam Everingham.
"Eleven days later, he [Barton] set up the Liberal Reform Group, which ran 22 candidates at that year's federal election, winning an average of 5 per cent of the vote in each seat. He had caught a wave of change."
The following year, the group had another name: the Australian Reform Movement. It put together for the 1967 half senate election a team of candidates that included the famed architect Harry Seidler, the founder of the TNT trucking empire Ken Thomas, and Barton himself.
Finally, in 1969 came the formal naming of The Australia Party.
The Labor Party had floundered in the wilderness for two decades, largely because it had split acrimoniously in the 1950s. The Democratic Labor Party had taken many Catholic, anti-communist and right-wing supporters from the central labour movement, effectively blocking Labor's chances at the ballot box.
Barton's Australia Party was something genuinely and "organically" new. It hadn't evolved through a straight split with a major party, as the DLP had.
Richard Whitington, a young journalist recruited to The Australia Party in 1969 and who has stayed in touch with some of the other "old stagers" from the Australia Party days, says Barton's party "neutralised" the DLP's 15-year influence by siphoning votes from the conservative side to Labor. He contends the Australia Party also gave Labor a "spine" on Vietnam.
Its high point came in the 1972 "It's Time" election that elevated Gough Whitlam to power.
The Australia Party still won no seats, but it got almost half the House of Representatives votes of the DLP (159,916 to 346,415). Psephologist Malcolm Mackerras later credited the Australia Party with delivering the preferences that gave Labor its victory.
At the next election, in 1974, the Australia Party contested 116 seats; more than the Liberal Party (110). In aggregate, it received more votes than all the independents combined, and more than the DLP.
But without seats, it had run its race. By 1977, it merged with the New Liberal Movement to form the Australian Democrats, with former Liberal minister Don Chipp as its leader.
Barton, finally bored with Australia, left in 1979 to establish his IPEC transport business in Europe. With characteristic style, he moved into a medieval castle in the Netherlands.
It took a decade before his empire collapsed, after which he lived with a son, Geoffrey, overlooking Lake Como, in Italy. Deaf and increasingly confused, he died in 2005 while staying with a daughter, Cindy, and her husband, Jose-Maria Cepero Rojas, in Marbella, Spain.
All these years later, the time of the small parties has arrived with a vengeance.
Could Gordon Barton, who started it all, be turning in his grave as Pauline Hanson's One Nation turns out to be the fastest rising of them all?