Stars aligned for unlikely prime minister John Gorton 50 years ago
WWII veteran John Gorton beat Billy McMahon 50 years ago to replace Harold Holt as Liberal leader and prime minister.
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HAROLD Holt was dead,” future prime minister Malcolm Fraser recalled.
“The Liberal Party was without a leader. The planning, the campaigning began even at the funeral.”
As Prince Charles and US president Lyndon Johnson joined thousands of mourners at Holt’s memorial service in Melbourne on December 22, 1967, Liberal and Country Party number crunchers toted unofficial leadership polls. The haggling ended on January 9, 1968, with the compromise election of Victorian senator John Gorton as Liberal leader, to be appointed prime minister on January 10.
When Holt vanished, presumed drowned, on December 17, 1967, Country Party leader John “Black Jack” McEwan became acting prime minister, but would not be elected to lead the Liberal-Country Party coalition. Liberals angling for the top job 50 years ago included top-runner treasurer William McMahon from NSW, West Australian Paul Hasluck and Gorton, anointed by Victorian Liberal Party powerbrokers, although a senator.
Disagreements between McEwan and McMahon on free trade and foreign investment, which McEwen opposed, were exacerbated by a currency devaluation dispute in November 1967. When Holt vanished, McEwen declared that if McMahon was elected as Liberal leader, he and his party would not serve under him.
Gorton’s three years as prime minister, until he effectively “sacked himself” in 1971, were almost as unconventional as his election, notable for the tragedy that made it possible, McEwan’s disdain for McMahon, and being the first senator to serve as prime minister. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, although some biographies list Melbourne, under current enforcement of citizenship rules, he also would not have been eligible to sit in parliament.
Born in 1911, his mother Alice Sinn, daughter of a railroad worker, was not married to his father, English migrant John Rose Gorton, a wealthy Victorian orchardist. Their older daughter Ruth lived with Gorton Sr’s estranged wife Kathleen, who refused to agree to a divorce. Gorton spent his early years in Port Melbourne with his maternal grandparents while his parents made regular business trips to Sydney, New Zealand and England. The family settled in Sydney in 1916, where Sinn died of tuberculosis in 1920.
Gorton was sent to live at Killara with Kathleen and Ruth, then 12, whom Gorton had been told died as an infant, while his father ran properties at Lake Kangaroo, near Kerang in northern Victoria. Gorton boarded at Shore Anglican grammar school until Kathleen and Ruth moved to London in 1927. After staying with his father, Gorton became a boarder at Geelong Grammar. Admitted to Brasenose College, Oxford, in October 1932, he claimed to have “majored in rowing”, but also learned to fly while studying history, politics and economics to graduate in 1935.
While visiting Spain in 1934, just before the outbreak of civil war, he met Bettina Brown, 18, a US language student then at the Sorbonne in Paris. They married in 1935, returned to Australia in 1936 and had a daughter, Joanna, and two sons, Michael and Robin.
Gorton planned to become a journalist but instead worked at his father’s orchard until he joined the RAAF in 1940. Gorton flew missions in Britain, New Guinea and Malaya, and was left permanently disfigured from injures when his aircraft crashed near Singapore in l942. Weeks later he again escaped death aboard an evacuation freighter sunk by a Japanese torpedo.
Returning to the orchard after the war, Gorton served on the local council before his election to the Senate in 1949. In his first Senate speech, he spoke of the “ominous shadow” of communism “creeping down” through China, to threaten Malaya, Indonesia and northern Australia. Described in 1953 as “an anti-Socialist and strong proponent of free enterprise”, he had “attracted favourable attention in Liberal circles”. Gorton dated his interest in external affairs to the mid-1930s, when “accidentally embroiled in a revolution in Barcelona, Spain”.
Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies in 1958 appointed him Minister for the Navy until 1963. He was Works Minister until 1967, then Minister for the Interior, and Minister for Education and Science under Holt.
Favoured as a “knockabout larrikin” when backed by Fraser in his bid for prime minister, Gorton’s poor media presence, disputes over the Vietnam War, and slump at the polls in 1969
led to his demise in 1971, when Fraser quit Gorton’s ministry. Complaining of stubbornness and lack of communication, several Liberal MPs were also annoyed as Gorton gave considerable control to his private secretary, Ainslie Gotto.
When a no-confidence motion in the Liberal party room tied 33-all, Gorton delivered the casting vote against himself. He resigned from the Liberal Party in 1975 and died in 2002.
Originally published as Stars aligned for unlikely prime minister John Gorton 50 years ago
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