Sir John Gorton

Australian prime minister with a devil-may-care streak

John Grey Gorton, politician: born Melbourne, Victoria 9 September 1911; Senator for Victoria 1949-68; Member of the House of Representatives (Liberal) for Higgins, Victoria 1968-75; PC 1968; Prime Minister of Australia 1968-71; CH 1971; GCMG 1977; AC 1988; married 1935 Bettina Brown (died 1983; two sons, one daughter), 1993 Nancy Home (née Elliott; five stepsons, one stepdaughter); died Sydney, New South Wales 19 May 2002.

John Gorton was once described by his private secretary as "the first real Australian folk hero since Ned Kelly". He was certainly the most colourful and unconventional prime minister in Australia's history.

In 1968 he became the first prime minister to come from the Senate and the first, three years later, to vote himself out of office. It was Gorton, a Liberal, who fostered the more nationalist philosophy in Australia that subsequently developed, with impetus from the Labor Party, into a strong republican movement. Unlike his most illustrious Liberal predecessor, Sir Robert Menzies, who declared that he was British to his bootstraps, Gorton proclaimed himself "Australian to the boot-heels". At any celebration he would happily accept an invitation to sing "Waltzing Matilda".

Gorton opposed foreign takeovers of Australian companies, claiming that too often in the past Australia's posture had been that of a puppy lying on its back with all legs in the air and its stomach exposed saying: "Please, please give us capital. Tickle my tummy – on any conditions."

An instinctive centralist, he strongly believed that Australians should put their nation rather than their state first, and that rapid national development should not be held up by parochial interests. He also provided significant funding to film-makers and creative artists in an attempt to encourage a distinctively Australian cultural expression.

Gorton's father was John Rose Gorton, a Lancashire-born entrepreneur who came to Melbourne early in the century from South Africa, where he had made a small fortune. He was accompanied by an English wife, Kathleen, from whom he separated, Gorton living in Melbourne, his wife in Sydney. He subsequently fell in love with Alice Sinn, daughter of an Irish railway worker, and set up house with her; they had a daughter, Ruth, who was farmed out to live with Gorton's legitimate wife. In 1911, a son, John, was born; he lived for five years in the care of his maternal grandparents in Port Melbourne.

Alice Sinn died when the boy was seven. He subsequently joined his sister and his father's wife in Sydney, while his father continued his business activities in Melbourne. It was not a very happy childhood; the lad felt no warmth towards Mrs Gorton, who disliked Australia, and he wasn't sorry when, in 1927, she and his sister left for England, never to return. He had attended private schools in Sydney, but now he rejoined his father, who had invested in a property at Mystic Park in northern Victoria. He finished his schooling as a boarder at Geelong Grammar.

His father sent him to Brasenose College, Oxford, and he returned to Australia with a Master of Arts degree and a wife – an American student named Bettina Brown – hoping to become either a journalist or a diplomat. The unexpected death of his father meant that instead he was saddled with a life on the land.

The Gorton property, which had been planted with orange trees, had absorbed all the family's wealth and was only marginally profitable in the Depression. John Gorton's hard work and his anxiety to make ends meet added to his tough earthy make-up. Like other battling farmers, he joined the Country Party, becoming secretary of the local branch.

In 1940, he left his wife in charge of the orchard while he went off to war. As an RAF pilot, he crashed in action on an island near Singapore and suffered severe facial injuries, then escaped from Singapore on a ship that was torpedoed at sea; he was rescued from a raft. Back in Australia he underwent plastic surgery on his face, though without having his nose rebuilt because of the delay it would have entailed. Whereas he had been very handsome, he now had somewhat crumpled, but not unattractive, features. He transferred to the RAAF, and was lucky to survive two other crashes before the end of the war. Those experiences probably contributed to a devil-may-care streak in his political character.

The war and the continuation of a socialist government in Canberra heightened Gorton's interest in polities. He did a stint on the Kerang Shire council and, after switching to the Liberal Party, tried unsuccessfully to win a seat in the Victorian state parliament. He was elected to the Senate in 1949.

Strong-willed, independent and something of a larrikin, he was treated cautiously by Menzies, who did not give him a portfolio (the Navy) until 1958. Not until 1966, when Prime Minister Harold Holt made him Minister for Education, did Gorton enter the Cabinet. He was intelligent, innovative, direct and decisive, and it was these qualities that enabled him to win the support of the parliamentary party and rout Paul Hasluck, Leslie Bury and Bill Sneddon for the leadership after Holt had disappeared, presumed drowned, while swimming near his holiday home in December, 1967. Another candidate, William McMahon, was vetoed by the Country Party leader John McEwan.

Although Gorton had shown that membership of the Senate was no bar to the highest political post – he duly took Holt's seat in the House of Representatives – he was handicapped by lack of experience in the lower house and in coping with the political limelight. These deficiencies did not deter him from vigorously pursuing the policies in which he passionately believed – policies that in some instances confounded the most cherished Liberal traditions. He soon made it clear there would be no further increase in Australia's commitment to Vietnam and that he favoured a Fortress Australia, as opposed to the traditional forward defence concept of the previous era.

In some respects, he behaved more like a reforming Labor leader than a conservative. He brought in generous pension rises and modified the means test; stood up to the medical profession; and blocked the possible take-over of an Australian insurance company by overseas interests. He was a natural protectionist opposed to the free trade leanings of the Treasury, and supported such openly interventionist measures as the Australian Investment Development Corporation.

Seen by some in the Liberal Party as a dangerous maverick, Gorton made powerful enemies, including Henry Bolte and Bob Askin, the premiers respectively of Victoria and New South Wales, by attempting to implement his centralist views. However, his personal standing with the electorate always remained high, and he might have held office longer but for his style, which could be both cavalier and abrasive. Distrustful of large sections of the Public Service, he made appointments that affronted some of the government's most senior advisers, and imprudently gave increasing responsibility to his private secretary, an attractive young woman named Ainsley Gotto. His critics accused him of one-man government or alluded cynically to the "Cocktail Cabinet", a small group of cronies among his ministers and backbenchers with whom he liked to share drinks at the end of the day.

Gorton failed to see why he needed to change his informal, free-wheeling style simply because he was Prime Minister, but his indiscretions inevitably left him vulnerable to unscrupulous and usually unfair attacks on his reputation. On an official visit to London he was welcomed by expatriate Australians carrying posters that said on one side, "Hands Off Vietnam" and on the other, "Hands Off Liza Minnelli". The insinuation was related to an incident at a Sydney nightclub in which Gorton was said to have made a pass at the American singer in her dressing room, an allegation which both he and she strenuously denied.

Another embarrassment came after he had taken a young woman journalist to a meeting with the US ambassador late at night. One of his backbenchers, Edward St John QC, made this the basis of a trenchant attack on Gorton, as a result of which St John was expelled from the party. Bettina Gorton, normally a quiet woman with an academic bent, adapted a poem by William Watson, which she headed "Comment on Current Events" and sent to the press gallery:

He is not old, he is not young,

The Member with the Serpent's tongue,

The haggard cheek, the hungering eye,

The poisoned words that wildly fly,

The famished face, the fevered hand –

Who slights the worthiest in the land,

Sneers at the just, condemns the brave

And blackens goodness in its grave.

Despite his worthiness and bravery, Gorton's insistence on doing things his way finally eroded his support. The Labor Party under Gough Whitlam was rapidly gaining strength, and at the 1969 elections the government's majority was drastically reduced. Several of Gorton's most prominent colleagues began openly questioning his leadership.

A crisis occurred when Malcolm Fraser, one of Gorton's original backers, fell out with him and resigned as Minister for Defence. Fraser told parliament that Gorton "has a dangerous reluctance to consult Cabinet, and an obstinate determination to get his own way".

On 10 March 1971, Gorton sought a vote of confidence from the parliamentary party. The vote was 33-33, whereupon, with typical nonchalance, he gave his casting vote in favour of "no confidence". The gesture became more puzzling when it was learned that one of his supporters, who was indisposed, had been advised that he needn't make the effort to turn up.

Gorton became deputy leader and Minister of Defence under William McMahon, whom he despised, but a series of controversial newspaper articles that he wrote led to his dismissal five months later. In 1975, he vehemently opposed the manner in which Fraser became Prime Minister following the Governor General's sacking of the Whitlam government, and stood as an independent Senate candidate; he was not elected.

He was appointed GCMG in 1977, and lived quietly in Canberra. His first wife, by whom he had three children, died in 1983, and in 1993 he married Nancy Home, a widow.

Towards the end of his life he was accorded renewed honour by a Liberal Party that belatedly realised he was a more profound and enlightened politician, and more in tune with changing public sentiment, than many had suspected when he was in power. Indeed, John Gorton might have become one Australia's greatest Prime Ministers but for certain facets of his rugged character that he made little attempt to change.

Alan Trengove