John Gorton
Sir John Grey Gorton was an Australian politician, farmer and airman who served as the 19th prime minister of Australia from 1968 to 1971. He held office as the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, having previously served as a senator for Victoria. He was the first and only member of the upper house of the Parliament to assume the office of prime minister.
Gorton was born out of wedlock and had a turbulent childhood. He studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, after finishing his secondary education at Geelong Grammar School, and then returned to Australia to take over his father's property in northern Victoria. Gorton enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in 1940, and was a fighter pilot in Malaya and New Guinea during the Second World War. He suffered severe facial injuries in a crash landing on Bintan Island in 1942, and whilst being evacuated, his ship was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine.
Gorton returned to farming after being discharged in 1944, and was elected to the Kerang Shire Council in 1946; he later served a term as shire president. After a previous unsuccessful candidacy at state level, Gorton was elected to the Senate at the 1949 federal election.
Gorton took a keen interest in foreign policy, and gained a reputation as a strident anti-Communist. Gorton was promoted to the ministry in 1958, and over the following decade held a variety of different portfolios in the governments of Sir Robert Menzies and Harold Holt. He was responsible at various times for the Royal Australian Navy, public works, education, and science. He was elevated to the Cabinet in 1966, and the following year, he was promoted to Leader of the Government in the Senate.
Gorton defeated three other candidates for the Liberal leadership after Harold Holt's disappearance on 17 December 1967. He became the first and only senator to assume the office of Prime Minister, but soon transferred to the House of Representatives in line with constitutional convention.
His government continued Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, but began withdrawing troops amid growing public discontent. His government notably encouraged and fostered the re-establishment of the Australian film industry. Gorton retained office at the 1969 federal election in the Coalition's 20th year in office, albeit with a severely reduced majority. After alienating his party's right wing and following the resignation of Malcolm Fraser from his ministry, Gorton resigned as Liberal leader in March 1971 after a confidence motion in his leadership was tied, and was replaced by Billy McMahon. After losing the prime ministership, Gorton was elected deputy leader under McMahon and appointed Minister for Defence; he was sacked for disloyalty after a few months.
After the Coalition's defeat at the 1972 federal election, Gorton unsuccessfully stood as McMahon's replacement. He briefly was an opposition frontbencher under Billy Snedden, but stood down in 1974 and spent the rest of his career as a backbencher. Notably, during this period Gorton moved the motion which decriminalised homosexuality federally and in the territories. Gorton resigned from the Liberal Party when Fraser was elected leader and he denounced the dismissal of the Whitlam government; at the 1975 election he mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate as an Independent in the ACT and advocated for a Labor win. He later spent several years as a political commentator, retiring from public life in 1981.
Gorton's domestic policies, which emphasised centralisation and economic nationalism, were often controversial in his own party, and his individualistic style alienated many of his Cabinet members. His political views widely varied and were incongruous, although he is generally regarded as having shifted further to the left over time after starting his parliamentary career on his party's hard right. Conservatively, he opposed Indigenous land rights, was opposed to an Australian Republic, was and at times fervently supported Australia developing nuclear weapons, but progressively, he staunchly supported drug decriminalisation, LGBT equality and reproductive rights. Evaluations of his prime ministership have been mixed; although he is generally ranked higher than either Holt or McMahon, Gorton is usually considered to have been a transitional prime minister who ultimately fell short of his potential for greatness.
Early life
Birth and family background
John Grey Gorton was the second child of Alice Sinn and John Rose Gorton; his older sister Ruth was born in 1909. He had no birth certificate, but official forms recorded his date of birth as 9 September 1911 and his place of birth as Wellington, New Zealand. His birth was registered in the state of Victoria as occurring on that date, but in the inner Melbourne suburb of Prahran. However, that document contained a number of inaccuracies – his name was given as "John Alga Gordon", his parents were recorded as husband and wife, his father's name was incorrect, and his sister was recorded as deceased. At some point before 1932, Gorton's father told him that he had actually been born in Wellington. There are no records of his birth in New Zealand, but his parents are known to have travelled there on several occasions. John Gorton apparently believed he was born in Wellington, listing the city as his place of birth on his RAAF enlistment papers, and claiming so to a biographer in 1968. If he were so, it would make him the only Australian Prime Minister born in New Zealand.If John Gorton was indeed born in New Zealand, this would have made him a New Zealand citizen from 1 January 1949 under changes to New Zealand nationality law. Holding dual-citizenship would have rendered Gorton ineligible to sit in Australia's federal parliament under Section 44 of the Australian Constitution. Gorton's eligibility to have sat in parliament throughout his career is therefore unclear.
Gorton's father was born to a middle-class family in Manchester, England, UK. As a young man he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he went into business as a merchant – during the Boer War, he developed a reputation as a war profiteer. He reputedly escaped the Siege of Ladysmith by sneaking through Boer lines, and then made his way to Australia. He was involved in various business schemes in multiple states, and was to said to have "lived on the brink of a fortune which never quite materialised". One of his business partners was the inventor George Julius. At some point, Gorton's father separated from his first wife, Kathleen O'Brien, and began living with Alice Sinn – born in Melbourne to a German father and an Irish mother. However, Kathleen refused to grant him a divorce. Some official documents record Gorton's parents as having married in New Zealand at some point, but there are no records of this occurring; any such marriage would have been bigamous. Gorton never denied his illegitimacy as an adult, but it did not become generally known until a biography was published during his prime ministership.
Childhood and adolescence
Gorton spent his early years living with his maternal grandparents in Port Melbourne, as his parents were frequently away on business trips. When he was about four years old, his parents took him to live with them in Sydney, where they had an apartment at Edgecliff. Gorton began his education at Edgecliff Preparatory School. When he was eight years old, his mother contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium to avoid passing on the disease. She died in September 1920, aged 32. Gorton's grieving father sent his son to live with his estranged wife Kathleen. There, he met his sister Ruth for the first time; he had previously been told that she was dead. Although she was his full sibling, she had been raised by Kathleen since birth, and rarely saw her biological parents. Gorton initially lived with Kathleen and Ruth at their home in Cronulla. They later moved into a larger house in Killara, in the north of Sydney.While living in Killara, Gorton began attending Headfort College, a short-lived private school run by a former Anglican minister. In 1924, he began boarding at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, initially on a weekly basis but later on a full-time one. He did not excel academically, failing the Intermediate Certificate on his first attempt, but was a well-liked boy and good at sports. Gorton began spending his holidays with his father, who had purchased a property in Mystic Park, Victoria, and planted a citrus orchard. He left Shore at the end of 1926, and the following year began boarding at Geelong Grammar School, which he would attend for four years from 1927 to 1930. He represented the school in athletics, football, and rowing, and in his final year was a school prefect and house captain.