I don't think that even John Grey Gorton, 19th Prime Minister of Australia (January 1968 to March 1971, born 1911, died 2002) would regard his prime ministership as being an unqualified success. Well meaning, perhaps. Unlucky, certainly, at least with regard to timing. He inherited a tired conservative government which was well past its sell by date in an increasingly radical and alternative time. He had, for the first time in a long time, a charismatic and popular opponent. And to top it off, he was not a good media performer in an age when television was the defining medium. He also had in his ministry at least one person who felt that the leadership should have been his after the previous Prime Minister, Harold Holt, disappeared while swimming off a beach in Portsea Victoria. (Or was hoovered up by a Chinese submarine, if you believe such things.) And indeed, Billy McMahon, Holt's deputy, would have been Liberal leader but for the Liberals' coalition partner (the then Country Party, now the Nationals) putting the kybosh on that by threatening to withdraw from the coalition and sink the government. The then-Country Party leader, "Black" Jack McEwen, loathed McMahon with a passion for various reasons that we need not explore here.

That was the one piece of luck that Gordon had, and it resulted in him being elected leader despite being a senator at the time. He therefore quit the Senate and was elected as the Member of the House of Representatives for the seat of Higgins which had been, er, "vacated" by Holt, thus allowing Gorton to take up the job of Prime Minister.

Luck was never Gorton's strong suit, though, with at least three crashes to his record as a fighter pilot in World War II. One of them apparently left him with a disfigured face. I was aware of the story, but can't say that I really noticed. He was craggy, but so were a lot of men of his age back then. Nor would I have been aware of it had I not been told the tale. But on the other hand, I never met the man personally. Oh, and after his worst crash? The ship that he was being evacuated on was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. On the other hand, at least he survived.

In the 1969 election the Liberal/Country Party coalition came close to losing government and the knives were out for the leader. With the leadership of the Country Party having changed following Black Jack's retirement, a McMahon leadership was no longer out of the question and the rumblings started. Gorton went to the party room for a confidence motion, which ended up tied. He could have stayed on with that, but decided that his position as leader wasn't tenable and pulled the plug on it.

McMahon won the leadership, and fumbled and stumbled his way until he lost the 1972 election. (In my view had McMahon been leader from the start, it's quite possible that Whitlam's Labor party would have won in 1969 and Australia's history may have been somewhat different. McMahon was dreadful as a leader. Utterly, utterly dreadful.)

Unlike some former PM's, Gorton has very few monuments in Canberra named after him. One of the few is this building which sits between the National Gallery of Australia and Old Parliament House. The John Gorton building houses the Department of Finance and Deregulation. Hmm, a curious pairing, considering how much of the GFC was caused by insufficiently regulated financial trading room cowboys.

This shot was taken at first light, when we went down to see the hot air Balloon Spectacular show. Unfortunately our luck was as good as Gorton's and the balloon launches were cancelled because of the wind direction.

The building itself dates to well before Gorton's time. It was first planned in 1924. The original architect designed it in the Stripped Classical style which was popular in the inter-war years, in Canberra at least. (Remember that Canberra was a heavily designed city, rather than one which grew organically like most capitals. A building here, and of this basic size and structure, was part of the "national triangle" plan from the outset.) However it was not fully designed until 1946, and it was completed in 1956. Foundations had been laid as early as 1928, but then work stopped due to the Great Depression. Then, of course, there was a world war to deal with.

The building is on the is on the Commonwealth Heritage List, so is likely to be around for a while yet.
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Edit 31 Jul 2024: The Department of Finance and Deregulation no longer exists. Its existence roughly paralleled the time that Labor was in power from 2007 to 2013. (That's an interesting coincidence, since Labor's first major test of that period in office was the aforementioned deregulation-driven GFC.) Its successor is the plain old Department of Finance which, some time after 2022, moved to shiny new digs at 1 Canberra Avenue, Forrest, on the south eastern side of Capital Hill. At the time of writing, the Gorton building was occupied by the the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

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