Summary heading

Person registration completed as part of the Prime Ministers Papers Project (December 2001).

Career within Commonwealth

Bettina Gorton (nee Brown), daughter of Arthur and Grace Brown was brought up in Bangor, Maine in the United States of America. Known as Betty, she was educated at Bangor High School and Hannibal Hamlin School, contributing to school magazines and showing talent as a pianist. She subsequently commenced studying Romance languages at the University of Maine at Orono and later at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935 she married John Grey Gorton, whom she had met the previous year in Spain through her brother. He was then a student at Oxford University in England. They had three children (one daughter and two sons).

Intelligent and strong-minded, Bettina ran the family property at Lake Kangaroo (Mystic Downs), near Kerang in Victoria, while Gorton was serving overseas with the RAAF during World War II and in the early period of his career in federal politics in the 1950s. They were difficult years. She later defined farming as ’20 per cent agriculture and 80 per cent mending something that’s busted’ (1). When Gorton was Minister for the Navy, she came to live in Canberra and resumed her academic interests. Gaining a degree in Asian studies in 1965, she subsequently worked on a Malay-English dictionary. She did not enjoy public life but Gorton often sought her opinion on political matters and she supported him during his controversial term as Prime Minister (1968-1971). In that period, Bettina took an active interest in the development of an Australian natives section in the garden at The Lodge. For some years after coming to Australia she had retained her American citizenship, but in the late 1960s a Department of Immigration ruling allowed her dual nationality. She has been the only US-born wife of an Australian Prime Minister.

Bettina became Lady Gorton following her husband’s knighthood in 1977, but died in 1983. Gorton remarried ten years later.

Links to other Commonwealth Persons

16 Feb 1935 – 1983:  CP 136, The Rt Hon Sir John Grey GORTON GCMG, AC, CH, PC

Publications

End notes

1) Trengove, Alan, John Grey Gorton: an informal biography, p83

Sources

‘Sunday Magazine (Sunday Telegraph), 31 Dec 2000

Trengove, Alan, John  Grey Gorton: an informal biography (Melbourne, Cassell, 1969)