Vale Tony Barker: writer, editor, musician and longtime Green Left supporter

Writer, book editor and musician Tony Barker, who has died aged 96, was for many years a subscriber and financial supporter of Green Left.

He rarely called himself an activist, but his long life often intersected with great campaigns of the Australian left.

Tony was a trade union member from his time as a working trombonist through the Sydney big-band and jazz scene of the late 1940s and ‘50s, playing the Musicians’ Club circuit, and later in the newspaper industry at the Sun and Fairfax, where he lived through the printers’ strikes and composite-paper disputes of the era.  

In 1953, after several years abroad, Tony began the long journey home as one of five young Australians who drove a 1936 London taxicab across 13 countries and 12,000 miles to Sydney.

The route took on a political edge, after they were barred from driving through Iran in the aftermath of a coup, orchestrated by the United States and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, which had nationalised Iran’s oil industry.

Instead, the travellers put their vehicle on a ship in Basra and sailed through the straight of Hormuz to Karachi in Pakistan.

Back in Sydney, Tony turned the adventure into an ABC radio talk, “Down the Persian Gulf”, and in February 1955 he married Joyce, a film censor and trade unionist.

As an editor at Angus & Robertson, he played his part in shaping Australian publishing, working with writers like Judith Wright, herself a tireless campaigner for Aboriginal land rights and conservation.

It was the Green Bans era that left the deepest mark on Tony’s political affections. He was a longtime friend of Jack Mundey and the Builders Labourers, attending the anniversary gathering at Kelly’s Bush in 1996 and riding the Green Bans bus tour organised by Lee Rhiannon in 2012, from Pyrmont to the Rocks to Hunters Hill.

In October 1997, Tony joined the Australian Society of Authors’ “Copyright Bus” to Canberra, protesting the John Howard government’s proposed digital exception to the Copyright Act — changes that would have let schools, libraries and governments copy and digitise writers’ work without fair pay.  (As his family recalls, he enjoyed telling the story that he sat next to the author of Bananas in Pyjamas on that bus to Canberra).

Nearly 30 years on, that fight could not be more relevant as senators interrogate AI executives and the government drafts laws that would let tech giants train their models on Australian books.

The same battle over whether creative labour is owed a living is being fought again.

Well into his 80s, as an active member of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, Tony campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, standing with unions and civil society against investor-state dispute provisions which would have let corporations sue governments over public-interest laws.

Tony attended Green Left’s annual dinner in Leichhardt in 2012, and was a regular fixture at launches of left and labour history, including Mick Tubbs’ exposé ASIO: The Enemy Within launched by Bob Brown. 

In The Book of Quotations he co-edited with Robert I Fitzhenry, Tony made sure to include this quote from Mundey: “Ecologists with a socialist perspective and socialists with an ecological perspective must form a coalition to tackle the wide-ranging problems relating to human survival. Such survival is based on a way of living in harmony with the rest of nature. My dream, and that of millions of others, might then come true: a socialist world with a human face, an ecological heart and an egalitarian body.”

Tony is survived by his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.