Australian Dictionary of Biography

George Barnes, 1952

State Library of New South Wales

George Victor Barnes (1927–2000), boxer and businessman, was born on 20 February 1927 at Temora, New South Wales, elder twin and third of seven children of New South Wales-born Eric Victor Barnes, boxer and blacksmith, and his English-born Jewish wife Cecilia Matilda, née Rice. George’s maternal grandfather and two of his uncles were also boxers, as were three of his four brothers. His father, who fought as Frank Burns, won the Australian middleweight title in 1921 and boxed, with mixed results, in Europe from 1922 to 1927. George’s Depression childhood was spartan, with the family prospecting in the early 1930s. The children’s staple food was rice pudding, made with milk from their own cow, and served from half a kerosene tin.

By the late 1930s, Eric was employed as a blacksmith with the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd (CSR) at Pyrmont wharves in Sydney. After a public school primary education, George followed his father into the blacksmith trade at Pyrmont, mastering oxyacetylene and electrical welding. Despite initial paternal discouragement, he acquired fighting skills at the North Sydney Police Boys’ Club, with his father as boxing instructor. Aged fifteen, he began amateur boxing as a welterweight, losing his first two bouts on points. He moved into the lightweight division and was runner-up in the 1944 New South Wales amateur championships.

Volunteering to serve in World War II, Barnes enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 9 April 1945 but hostilities ended in August while he was training as a sapper. From April 1946 he cleared mines and bombs in New Britain with the 51st Field Park Company, Royal Australian Engineers. Discharged in Sydney on 21 February 1947, he returned to blacksmithing with CSR, before taking up professional boxing in 1948. By September the following year he was hailed as ‘the most brilliant welterweight prospect in Australia’ (Gamester 1949, 6) after knocking out the hitherto undefeated Queensland boxer Max Skinner. On 19 November 1949 Barnes married Betty Alma Agnes Smith, a sales assistant, at Sydney’s St Philip’s Church of England.

Barnes’s subsequent boxing career was a series of peaks and troughs as he fought across lightweight and welterweight divisions for the next thirteen years. In 1952 he twice defeated the African-American fighter Wallace (Bud) Smith, a future world lightweight champion. These victories made the nuggetty, muscled Barnes a white Australian hero, in an era when pugilism was frequently viewed through racial prisms. During the first of the two bouts, in Melbourne in June, a crowd of eight thousand applauded Barnes’s scoring punches and jeered Smith’s superior ringcraft. Later, after Barnes lost his fifteen-round battle with Freddie Dawson in 1954 but was not knocked out, racial stereotypes were evoked as he was hailed as ‘a plucky Australian champion’ who ‘took some severe punishment, but proved too tough for the negro to knockout’ (Mercury 1954, 28).

Guided by his father early in his career, Barnes later employed Ern McQuillan as manager-trainer. This brought him under the umbrella of the monopolistic Stadiums Ltd, which dominated Australian professional boxing. It offered boxers opportunities but treated them as employees with limited rights. Barnes regarded the gruelling trade of pugilism as business, from which he should derive fair remuneration. He alleged exploitation, complaining that the £300 he received from Stadiums Ltd for his first defeat of Bud Smith was paltry. His second victory brought him £500. In October 1953 he became Australian welterweight champion, defeating Lithuanian-born Pran Mikus over fifteen rounds before a ten thousand-strong crowd at Sydney Stadium. He was the first son of a national Australian title holder to emulate his father. In November he retained the title, knocking out his friend, the former Australian welterweight champion Tommy Burns, who was attempting a comeback. The estimated fourteen thousand spectators who flocked to the encounter between two of the decade’s most popular boxers provided a return of around £2,350 to each.

Confident of his drawing power, Barnes chafed at Stadiums Ltd returning boxers a maximum of 25 per cent of bout revenue, with McQuillan taking a quarter of his earnings. He broke with McQuillan and Stadiums Ltd in March 1954. His father-in-law, Jim Barker, became his manager and Arthur Fennell his trainer. Barnes explained, ‘I am in boxing to make as much money as possible as quickly as I can’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1954, 8). He had accepted a £3,000 offer from a new promoter, the Australian Boxing Club, to fight the title-holder, the New Zealander Barry Brown, at the Sydney Sports Ground for the British Empire welterweight championship. Knocking out Brown in the eleventh round, he secured the title.

Barnes was a top drawcard in the 1950s, one of boxing’s peak decades. Fans admired his fearless aggression, though his casual defence left him vulnerable. Three times he won both the Australian and British Empire welterweight crowns. When he turned thirty-three early in 1960, he was still filling stadiums but his toughness and fighting ability were ebbing. In April he was humiliated by the American pugilist Ralph Dupas, disappointing the crowd of twelve thousand. His final loss of the Empire title to Brian Curvis in Wales attracted twenty thousand, who applauded his courage, even though he was outboxed by the Welshman, eleven years his junior. In December 1961, at Sydney Stadium, he lost his Australian welterweight title to the decade-younger Gary Cowburn, an Indigenous boxer from Queensland. The crowd of almost seven thousand noisily disputed the verdict. During his attempt to wrest the title back from Cowburn two months later, Barnes suffered the first knockout of his career. The Queenslander floored Barnes three times before his manager threw in the towel, with referee Vic Patrick ruling a technical knockout, disgusting Barnes and most of the ten thousand spectators. Barnes protested that he was ‘only coasting’ (Canberra Times 1962, 16), waiting to attack when Cowburn faltered. It was his last professional fight.

Amiable, unpretentious, and shrewd, Barnes supplemented his boxing income by providing security for venues and celebrities, including Frank Sinatra on an Australian tour. He rebuffed approaches from Sydney criminals to fix fights and took pride in being ‘a good bloke and a gentleman’ (Barnes 2023). After retiring from boxing he became a pineapple farmer on Magnetic Island off Townsville, and, later, the owner-manager of the El Dorado Motel on the Gold Coast. The boxing historian Peter Corris acknowledged Barnes’s popularity and courage, but judged him deficient in technique. Grantlee Kieza was more generous, nominating Barnes’s 1954 battle with Freddie Dawson as one of the great bouts in Australian boxing history. In his later years Barnes assisted distressed retired boxers. He died from lung cancer on 23 August 2000 at Benowa and was cremated. His wife had predeceased him (d. 1995), and he was survived by their two sons, Robert and Wayne.