The extraordinary life of Barbara Bolton – an unusual, one-of-a-kind officer
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
As of 27 June 2026, it will be 30 years since the Promotion to Glory of Major Barbara Bolton, a Salvation Army officer and journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald and the Salvation Army editorial department.
While we often tend to venerate the dead, it takes a great deal for someone to be considered remarkable, one of a kind.
In her tragically short life, which ended at just 54, Barbara authored Booth’s Drum, the only comprehensive history of The Salvation Army in Australia, and one of only a few histories of the Christian church in the nation. Barbara was also the writer behind the Ginger Brown character, who featured in a weekly segment in The Young Soldier.
Additionally, outside of the Army, Barbara pushed the boundaries as a journalist, at one point documenting a week of living on unemployment benefits on the streets of Sydney for The Sydney Morning Herald. Barbara also wrote several children’s books, most notable among them being Jandy Malone and the Nine O’Clock Tiger, which received a commendation from The Children’s Book Council of Australia.
Over several months, I spoke with many of Barbara’s friends, an accomplished group who spent their early days in The Salvation Army, and some of whom went on to serve as officers.
Lieut-Col Frank Daniels
For two years as a young Salvationist in the 1960s, retired officer Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Daniels spent every Sunday with Barbara in Melbourne.
“I used to pick her up from our friend’s place on a Sunday morning,” Frank says. “She’d come to Thornbury East [Corps], and she would help with Sunday school, and then come to the morning meeting, then we’d spend the day together. She’d come home [with me], and we’d have lunch. She was very impractical as far as anything domestic was concerned, so I used to do all that for her.”
Frank says Barbara was often “in another world”. The two had met at Frank’s 21st birthday party. Frank said the party atmosphere had been loud and boisterous, and while wandering through the venue, he found Barbara sitting in a corner, finishing an article.
“She could be in that setting and yet be focused on writing an article,” Frank says.
He describes arriving at Barbara’s house one day to find a strong smell emanating from her kitchen. He asked her what it was. “[She said] ‘Oh! I put the peas on for tea, and I forgot to turn them off!’”
Frank says Barbara was not afraid to go against the grain and engage in political demonstrations, such as campaigning against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He says he remembers her marching in the demonstration, but without realising, she had put her officer’s hat on back to front.
“That was a political statement, but [for] Barb, I don’t think that reached her brain,” Frank says.
Frank says Barbara’s love of those on the margins or facing oppression was a trait that went back to her teenage years living in Tasmania. After Barbara’s father died of tuberculosis, Barbara spent some time living with her aunt in Hobart, where she saw the heartbreaking reality of poverty for the first time. While she was in school, the State Parliamentarian for Welfare addressed the assembly. Barbara, disagreeing with a point she made, stood up and contradicted her.
“She was always very much keen on social justice, feeding the poor and looking after the poor,” Frank says. “I’ve known her to give away her last dollar. That’s the sort of person she was.”
Frank says even while she was in the editorial department, she continued volunteering on the frontlines at The Salvation Army. He remembers how one elderly, isolated homeless man was very ill, and she washed his clothes and visited him in hospital almost daily.
But Frank says Barbara’s love of social justice and thoughtless streak sometimes put her in harm’s way. After assisting with homelessness responses at Little Bourke Street Corps in the Melbourne CBD on a Friday night, Barbara would walk home to her house in Normanby Avenue, Richmond.
“She’d just wander home through the Fitzroy Gardens, and I used to say to her, ‘Barb, you shouldn’t be doing that at night!’ She seemed to be oblivious to a lot of things. She was unique, and we loved her for it.”
As a corps officer, Barbara struggled in the role. As administrative skills didn’t come easily to her, she found the daily work of management challenging. And there was another problem.
“She wasn’t very musical at all,” Frank says. “She couldn’t sing to save her life, so leading the actual meetings and services was difficult.”
Whenever I spoke with someone about Barbara, eventually, they would begin to laugh. It was contagious laughter, the kind that starts out quietly and builds to an unstoppable giggle. Whether it was her lack of practical ability, her unusual dress style, her attempts at music and cooking or her witty sense of humour, almost 30 years after her death, I found it remarkable that her friends hadn’t stopped finding her amusing.
Barbara Bolton at different stages of life – (from left) as a young senior soldier, as an officer captain, and later as a major.
Major Jenny Begent
Major Jenny Begent, another friend of Barbara’s, also remembers her friend’s musical ventures. Jenny says Barbara was already a seasoned officer when Jenny began in the Army, and one whom Jenny always admired for never being afraid to say what she thought. Jenny says Barbara was hilarious, and often “unwittingly so”.
“I remember she was once the editor of The Musician, which was a paper we used to have that circulated to all our musical sections, and she knew not a word about music. She couldn’t read it, she couldn’t sing. She was tone deaf,” Jenny says. “And they made her the editor of The Musician. I remember we had the International Staff Band out here. When the ISB arrived, she went to the concert to write about it, and she didn’t mention one piece of music. She didn’t have a clue!”
Jenny also recalls Barbara trying to find ways to make even the dullest of tasks amusing. Jenny says Barbara had a knack for “taking the mickey out of everybody at the same time”.
“We both ended up on the vehicle committee,” Jenny says. “It was the most boring thing. [One time], someone had hit a stationary object, and they used the word ‘stationery’ as in pens and pencils. And Barbara said, ‘Do you reckon it was a ruler?’”
But alongside Barbara’s sense of humour and knack for finding the ridiculous, Barbara’s friends remember her fondly as someone who was exceptionally bright, and who had a profound impact on those whom she encountered. They remember her sermons and how confident she was when speaking without notes. One notable example was a four-part sermon series she gave at what was the Fitzroy Corps, in which she spoke on Revelation and the idea of a new heaven and a new earth, from a basis of restoration theology.
Major David Eldridge
Her friend, retired officer Major David Eldridge, remembers her being “well-read”.
“She had the gift of making complex ideas accessible for people,” he says. “Barbara took the Bible seriously, but not literally. And it fed her actions as well. They weren’t just words with Barb.”
And they weren’t. David says that at one point, one friend visited Barbara’s apartment and found that she had no electricity. As it turned out, she had paid her neighbour’s power bill and had no money left to pay her own. When their friendship group would play Monopoly, Barbara would refuse to purchase any properties and stuck to buying up utilities “because she was a good socialist”, according to David.
“She was radical, but in her own quiet way,” David says. “She was always in trouble with somebody.”
Barbara’s social conscience came through in her work. A piece by Barbara in the 7 July 1990 edition of The War Cry titled ‘The church that refused to die’ examines the reasons Christian belief persisted in Eastern Europe despite Soviet control.
Barbara’s conclusion captures the essence of her unwavering belief in a God who can overcome any political turmoil.
“In Eastern Europe, the Church has refused to die because its Lord is too vigorous, too vital, too alive for death. He was the element official Communism never understood, and in the end, He will beat it. He is also the element which official Capitalism has never understood, and He will beat that too.
“Christ and Christ alone is unconquerable.”
In a War Cry piece on the AIDS epidemic, Barbara expressed a desire for those facing the disease to be treated with compassion and tolerance.
“In spite of the efforts of Christians to provide HIV/AIDS education, there is still prejudice in religious circles,” Barbara wrote. “Some still see AIDS as God’s weapon against promiscuity. For many Christians, AIDS is still the disease that happens to ‘other’ people, a disease which is ‘deserved’.
“Yet Jesus said very clearly that human beings did not have the right to judge one another. Mercy always came at the top of His moral agenda.”
Ross Gittins The child of Salvation Army officer parents and renowned economics journalist and editor Ross Gittins credits his start in journalism to Barbara, who encouraged him to use his writing skills.
“She did a lot to encourage me to write for her and her publications,” Ross says. “She was really encouraging me to be a kind of amateur journalist, and we became friends and exchanged a lot of letters.
“I may not have ended up as a journalist had it not been for the encouragement Barbara gave me [then].”
Later, when Barbara was on a break from the Army and looking for work, Ross secured her a job as a Church Reporter with The Sydney Morning Herald. During this time, Barbara would share a meal with Ross and his wife every Sunday evening.
Soon after, Barbara was again in the editorial department and was later appointed to International Headquarters, where she was editor of All the World.
Ross remembers being on a British Government press junket during this time, in which he found himself with plenty of spare time. He spent it eating in restaurants, watching movies, visiting concerts, and spending time with other Salvationist friends with Barbara.
It was then, while Barbara was living in London, that she discovered she was suffering from the disease that would eventually shorten her life: multiple sclerosis.
Barbara’s difficult diagnosis was not the first battle she faced with courage and pragmatism. Her reason for taking time out of The Salvation Army was known only to her closest friends. David Eldridge remembers the cost of the generosity and kindness that Barbara so consistently showed to those around her. He says she had her struggles with mental health, as a result of a life marked by stress and constant giving.
“Barbara could be depressed and could work herself into a state of exhaustion. And I think she got to that point. I think she just got drained and was looking for something else,” he says.
John Cleary Another of Barbara’s friends, John Cleary, a veteran ABC broadcaster and religion commentator, remembers his “extraordinary” friend as someone who was so easy to like that even when her views were at odds with those around her, she managed to maintain strong connections.
“I think even those people who disagreed with Barbara would never have had an argument with her,” he says. “She was just one of those people who treated everybody with kindness and civility, even when she knew she deeply disagreed with them.
“I think it’d be hard to find anybody who had a bad word to say about Barbara.”
He remembers her feeling crushed following the publication of Booth’s Drum, as her hopes for the book were dashed when the rigorous research she had put into the work over a very short period of time was removed, in order to make the narrative more accessible to a Salvation Army audience. This choice made the book, which could have otherwise been a groundbreaking work at an academic level, far less valuable as a documented history.
“It must have hurt her enormously to have that, because all the work counted for nothing outside of the Army,” John says.
When Barbara died in 1996, she left behind an enormous body of work across multiple Salvation Army publications, children’s books and media. But her friends remember her as someone who didn’t just push the boundaries in her work, but who really understood what it meant to minister to others in a rapidly changing world.
John says her death was a sudden loss of someone who deeply understood the currents within society and within The Salvation Army.
“What was lost was somebody who understood the Army to its core but was also connected to the reality of society now, and that was very unusual for an officer to be that well-connected in both,” he says.
“She got it. And that was a profound loss.”
