John Singleton, “Ockers triumphant — they are us,”
Nation Review, April 2-8, 1976, p. 608.

When you’ve knocked around the advertising business for more than five minutes, one thing you learn real quick: everybody hates a winner. Which brings me immediately and also straight away to the new Australian advertising national sport: ocker knocking.

Anyone can play. All you have to do is sit down in from of your telly, pick out any ten ads that

  1. get your attention,
  2. hold your attention,
  3. make you an offer it is impossible to refuse,
  4. do so clearly and with a minimum of confusion or irrelevancy and
  5. have no slow motion running along the surf with sunset whatsoever.

The odds are 90 percent certain that you have now stumbled across your first ocker ads.

You know the kind: Uncle Bill, Jax the Ripper, Jeannie Little, Bumper Farrell jnr. esq., Victure Venture, Betty Best & Lotty Less, ‘Udson with a Haitch, Where do yer get it? etc, etc, as modesty forbids me running through our entire client list.

And the most flattering thing is that the ten dollar a week TV critics who give the ads such a good ocker-knock are also giving me the personal credit for creating the ocker cult.

If it were true I would be the proudest man in Snake Gully; but let’s remind ourself of the real Australian culture that’s been hanging around this joint since the first lot of convicts came out here to get away from the chilly pommy winters and even chillier pommy accents. Let’s look at our own Aussie language, our literature, our comics, our wireless shows, our films, our theatre and even our most popular TV shows.

Shock and horror! You find that in almost every case the most successful (being the ones most people most wanted to watch and being therefore the ones that made the most money for their authors/producers) were the ones that best understood and presented all those things that are most Australian about us all.

Our speech is quick and full of inspired colloquialisms that cut out the bullshit and get to the point with a minimum of fuss. “Owyergoing?” instead of “how are you going?” Quicker, more efficient, therefore better. An understanding that english is a living language; and that Australian is the living proof.

Our literature: Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, The Magic Pudding; Frank Hardy; Nino Culotta. Not an artificially cultured bone amongst them.

Our comic heroes: Bluey & Curly; Boofhead; Ginger Meggs; Fatty Finn; The Potts. Look at them again today. They haven’t changed since we were kids because Australia hasn’t changed since we were kids either.

Our cartoonists, the best in the world: Pickering; Leunig; Jolliffe; Mercier; Benier. Hard, tough, sad and totally irreverent. The great Australian ability to laugh at ourselves and actually see ourselves as others see us.

We turn back our ears to Dad & Dave and Jack Davey and John Harper and Blue Hills and Greenbottle and Amateur Hour, Pick-a-Box, Ken Howard’s rich red Fountain brand tomato sauce, and then surely we can immediately understand the logical progression to the best (most popular/successful) TV today.

Number 96, The Box, Celebrity Squares, that thing on the ABC which is Blue Hills with moving pictures. Sport, sport and more sport and stop press: Australia’s latest wireless/TV phenomena, Robert Maumill, who would have to be the closest thing to a genuine Aussie sales machine since John Harper went to that great 2KY in the 2KY.

The logic is irrefutable. We are most interested in ourselves, then our families, our streets, our suburbs, our city, our state, our country. Timor is running in the fifth at Canterbury and France is where all the cities are named after famous Australian biscuits and race horses: Monte Carlo, Nice, Cap d’Antibes.

Australia is where we are all at. Lindsay, Dobell, Namatjira, Pro Hart paint us. And if you spend a few hours in any public suburban bar you will understand it all 100 percent.

Unfortunately, most of the wankers in advertising much prefer the atmosphere at Fannys, Maxims, Glo Glos, Primos, the Chelsea and latterly Pips. When they do go to a pub it is only because it is the sort of pub that is full of other advertising people where mental masturbation is the only floorshow.

The writers who are supposed to be salesmen instead wish to become poets, and so become neither.

The art directors who would rather be painters and so became neither.

The account executives who would rather be sluts dressed up as store dummies and at least succeed.

And so when the great new toy of television is visited upon us in 1956, it has a natural attraction for all that is phoniest about the fringe art/writing/theatrical/advertising world. And the study trips to Hollywood are bounteous, and everyone tries to top everyone by trying to make the next commercial even more Australian than the last.

“It’s so good you would swear it has come straight from New York.” This was the ultimate criteria.

And while the mob at home with the four kids and the husband down the pub, and with more bills to pay than money coming in, all wondered what the hell it was all about, the wankers got away with it.

But now their game is up and like Whitlam, they have a magnificent obsession with the other boys from Balmain who have given them the miss. Because the so-called ockerism in Australian TV commercials is not a new phenomena, rather it is just a natural progression that is about 20 years late.

And for those who criticise and predict doom and destruction for all concerned, I would point out that those who are critical of our country and our people are those who really should be criticised because they neither understand nor respect their fellow Australian.

And I often wonder, in my quieter more understanding moments, why they don’t piss off.