“… yes, but what’s he really like?,”
The Australian Women’s Weekly, September 7, 1977, pp. 11-13.

John Singleton is one of those men everyone thinks they know, even if they don’t.

It’s rare to meet someone who hasn’t an opinion about him. His image is a sort of monster Ocker, a term he hates, because “people use it to denigrate not to cultivate.”

You have a drink with him in a pub and the world and his friend comes up to argue. Everyone wants to argue with John.

And yet, he’s so nice and affable about it all, you almost feel he doesn’t mind the intrusion on the very little privacy he has.

And then when you talk to him a little longer, when you get to know him better, and that’s not easy, because he doesn’t drop his guard much, and just when you think he has, you realize that there is a very reserved look in the strong blue, blonde-lashed eyes, and you know he’s trying to work you out … but I digress.

When you get to know him better, you realize that he does care very much about his privacy, that he cares, very much, about what people think about him.

Yet he hates such assumptions to be made about him.

John Singleton is a complex man. Certainly stimulating. Never boring — an accusation that could be levelled at so many men at the top in Australia. He is difficult to understand. I doubt that he even understands himself.

I first met him in 1972. Kerry Packer of cricket fame and chairman of Australian Consolidated Press, sent me to see him to discuss a new format for the women’s pages in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, then owned by Australian Consolidated Press, the publishers of the Women’s Weekly. (The Telegraph is now part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited Group.)

I remember little of our actual discussion. I do remember, though, my impression of John. He was, and I apologise for the cliche, a dynamic man. Enthusiastic. Positive. He spoke with conviction. I thought then, as I still do, that he was one of the most exciting men I’d ever met. I was sorry that the sale of the Telegraph in the same year robbed me of the opportunity to work with him.

That now has been rectified. John’s agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, now looks after the Weekly’s advertising. It often is mooted that the Weekly is the most Ocker of all his accounts, but so subtly Ocker that no one has noticed.

Singleton is a product of Sydney’s working class western suburbs, where he began his schooling. He went on to matriculate at Fort Street Boy’s High School, which boasts some of the nation’s most famous men among its graduates.

When he was a boy he wanted to be three things — “a vet, a barrister, a butcher” in that order.

He wasn’t good enough, he says, at science and maths to become a vet. “All I was interested in was animals.”

“To become a barrister I had to go to university full time and I couldn’t afford it.” And butchering? “There was quite a bit of parental disregard for that idea.”

So he became a messenger boy at J. Walter Thompson’s, one of the big advertising agencies in Sydney, studied Arts, then Economics at night at university, and failed at both.

Somewhere along the way he got his act together, founded his own advertising agency, SPASM, which he later sold to an American advertising company, Doyle Dane Bernbach. “I didn’t really enjoy selling out,” he admits. “I did it for the money.” He is now managing director of DDB in Australia.

He liked to talk about the company. He employs about 60 people. His staff like him. They trust him. He feels the same way about them. Everyone is friendly and efficient. It is important, he says, that everyone likes each other. “If someone isn’t liked,” he says, “they don’t last more than two weeks.”

Singleton is close to his mother and father, who still live in the western suburbs, in Enfield. “Dad and I share a common interest in sport, particularly football.”

Dad — his name is Jack, same as John’s only son Little Jack, aged five — supports Newtown, the football club John “took over” this year, with the hopes of getting it to the top of the Rugby League circuit.

1977, like 1976, hasn’t been a good year for Newtown. John says wait until next year. I guess we’ll have to.

Singleton doesn’t only support football as an entrepreneur spectator. He still plays — for Lane Cove, a suburban side on Sydney’s North Shore.

“The opposing side like to try to knock my block off when they discover I’m playing.” When you see him after a match you believe him. This winter he has been sporting black eyes, cut eyebrows, a swollen mouth and a splendid collection of other football wounds.

Why does he do it? “It makes me feel young. Like when I was eight or nine. You go into the dressing shed and it smells just the same as it did when you were a little boy. And you do the same things.”

Is he frightened them of growing old? “I guess I must be.”

He was born on November 9, 1941. For those who care about such things that makes him a Scorpio.

Because he is outspoken and, some of his friends feel, deliberately provocative, Singleton often is the target for poison pens and tongues.

His mother, Mavis, dislikes the many nasty things said and written about her son. She, naturally enough, finds them hurtful. “John is the best friend I’ve ever had.” You know she means it.

He is married to Maggi Eckardt, one time model, now a TV personality. Little Jack is his son from his first wife, Margaret. The marriage ended in divorce. He doesn’t like to talk about it.

He does talk about Little Jack though. Not much, but enough. He loves Little Jack. He doesn’t really have to say it. You just know.

He would love to have had more children. How many? “Twenty,” he says. But once, when he was being serious, he admitted he’d have liked six. The odds now must be against him. [Note to Economics.org.au readers: I think he now has seven kids.]

“I feel sorry for people who don’t have children. Children are your eternal life. They inherit your physical traits and environment. And your traits live on in them, and their children, and their children’s children.”

This prompts the question does he believe in God? “My version of God. No one on earth can explain how we began — the earth, the sea, the animals, the first tree … so there must be something beyond our knowledge. Whatever that something is, it must be God. Anyone who doesn’t accept there’s something beyond is a fool.”

Singleton has come a long way since his western suburbs days. He now lives in an enormous, luxurious home on the waterfront of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, with a view that they put on the tourist postcards.

He has a pool, a private beach, a boat, all the trappings of a rich man. He denies that he’s rich. You don’t believe him.

He has just installed a tennis court, much to the annoyance of his flat-dwelling neighbours, who fear it will create noise. He delights in annoying his neighbours even further by playing a juke box loudly at all hours of the day and night. “Sometimes,” he admits gleefully, “I go out and leave it on all day.”

He owns a beach home at Terrigal, where he has a telephone with a long extension cord so that he can sit on the beach and sunbake while placing his bets on the races. “Yes I gamble. All the time. Too much.”

He breeds race horses at Armidale in the New South Wales country with a business associate. He drives a swanky blue Rolls-Royce in which he often gets lost. He has no sense of direction.

Driving with him, like most things associated with Singleton, is unpredictable.

At 35, you get the impression, loud and clear, that Singleton is disillusioned with many things. Maybe jaded, too. “Next year,” he promises, “I’m going to take half time, so that I’ll be round for the second half.” Which means he is not going to work so hard.

“I’ve been working for 20 years. It’s a long time, Mate.” (Singleton calls most people, Mate.) “I can’t remember names.” You wonder if he’s feeling his age a little. “Well, I’m half way there, Mate, there must be more to do, to learn, to experience.

“There’s nothing I’ve done yet that I’m particularly proud of. If I died tomorrow I’d feel I hadn’t done enough to make me comfortable.

“People need to think of death more. It makes the present more important. People think they’re going to live forever. And they spend most of their day being nasty.

“Australia is a nation of such hate and envy.”

Almost three years ago Singleton became founding chairman of the Workers Party, now called the Progress Party in most States. It advocates individual liberty and absolute free enterprise.

He has now stood down as chairman, but is an active member travelling frequently throughout Australia to deliver the party’s promises, make speeches, shake hands, and have a beer with “ordinary blokes.”

He is just back from six days in the Northern Territory. “Door knocking. Gee, I love door knocking.” He loved the Territory too. He claims the people he spoke to were enthusiastic about the Progress Party and its aims. It pleased him.

“People in the bush are more tolerant of new ideas, less tolerant of what is wrong.”

Singleton is critical, and, for a professed open-minded man, highly intolerant of the Federal Government and the people who sit in Parliament.

“Most politicians have never run a business. How the hell can they run the country?

“Australia has been so lucky. We’ve done everything wrong and yet still made a quid. People have their colour tele and their car. Even if you’re unemployed you can live like a king on the dole. I would abolish the dole. People should be encouraged to work.” How?

“By reducing taxation; by flogging off Government Departments that we don’t need, like the Post Office — give it to private enterprise; by lifting all capital inflow restrictions.

“The Government should have nothing to do with import or export licences. If a company owns oil it should decide who it wants to sell it do; if a person owns uranium he should be able to make the same decision.

“The Government should do only three things. Look after defence, the police and the law courts.”

What does he think of our Government leaders? For once, predictably, not much.

“Malcolm Fraser should be ashamed. No one has been elected by such a massive majority to abolish the Welfare State and give back incentive to make people work. He has done none of it. He made only one promise during his election campaign, to abolish the Prices Justification Tribunal. And hasn’t done it.

“Gough Whitlam was the best thing that ever happened to Australia. He woke it up. Before people used to believe elections were Bob Menzies being re-elected every three years. Gough made us think. But I didn’t agree with his policies.”

He paused. “Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Now he has guts. He stands up to bullies like Bob Hawke. But I disagree with him entirely on civil liberties, anti-porn, anti-drugs. If someone wants to kill themselves let them go ahead.”

Singleton is hardly the man one would use in an advertising campaign on how to make friends and influence people. But then, does he want everyone to like him?

“No, but I’d like more people to agree with me more.”

He is as critical of big business as he is of Government. “I’m more anti-business than anti-trade union,” he admits.

“Apathy and ignorance has ruined Australia. And it’s right through everything. We should speak out more. We should use voluntary groupings more to make effective protests.” He, Singleton says, we should learn from Communist leaders. “They get together to achieve their objectives. The top 100 Australian companies could get together and speak out against unnecessary Government interference, like the Prices Justification Tribunal for example.

“I’m tired of businessmen who say, ‘John I agree with you, but you understand that a person in my position can’t be seen in public to take a stand with you’.”

Sure he understands, but he doesn’t like it. It makes him angry. It also hurts. Again you feel a sense of disillusionment.

Is there anyone he admires? Silence. Finally, he says yes. Two people. Ted Noffs and Lang Hancock.

Noffs, a Methodist minister runs the Wayside Chapel, a place, a refuge, where people can seek help 24 hours a day, in Sydney’s Kings Cross. He is well known for his work with drug addicts.

“Ted is living proof that people care about people, care if given incentive to care. It’s a relief to me to find someone who does good stuff.”

Hancock, the mighty mining magnate from West Australia, probably Australia’s richest man is, according to Singleton, “the only business man with 100 percent courage. He will not back down, bow down or compromise to any Government no matter what it costs him.

“He has enough money to stop but he still gets up at 4 am and works to try to get people enthusiastic about a country that no one really should be enthusiastic about.”

But what about Singleton himself? What is he enthusiastic about? Not much it appears.

And then strangely enough he praises the Australian advertising industry. Strange, because so many people in advertising think John isn’t, and hasn’t been, good for advertising.

He has lowered their standards, they say. It is common in advertising circles to hear his critics vocalising (to use their jargon) about his faults.

His Ocker approach to advertising, his “Where Do You Get It” ads and others of similar ilk, draw much flak.

He is more generous about his advertising colleagues. “Sydney is the advertising capital of the world. There is more creative talent here than anywhere I know.”

What does he do now? What does an ageing advertising whizz-kid do for an encore? Having admitted that he’d feel uncomfortable if he died tomorrow what can he do that will make dying comfortable for him?

He doesn’t really know. Is he happy? “No. You can’t be happy until you achieve something.” Can he change Australia? “No. Don’t think I can. That’s why I’m not happy.”

What is important to him? “Friends are important. I’ve only got a few. You can’t have too many.”

Then he tells you proudly that he is still friends with some bloke that he met at school when he was five. It’s nice, but he never forgets and won’t let you either, that he’s a boy who made it the hard way to the top from the western suburbs.

Maybe that’s his problem. He finds retreating into the past sometimes easier than coping with the present.

So what’s he really like?

Shrewd, immensely likeable and direct. He looks you straight in the eyes when he talks to you.

He still gets nervous when he gives TV interviews and speeches and betrays himself by constantly rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, rather like a prize fighter.

He is shy of anyone getting too near him, of being judged and analysed too accurately.

He doesn’t think much of women. “Well, women haven’t done much. Women should bring up families, should stay home and have babies.” Then he remembers it’s 1977 — “of course women should go out and work if they want to.”

He’s good-looking, overweight — “but fit, Mate; I run every morning” — drinks too much, works hard, plays hard. He is very generous. Gives his time and money freely to charity. “But I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to buy people’s respect. I want to earn it.”

He is good humoured. He laughs a lot and it’s easy to laugh with him. He is rumoured to have a fierce temper but he says it’s rare for him to lose it, but when he does, he does. He is loyal to his friends and he gets loyalty easily from those who care about him.

He would like to see the world more optimistic, to see people be more tolerant.

He admits to two golden rules for life. Don’t hurt anyone. Do whatever you like. He says they’re important but you can’t help but wonder if he sticks to them all the time.

There’s a magic about John Singleton. Somehow you find yourself hoping he’ll find that elusive thing that he’s looking for, which you suspect is happiness. Somehow you find yourself hoping that when the times comes for him to die he’ll feel, if not comfortable, at least at ease.