Elizabeth Riddell, “… OTHERWISE I WOULDN’T DO THESE COMMERCIALS,” Australian MEN Vogue, May/June 1977, pp. 48-50.

How would you justify using the headline “Ocker and Genius” about John Singleton, advertising agent and political innovator?

In fact you couldn’t. But it is a clue to the man’s pervasive, perhaps obtrusive, presence in sections of Australian society that the headline was used in The Age, a respectable Melbourne newspaper.

I came on this overblown label when I was looking through files before going to see Mr. Singleton in his offices at Squizzy Taylor Square, a jokey name for an area of East Sydney. Within the last couple of years he has acquired a quite thick file, for two reasons. One was the founding of the Workers’ Party, the newest minority political group. He did not do it all himself, but his personal and promotional enthusiasm got it off the ground. The other was his introduction of ocker advertising on television. He is sometimes also credited with the invention of the ocker, but this is not so. The ocker anti-intellectual, anti-creative arts and crafts, anti all education except that to be gained in the School of Hard Knocks, greedy, defensive and loud-mouthed existed before Singleton was born thirty-five years ago, the original having arrived, no doubt, with the First Fleet. (We are what we come from: had Australia been settled by the French or Dutch or Spanish, which it almost was, we might be a lot of things but ocker would not be one of them.)

The thing to do with a file is read it, close it and go to find out for yourself.

I saw Mr. Singleton on one of his last days in Squizzy Taylor Square. He recently bought the Bonython Gallery (for a reported $350,000) in Paddington when the former proprietor, Mr. Kym Bonython, returned to Adelaide; and after alterations — a new entrance, a block of land acquired for a car park, big windows, individual offices (but not too many), the translation of the Bonython living room into a piano-room-and-bar for after-hours relaxation, and the master bedroom into a conference room — has moved in, lock, stock, barrel and cage of canaries. The cranky-willow in the courtyard has been retained, Julie Bonython’s great bank of greenery on the top storey survives, and the fountain and stream babble on near the old entrance in Victoria street. Still, it does curdle the blood a little.

When I rang him up and asked him to talk to me for this magazine Mr. Singleton said, “But I’m the most un-Vogue man you ever saw.” Maybe, but his office — typewriter and necktie bolted to the wall 20 feet up, joke plaques and posters — could have been out of Vogue LIVING, one or another issue, and carrying, of course, its own built-in obsolescence. He was wearing jeans, a velours Indian-type over-shirt and on his feet loafers so relaxed they could have been bedroom slippers, if Mr. Singleton could be thought of as the kind of man who wear bedroom slippers, ever.

He has a good tan, streak blond hair, a big smile, a small mouth that scarcely moves when he speaks in a low voice with mutilated vowels that make him hard to follow unless he is actually speech-making on television or radio. He throws away the end of every sentence, or statement.

“This place is really crook,” he says, looking distastefully at the matt brown walls (what was good in March, in this kind of scene, being lousy in October) and leads me onto the roof garden, or what was the roof garden, or that part of it which has not been destroyed by insensitive hands.

“We had a beautiful roof garden here. Then the place was bought, and an insurance company told the new owners that the roof was unsafe. So they covered it with sheets of iron.” He gave the roof a kick and turned away. The afternoon sun, blazing down on iron, turned his cheeks to the colour of a Queen Elizabeth rose. We went back inside, where canaries sang in bamboo cages and employees padded by on bare feet.

He is charmed by the idea of moving into the former Bonython and seen no incongruity in cutting up its light white caves into little enclaves of industry and power.

Let us take Singleton the advertising man first. He started out as Singleton of SPASM, with a partner named Duncan McAllan, and others, and was bought out for some colossal sum like three million dollars (he doesn’t get all of this, naturally) by the international advertising firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach. He is not boss of the Australian end of the operation. But before SPASM there was work with J. Walter Thompson and Berry Currie. His chief interest is in television advertising, and it is not all of the notorious Where D’ya Get It type.

“You have to isolate the product,” he says. Meaning that he does not advertise Yardley’s cosmetics and IXL jam in the same way he advertises the business of Norman Ross or Hudson’s or David Holdings.

“People think of my kind of advertising as new. They have forgotten John Harper, and what he did with advertising on 2KY.” And adds, “The renewal rate is over two thirds.”

Singleton put retail selling on television, an innovation that holds many women mesmerised in front of their television sets when they meant to get on with the ironing. These advertisements, called “horrible and compelling”, may transfer the viewer into a buyer. Can we believe the people who say they will never buy a product ocker-ly advertised? Can we believe that some people use television ads as their only buying guide? Can we believe commercial surveys? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Ask the man paying the man to stir up something new in a vat in a factory, far from the madding market. It will show up in his account books.

A few months ago John Singleton was marred to Maggi Eckhardt, his great and good friend in a ceremony conducted by the Rev. Ted Noffs. It was a cliché mating of vigorous ambitious ad-man and an angular European beauty, formerly (and still occasionally) a model and now anchor-woman for a morning television show. They live in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, by the harbour shore. He drives a Rolls Royce Corniche. “We lead a very simple life,” he says. “A few beers and a bit of steak. We have very few friends, we don’t go out to parties. I couldn’t be bothered with all that stuff.”

During a Monday Conference meeting with the South Australian bookseller and columnist, Max Harris — who deplored ockerism — Singleton said he would rather have a beer and a barbecue than sip sherry and have a sit-down dinner with cultured conversation.

Wasn’t that, I asked, a curiously old-fashioned attitude to food and drink?

“That’s the way Australians like it,” he said. In fact he does dine out, at good restaurants, and has been known to take a glass of wine.

Is this a working-class chip on the millionaire’s shoulder, I ask. He is not offended.

“I was blessed with a very sound family.” (A nice quote that might come well from Joh.) “They encouraged me to do well. My father was a production manager in a battery factory. I went to school at Enfield, where we lived (Enfield is in Sydney’s western suburbs, but not the far-out-bikey western suburbs) and then to Fort Street where I matriculated. My study was erratic. When I had an exam coming up I would read the stuff up the night before. My English was hopeless. So was my French and Japanese. There must be a better way to educate kids. Apprenticeship may well be the answer. In apprenticeships a kid has a chance to work with someone who actually knows and understands the work. If you find anyone who is good, you will find that he once worked for someone who was good.”

He broke off to say that he wasn’t interesting, but “this place” was.

“It is completely unstructured. When we began we had a hard time but now a lot of good things are getting off the ground. The people are paid more than they get in other places, and salaries go up automatically, which avoids confrontations and the putting of individual cases. There is no regular lunch hour. People take a break. No long lunches anyway, no entertaining of clients, no drinking during the day. If they don’t like it they don’t have to stay.”

How can a business be “unstructured”? Try as I might, I could not get him to explain how a diversity of opinion among staff members of roughly equal standing could be rationalised into a policy applying to a product or a client — unless he acts as arbiter, a proposition he brushed aside. “I don’t know how it works,” he said. “I’d love to know. But anyway we are all having a good time.”

Everyone at Doyle Dane Bernbach is very polite, including the boss. They even answer the telephone nicely and they have a distinctly up-beat approach to the unsolicited enquiry or visit. I don’t think that any of the social mechanisms of Singleton’s office operation are trivial. There is a real case for talking to the people who work with you. In advertising it may be more common though it certainly isn’t, generally, in the newspaper or radio or television business. John Singleton is the second highly successful businessman I have met who trusts his staff, takes them into his confidence and pays them, not too reluctantly, what they are worth.

When John Singleton led a group launching the Workers’ Party at the Opera House in Sydney in January 1975, amid the jeers and cheers of the populace, he had not ready anything to tax his brain since he left school, but he has since read a good deal of economics (and Ayn Rand, of course) and has now written a book with the cute title of Rip Van Australia which is to be published soon by Collier Macmillan. You can be certain it will lack style, or at least any style except belligerence, if it follows the tone of the columns he has been contributing to Nation Review, a newspaper read mostly by two kinds of people: sixteen-year-old iconoclasts and those who want to find out what Mungo McCallum thinks is happening in Canberra.

Is the Workers’ Party a manifestation of the chip on Singleton’s working-class shoulder? Singleton says he went into it because “I hate people who just sit around saying things are crook.” The encapsulated policy of the Workers’ Party is less government, less tax, less inflation and more freedom. The government should only do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

“Do you realise,” Singleton says, “that the average Australian works two out of three days for the Government, and that Government takes from us seventy-two cents in every dollar?”

Well, no, I didn’t.

“But I believe you,” I said.

At its birth the new party has 2,000 to 3,000 foundation members who each subscribed $50. It has put up candidates in both Federal houses, in State elections (except in Victoria) and at local government level. Membership renewal is said to be sixty percent annually. Those who do not wish to pay between $5 and $50 membership fees may still signify devotion at the ballot box.

Singleton says, “The membership is stable. It hasn’t got bigger and it won’t get bigger.” He did not sound too pleased.

In December 1975 the WP entered candidates in the election precipitated by the dismissal of the Whitlam government, at an estimated cost of $300,000 but did not make much of a dent in the vote, in spite of some business and country backing. It may well be that Australia is unable to support realistically more than two political parties, as is the case in America. In Europe it can be done, and it has sometimes looked possible in Britain. (About four years ago, when I was living there, the Liberals made a run for it. The current joke was: “The Liberals are doing well. They will need tow taxis now to take the party to the House of Commons.”)

The policy advocated — government withdrawal from everything but defence, police and law courts — is derived from the philosophy of the American writer Ayn Rand, who in her novels propounds the gospel of ultra-capitalism. The Prime Minister, Mr. Malcolm Fraser, also reads (or did read before he got so busy) the Rand works.

It is conceivable that Mr. Fraser would like to do all the Ayn Rand/Singleton things, but he is a man of practical politics, and the Workers’ Party is not strong enough to influence the Liberal-Country Party government. Mr. Fraser has not invited Mr. Singleton for a discussion of the economy, or even for a drink. And there are some things in the Workers’ Party platform (not necessarily given the greatest prominence) which would not appeal to the squire of Nareen. Such as decriminalising drug use, prostitution and abortion and letting the porn flash free. They might also differ on the value of farm subsidies — Singleton is against them.

When people (Professor Henry Mayer was the first to do so) call them “anarchists of the right” they overlook these awkward items, which stems from Singleton’s dislike of coercion of any kind. And those who see members of the Workers’ Party, in their role of “anarchists of the right”, as a potential danger disregard facets of the Australian character: our famous apathy, our indifference to everything but quick food and drink, television, spectator sport and refrigerators, our safe-guarding mediocrity which keeps us on an even keel, unrocked by anything, either uplifting or degrading.

To Singleton, government, any government, is the enemy. He believes in self-help and in helping others, a belief he oddly enough shares with many a member of many a commune.

He made an interesting statement in this regard: “Take spastic children. If you or I have one, we will not only look after the child but take an interest in all spastics.” Well, some years ago I was told by one of the top people at the Spastic Centre (NSW) that fathers of spastic children (and fathers of deaf and dumb and blind children and autistic children and mongoloid children if it comes to that) frequently fly the coop leaving it to the mother and to welfare. They see an imperfect child as a black mark on their virility, so they quit the family scene.

A short time ago some sections of the Workers’ Party changed the name to Progress Party, while sticking to the policy. The name was thought confusing for possible adherents.

Was it Singleton’s politics or his ad-man’s instincts that caused him to devise Liberal Party television advertising used in the 1974 Federal elections? The ads seemed designed to elevate the notion of totally free enterprise above even the level aspired to by Liberal politicians. In any case they caused some heartburning among Libs which may have helped irritate their creator into forming a party of his own.

Singleton’s latest publicised exercise is to try to get some financial and sporting muscle for the Newtown (NSW) Rugby League team, and incidentally bolster the finances of the League as a whole.

“I want to get some money into Newtown for better facilities and to buy better players,” he says. “Newtown is a poor club. It needs money.”

Why is he doing this? “For sentimental reasons,” he says. Newtown is not far from Enfield.

Singleton is very keen on the Australian Way of Life. But what is the AWOL? Is it my AWOL or theirs or yours or that of Mrs. B. who comes to clean for me once a week and who lives in the same Paddington street in which Miss Eckhardt lived (rather more grandly, with burglar alarms and the Rolls parked on the pavement outside the door) or his?

But Singleton has at least helped us to think a little about work. Many of us, trapped in the Protestant ethic, can’t live without work. Some of us are lucky enough to work at something we don’t actually hate. Although, work at it long enough you may come to hate it.

The lectures emanating from John Singleton and his political cronies might be received a little more gratefully if they were not delivered by men who actually pursue professions and deliberately chose to do what they are doing, in advertising, medicine, engineering, economics, the land and so on. And of course some of us think work is a mug’s game. Singleton is, he admits, a bit up against it in a country that prefers to have its hard physical work done by non-Australian, non-skilled immigrants and their women.

I’m not sure that I know any more about Singleton now than I did when I closed his file. With perfect amiability, he turns questions aside. There is this air of being absolutely certain about everything. The public and the private man seem to be the same. But can they be?

In spite of the smiling, blond, huggy-bear exterior I don’t see him as a sunny-natured man. Farouche might be the word for his personality. He is certainly complex, and he may not be aware of how complex he is.

I don’t think anybody should lay a bet on what he will be thinking and doing five years from now.