Dennis Minogue, The Age, March 16, 1976, p. 23.

SYDNEY. — Kim Bonython’s Paddington art gallery, all white and pure, tiled floors, willows in the courtyard, natural spring waterfall, is arguably Australia’s most tasteful modern monument to art, beautiful, under-stated, simple.

The extravagances have always been on the walls in this home gallery to Brett Whiteley and Paul Delpratt and the most avant of the garde of sculptors and etchers, painters, ironsmiths, perhaps eccentrics.

The Bonython gallery is soon to change hands for a reported $350,000 and if critics of the new owner are correct the building will become a citadel to ockerism, headquarters for the glorification of all things vulgar.

It is an extraordinary twist, the transfer from the perhaps too-smooth Mr. Bonython, art patron, to the very exuberant John Singleton, advertising whizz, political activist (extremist?), founder of the Workers’ Party for all things bright and profitable, creator (say some) of the 1970s ocker Aussie, bigger and brasher even than Hogan the bridge painter.

That his purchase of the beautiful Bonython should cause some sense of outrage in the Paddington-Woollahra set rather suits the Singleton style. He has been shocking Australians and soaking up the fear and loathing for what seems a lifetime and becoming successful by emphasising the crudities of our life.

What would our television night be like now without the curious genius of Singleton — Victor and Vera Venture of Venture stores; Jeannie Little for Sleeman Ford; Bob Maumall for Channel Nine, the ultimate ockers, all horrible and compelling.

Singleton, if any man is to have credit, invented the horrible ad. He is the conjurer who pulls an image of ourselves from the hat for us to laugh at. In that, he poses the conundrum. Does the artist invent or reflect the image.

He says:

Look mate, there will be three stars born in Australia this year — John Michael-Howson doing his Victor Venture bit, Jeannie Little, Bob Maumall. And all of them through advertising.

It is perhaps his most annoying trait that he is correct more often than not.

His pending purchase of the Bonython is simply the latest physical manifestation of his success, a progressive from the ultra-trendy offices in a row of terraces in advertising-haunted Darlinghurst; a progression like his ascension from a slick adman’s Porsche to the Rolls-Royce that told the world he has succeeded beyond the lace cuffs and velvet suits stage.

Well, one of his cars, a Rolls incidentally, was blown up during the heat of the 1974 Federal election campaign when Singleton was making extraordinary advertisements for the Liberal Party. Well, that was its own mark of his success in stirring the reds under the beds and the pinks in the wine bars.

He is an extraordinarily complex character, at once a subtle magician and a ham-fisted self-made success, the lad who clawed up the toughest way and won on wits.

The problem for his detractors, and he repels them in droves in literally every area he enters (advertising, politics are exceptional examples), is that his ideas blossom, perhaps in grotesque form, but most of them thrive (well, the Workers’ Party might be more a weed and seems reasonably under control although fed a steady diet of fertilising money).

If, as he believes, he is really one of the few people who understand Australians, then there is cause for despair among those seeking signs of the great cultural evolution. He has proved, above all things, that culture is the veneer and beneath it is the mass of horrible coves and coots and blokes and, even more, sheilas.

Of course advertising, our advertising, is aimed at women. Women make between 80 and 90 per cent of all purchases of consumer goods, or are responsible for them, including houses and cars. Of course we aim at women. We, this agency, understands Australian women perhaps better than anyone else in the country.

We have spent more time and money understanding women than all the other advertising agencies put together. We have talked to literally thousands of women in groups of seven or eight for two and a half hours at a time. We’ve been doing this for years.

Of course I keep some image of the average woman in my mind, the women we want to reach. They have three or four children, live in the suburbs, have a higher education level than their work, housework, requires and therefore they have a high level of boredom.

That’s what we do, you know. We put entertainment into the dull bits of their life, the shopping. Regional shopping centres had the idea first. Shopping is a bore. But they wrapped a boring business in show business. The regional shopping centres have some oomph. You can go there and see the stars — television and singing stars.

There is entertainment for the children. They have made shopping seem glamorous. And that’s what we’ve done with our ads: not made the business glamorous, but mixed entertainment with a boring chore.

John Singleton does, however, seriously attempt to understand Australia and the people and the place of the ocker (it is, incidentally, unfair to label Singleton as simply an ocker king. One of the most scenically beautiful advertisements of the year, for IXL fruits, was also made by the man).

Singleton thinks it is a “terrific compliment” that people say he invented the ocker:

I think it is praise, although others might call it criticism. In any case it is not true.

What you have here is the most nationalistic country in the world bar none. And the ocker has always been here — Roy Rene, the ocker can be seen in Ginger Meggs and Blue and Curley, the most popular of all comic strips, and in Number 96, the most popular programme. I didn’t invent the ocker. He’s always been here.