A few days later I took the train down again from Stawell and got off at Spencer Street carrying my suitcase and a huge sense of expectation. The first thing was to find somewhere to stay. I found a bed at the YMCA on St Kilda Road, where Melbourne’s Arts Centre is now. It was cheap and all I could afford, a shared room with three other young men. I didn’t mind these basic digs. How could I? I had achieved a dream: coming to the big city and knowing I was on the first rung of the ladder. I was a little bit proud that I had impressed Mr Cheel by travelling so far to Melbourne. It reinforced in me for life the value of showing keenness and standing out from the crowd. It’s a lesson I took into all aspects of my business life for the next fifty years.
But before applying these lessons, I had a more urgent task at hand: to arrive on time, neatly dressed, and ready for work on the Monday morning. It was a frightening experience. My first job was to ride a bike around the city to pick up deliveries and do errands. I had to learn the street names quickly, which I did. Melbourne’s city centre is in square grids, so it wasn’t too hard.
The winter of 1959 was about to turn into spring. Melbourne seemed huge after Stawell. The gardens that fringed the city were starting to burst into life, and the trees at the top end of Collins Street—often described as the Paris end—were turning green. People were rushing about with their very busy lives. Fresh from the country I was dazzled by the glamour and sophistication of these people going off to work. I’d walked around with my uncles and aunts on my several trips to Melbourne, but now I was alone. Everything was up to me. It wasn’t as though there was much of a safety net. My father was hundreds of kilometres away and I hadn’t made any friends yet, but I found that invigorating.
Getting settled wasn’t helped by the fact that I was shy beyond belief. But I felt my new life was going so fast that my shyness didn’t hold me back. I didn’t do too much talking—I was just open to all these new experiences.
After two weeks at the YMCA I moved to a boarding house in Wakefield Street, Hawthorn, near Glenferrie railway station, where I shared a room with a young man who snored. It wasn’t ideal. I was able to get in touch with an old friend of my father’s from the sawmill who lived in Richmond. He told me about a flat behind a pie shop in Church Street that might be available. I went and had a look. It was tiny—about eight feet by six feet—but perfect. I was so impressed that I now had my own flat in Richmond, even if all my clothes had to be stacked in a bookshelf. Even today, once every six months I go back there and remind myself what humble beginnings are all about.
My path was set. I was working in Melbourne, living in my own place and about to meet the most interesting people and see how an advertising agency worked. I was starting at the bottom, but that was OK. No one has ever accused me of being scared of hard work. I was going to create a life in Melbourne, and I knew I was ambitious, hardworking and ready for anything.
I soon discovered that office boys didn’t get paid too much—certainly not enough to live on. At the end of the week, I spoke to my father who told me a friend was heading out with a shearing group and had a job, which I could take in the next week, paying fifteen pounds. I was at that point earning four pounds. So I had a very considerable dilemma: should I take the money or not? I turned down the shearing job because I realized a job in a big city in radio might be very good for me. I had a strong sense of self-improvement. I was busy; I was disciplined about learning more.
I loved reading, and would often pick up a paperback and read in the flat. I didn’t finish high school and I had always wanted to go to university because I wanted to know more about the world. I signed up for some night-school courses at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology to learn more about advertising and television production. It was three hours a night, two nights a week. I stopped after three years when it turned out I was preparing the course notes for one of the instructors whose hangovers were freezing his brain. As much as I enjoyed study, I felt I could probably learn more on the job.
I was a skinny seventeen-year-old finding out the most amazing things about life. What I didn’t know Phillip Adams filled in. At twenty-four, Phillip was a veteran of two years at the agency. I came to know Phillip very well. He was witty, smart—sometimes a smart-arse—the whole range of everything that he continues to be. There was a sophistication about him—well, to me, anyway—that I didn’t possess. But he never cold-shouldered me. He was friendly and welcoming and wonderful company. We didn’t socialise much together outside work. We were from entirely different worlds—even back then he was one of your intellectuals, and I was a quiet young person from the country.
Phillip went on to set up his own advertising agency, Monahan Dayman Adams, and he developed successful advertising campaigns: Life Be In It, Slip Slop Slap and Guess Whose Mum’s Got a Whirlpool. He is still amazed that I became as successful as I did. He has written about me, remembering how shy I was. He says I could barely speak. That’s not quite true. It’s just that I felt in awe of the colour and movement around me.
I couldn’t believe these people I was meeting. I thought, how long has this been going on? I was dazzled by this new world. Upstairs there was a lady who was an art director. Phillip told me she was a lesbian, and I couldn’t believe it. This was 1959, I’d grown up in a country town, and in the one week I met someone who was a communist and someone who was a lesbian. It almost blew me away.
The photographer Helmut Newton worked out of a studio in LaTrobe Court, which was opposite Briggs & James’s office in LaTrobe Street. All sorts of interesting people would walk into this studio, including many beautiful women. I wasn’t as familiar with Newton’s work then as I am now, so it was probably best I didn’t turn my mind to the photographs he was producing of fishnet-stockinged dominatrices with whips and large leather boots. The graphic images might have been too much for me as I cycled around the central business district. What an amazing part of Melbourne I’d be spending so much time in. Indeed, the checking department of the agency used to be—not that long before—an opium den. LaTrobe Court was where some famous painters had their studios, including Wes Walters, the Australian realist portrait painter and abstract artist who won the 1979 Archibald Prize for his portrait of Phillip Adams. A very glamorous part of town.
I worked on everything you could do in advertising except draw. I worked in the checking department, read all the newspapers, pulled ads out of them, cut out relevant articles. I was a copywriter, a researcher, an account executive; I did a bit of management and a stint in the media department; I worked as a television director; I made ads for radio; I learned how to set type. I knew what production was like inside newspapers because I had to be physically involved. I was a copy-checker for a while. You get very careful about making sure there are no spelling errors in the text. Today I can still run my eyes down any page of text and, without quite knowing what the word was, find the spelling error. I tried very hard not to point that out to anyone just to show off so they didn’t think I was a total smart-arse. It was classic on-the-job training.
It was at this agency that I learnt to speak, to find confidence, to assert myself. I conquered my shyness quickly out of necessity. Shyness was a curse in the world of advertising. You just couldn’t function if you couldn’t present yourself adequately. At my job at Briggs & James, I only needed to speak to groups of two at a time, which I could handle. Then, one day when I was twenty-six, I was asked into a meeting to be confronted with the general manager and a table of eight executives.
‘Harold, you might like to present all of this.’
I froze. The blood drained from my face. I knew every detail of the material the boss was asking me to present. It was the presenting I was terrified of. I stumbled in and did my best. I don’t think I did the best job in the world, but at least I had had a go. And the ice was broken. I now knew I could stand up and speak in public, which stood me in good stead in future.
I also did a lot of observing, and learned a lot about how people operated: all invaluable. The main lesson I learnt, though, was to treat people as equals. In this business, you either did that or you didn’t make it.
Regular life went on outside all these dazzling new experiences. I would go on shopping expeditions and buy five pairs of highly coloured socks, all of which were so disgusting I could never wear them to work, but they were cheap. In later years, when I found myself working seven days a week, I fell into a habit of wearing the red socks to remind myself it was Saturday and Sunday. Nearly fifty years later, I still wear red socks at weekends to remind myself not to work.
I kept in touch with my family. I’d write letters to Dad letting him know I was fine. He’d write back—not often, but often enough to let me know he was there for me if things didn’t work out. He would keep me posted on news of my brothers and sister and the town. I was alone in a big city, and sometimes I was lonely, but I knew my father had confidence in me, and that gave me strength. I felt older than my years, and very occasionally I would feel a sense of pride at how well I was coping.
After a year in Church Street, Richmond, I moved into a small house in Arnold Street, North Carlton, with three other young men. It was an interesting group of people. One was a clerk of courts in the city, another worked as an administrative assistant at the Royal Park psychiatric facility and the last one was a trainee Anglican priest. It was a typical house in Carlton. It was fun—a lot of drinking in local pubs, a lot of parties, quite a wild time. We would wander around Lygon Street and head for the famous Jimmy Watson’s where we drank cheap red and cooked our own steaks on the barbecue. Sometimes we stopped for a coffee and spaghetti. But usually the activity was joining some of the guys from Melbourne University and trying to have a beer at as many as possible of the many pubs dotted along Sydney Road, Brunswick. Sometimes we’d stop at a hamburger place on Sydney Road that sold in coffee cups some of the worst Chablis I have ever tasted. The wine was truly revolting, but what it had on its side was that it was available at 2 a.m., which made it, to some of my thirstier friends, nectar of the gods.
We all worked hard, and on Saturday night we played hard. And drank hard. We’d stand in the pubs and get into it. The advertising people, who were meant to be the edgiest of all, sat back and watched these crazy people from the lunatic asylum, the clerks of the courts and the trainee lawyers from the court system knock back the beers. Later, when we got home, we would, in this less-than-sober environment, help our friend—the trainee minister of religion—write his sermons for the next morning. It’s hard to write a sermon when you’ve got seven beers in you, and are full of youthful bravado. I wonder whether some of the ones we helped him with were shared with his congregation. If I’d been up in time, I might have wandered down to the church one Sunday to check.
I met Bevelly at a university party in Carlton one Saturday night. I wasn’t a university person, but they always seemed to have lots of parties. Bevelly was with her girlfriend Lalah, and my friend Ken Stevens said that we should drive both of them home after the party, which is what you did in those days. So we did. I had not had a girlfriend before, so I was quite an innocent. It was a bit tricky because I didn’t have a car and nor did she. We went to the pictures one night, which is what you did. The next week I invited her to a ball, which was a very big thing to do in those days, and we started going out. Eighteen months later, in 1963, we were married.
Bevelly came from a strong working-class environment with great family values of honesty and integrity. Her father died shortly after we were married. Her mother lived until she was ninety-one.
Bevelly’s mother was a marvellous woman who had five children. The family lived in Port Melbourne where her father had worked on the wharves. It’s full of aspirational middle class now with big mortgages and two children, but in the early 1960s Port Melbourne was a tough neighbourhood with pubs on every corner, often fights on the street after the six o’clock swill, and a game of football down at Port’s home ground on Williamstown Road on a Saturday afternoon.
It was a colourful life. Bevelly remembers one of the famous cases of the late 1950s where one of the stand-over men, Freddie Harrison, was killed by a shotgun blast. Bevelly’s dad was one of the forty wharfies on the wharf that day who didn’t see a thing because they were all in the toilet.
It was a community in which everyone would look after everyone else. Dad might be away in jail, so everyone would pitch in and help the family until he came back again.
Bevelly’s mother was mother to the whole of the street. She would sew everyone’s clothes and take up the boys’ pants, and if they couldn’t pay, she wouldn’t charge them, even though she couldn’t afford to do that. She would make the young girls dresses for when they got married, because they couldn’t afford that either. She helped the whole street that way. And she would always listen and give straight talk to any of the young ones that got into trouble. She was a very strong, kind woman with a natural flair for reaching out to people who needed it.
Their little neighbourhood was well known because of the young footballers who would come down from the country to play for South Melbourne in the then VFL, which twenty years later became the Sydney Swans in the AFL. Adjacent to Port was a suburb called Garden City, well known for its ‘bank’ houses which had been built by the Commonwealth Bank after the war as a way of getting people back on their feet and where a lot of the criminal class lived. They called Garden City ‘Baghdad’—home of the forty thieves.
There was a huge trade in stolen goods in all the pubs, which was interesting given that the doors were never locked. I found that you could buy anything—as long as you didn’t mind the fact that the label had been cut off. So I didn’t wear anything with labels for quite some years.
I bought my first car—a Holden ute—from a family who said that they wouldn’t need it for eighteen months. I found out later that they didn’t need it for the next eighteen months because the young chap who owned it was going to jail. As the boy’s father gave me the keys, he reminded me that there was an iron bar 18-inches long in the front seat—just in case.
Port and Garden City were populated with a cast of colourful characters. Nappy Ollington ran the last of the great two-up schools, in North Melbourne, and lived in ‘Baghdad’. Bevelly still remembers these characters almost affectionately as down-to-earth people; they just had a different type of career. The thinking went that they were good criminals, unlike the latter-day ones who were aggressive and violent.
Bevelly’s mother worked long into the night as a seamstress to keep the family together. So working-class values were probably built into all of us over a long period of time, which have infiltrated to our kids.
Bevelly’s mother was wonderful to me. I was twenty-one, and living a life where I cooked for myself and ironed my own shirts, which is what you did when you lived in a shared house with three other young men. I was used to it, having lived alone since I was sixteen. She was extremely kind and, although I was pretty independent, I was grateful for the attention. She would give us extra little things for the flat, like tea towels. She would cook wonderful plain food, which we enjoyed. It was all about sharing. It reminded me of one of my aunties I lived with two or three times after my mum left home. Mum left home a few times, and each of those times, we were sent off to live somewhere for a while. My auntie would cook a big roast for her five children, and if someone brought another friend for Sunday lunch and they arrived a little bit late, a new plate would emerge and a piece would be taken off everyone else’s plate, to make another lunch. This stuck in my mind forever—how people can share. I have tried to carry that all the way through my life.
Often I wondered about my mother. Where was she? Was she all right? For three years I didn’t see her. Then in 1963, through my father, I found out she was working at the Portsea pub as a barmaid. I also found out then about her drinking. Dad had told me that in the years before she left, Mum drank too much, and that was why she wasn’t able to bring up four children. I had no idea. I thought I would go and see her. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how she would react to me. I felt it was something I had to do.
I went with a mate down to Portsea. We drove down and parked under the huge fir trees that form an archway into the little township. I walked into the pub. I felt a mixture of curiosity, nerves and a belief that I had spent the past three years proving I was OK on my own, that I didn’t need my mother’s presence. Years later, from an adult perspective, her leaving would cause me a lot of pain. But at twenty-one I felt what many young people feel: bullet proof.
I walked to the front of the pub and looked out at this beautiful stretch of beach where Melbourne’s rich were spending their summer. The seagulls wheeled around above the Portsea pier, and a couple of fishermen had lines in. I walked in. Mum was behind the bar. I knew her male friend was working in the pub as well, but I didn’t meet him.
‘Hello, Mum.’
She was pouring a beer and looked up, just slightly startled. ‘Hello, Harold.’
We didn’t speak much. It was though she was another person. I felt as disconnected and detached as one might expect after what had happened. I asked her how she was; she asked me where I was living and working. I could see she had a new life and that she really had left us kids behind. I didn’t feel empty about this but, looking back, I can see it was a pretty tough reality to accept.
I said goodbye and walked towards the car. Our meeting had taken just a few minutes. There were so many questions, so much to resolve. Neither of us was ready or willing to try and do that. We had so much to say, but we said nothing. And that’s where it ended. As we headed back up the hill towards Melbourne, I didn’t know that I would never see her again.
I never reconnected with my mother. In one of the great sadnesses of my life I didn’t see her for the last forty-five years of her life. She tried to contact me several times. I wouldn’t take her calls because she was an alcoholic, and talking with her wouldn’t have achieved anything. It was of course a tough decision, possibly the hardest one I’ve ever faced. There must have been resentment and some anger there for me to feel that way. The scars are deep. I’ve internalized so much of what happened when I was a teenager. And it surfaces only by chance, usually when I see children suffering in films. That is the quickest way to unlock my emotions.
A couple of times in the early days I helped her financially, but she ran through the money in an instant. She found a place near some relatives in Gippsland, so it was good to know where she was, and if she needed something I would send her money; I was able to make life a little bit more comfortable. She never knew I was funding her in the nursing home. I did it partly because I could. It didn’t make me feel any better about anything that had happened. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
I got through the pain of Mum’s leaving by being busy in my career. It wasn’t a bad coping strategy. After seven years at Briggs & James, I left to become the media manager for an agency called USP in St Kilda Road, which was a jump up, introducing me to television in a big way. I spent three years there, then joined a well-known agency called Masius Wynne Williams, where I stayed for seven years.
By thirty I was national media director at Masius. By thirty-three I was running the media-buying operations of Australia’s third-biggest advertising agency. Never at any stage did I stop to consider a big plan for my career. My views on career structure formed much later. In the 1960s I was being carried along on the tide. Happily, I liked where it was taking me.