Pod Insights ABC Rewind 01 Where the bloody hell were you! Television comes to Australia About this episode Join host Dee Madigan for a wild ride through the golden days of Australian advertising.
When TV arrived in Australia in 1956, it brought American ad agencies, international sophistication and the rise of the cultural cringe.
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0:07 Speaker 00 ABC Rewind.
0:12 Speaker 01 Ah, aren't you ready, Mars?
0:16 Speaker 02 Guess whose mum's got a whirlpool? How do you feel? Not happy, Jan! G-O-G. You know what I mean. There ought to be a better word than delicious.
0:26 Speaker 03 Yes.
0:28 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Dee Madigan. Excited to be taking you on the first of our adventures into the colourful, wild and crazy days of Australian advertising. Where the bloody hell were you?
0:43 Speaker 02 Prepare yourself for a new radio thrill. See and hear the new 1937 is master's voice, true to life radio receivers without delay.
0:53 Speaker 04 Now, remember that television didn't arrive in Australia until 1956. But advertising, of course, began long before that.
1:03 Speaker 04 We're going to start our story in the late 1940s. And who better to tell the story than the elder statesmen and stateswomen of the industry?
1:15 Speaker 02 When you hear that cheery snap, crackle, pop, you're all set for a delicious breakfast.
1:20 Speaker 05 My name's Bruce Jarrett. I was born at Enfield, a suburb of Sydney, 1932. Same year that the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened.
1:33 Speaker 05 About the age of, I think I was 17, I saw this ad in the paper for advertising at Farmers. Farmers, no longer there, it's now a mire. It was a very upmarket department store, really. Even more upmarket than David Jones was in those days. And I happened to say to my mother, that's the sort of thing I think I would like to do when I finish school. She said, well, why don't you apply for it? And I said, well, I better finish school. And she said, oh, go ahead, just apply for it. So, anyway, I spoke to my French teacher about it. And she said, well, I think you're a natural for advertising. So I did apply for it and I got the job.
2:24 Speaker 00 My name is Marian von Adelstein. I was born on the 21st of July 1932. I grew up at Bankstown and also at Guildford. I spent teenage years at Guildford. And I had been sent to a domestic science school as opposed to a high school, which was a kind of a defining time, really. That means that you're schooled to work below stairs rather than upstairs.
2:58 Speaker 03 Mary, you're almost an expert. I'd like to be able to keep an eye open for jet planes, too.
3:05 Speaker 02 The makers of Protek soap present these talks to help you know your aircraft. They remind you that for your own protection, you should also know your antiseptic soap.
3:14 Speaker 00 I left school at the age of 15 and I looked up the Herald and I found in the classifieds a job in the advertising department at Horden Brothers, a retail store in Pitt Street. They wanted a junior, which means that you just ran around as the beginning of an apprenticeship.
3:44 Speaker 04 It's the 1950s. South of the border, Melbourne was already vying for cultural capital. Television still hadn't arrived, but Philip Adams certainly had.
3:57 Speaker 01 I had to leave school in a hurry at the age of 15 because of domestic dramas. And I was offered a job riding a bike for a company called Briggs and James. My very first day, I was told to take a plaster dummy, a naked dummy of a woman, on the tram down Swanson Street to the Gas and Fuel Corporation. So I can never forget, here I am trying to climb on a tram with a naked woman and head downtown. So my first job was just delivering things around to the print houses. It was at a time when there were still linotype machines.
4:37 Speaker 01 You know, it was the old world of media, both technologically and of course also in its simplicity.
4:47 Speaker 01 Well, there was no television. There was a half a dozen AM radio stations, newspapers and the Woman's Weekly.
5:04 Speaker 04 Back in Sydney, Bruce Jarrett and Marion von Adlerstein had begun working their way up.
5:10 Speaker 05 The job that farmers was for a copywriter. But you had to start off as an office boy because I knew nothing about copywriting. We did magazines, mostly newspaper, and brochures and things like that.
5:24 Speaker 04 Dogs Bodies is probably what they'd have been called, later to become Dispatch Clerks, and now, Interns.
5:32 Speaker 00 I went twice a day to the newspaper offices to pick up the advance copies. Then I cut out the copies of Horden Brothers Advertising, and also their competitors, stuck them in a big guidebook. I ran up the Imperial Arcade to Continental Cakes and bought snail buns for my seniors. They were called layout artists. And then I was given the job of, by Mr. Inns, the boss, of producing the mail order catalogue twice a year. They used splashy, big, full-page ads in The Herald and in The Sun. This was long before television, so we're talking about the late 40s and early 50s.
6:17 Speaker 00 I was a bit of a Westie, so I made a few blunders, I can remember.
6:28 Speaker 02 Your work is a pleasure. You feel like promotion once you've caught on to this grand shaving lotion.
6:37 Speaker 01 The one thing that has to be said for advertising, for all its sins, it was a meritocracy. It didn't care what side of the street you came from. If you were on the creative side, it didn't care much what you wore. You could have gone to the wrong schools. But if you could do it, you were off and running.
6:58 Speaker 05 Nine or 12 months later, they gave me my first ad to write.
7:04 Speaker 05 Eventually, I started doing the layouts for ads. And I worked my way up. And then I started to think about television coming to Australia. And I thought it would be good to learn something about television advertising. There was no television in Sydney. And there was no such a school or anything like that you could go and learn it from. So that's why I went to Canada. And I was there for four years.
7:37 Speaker 02 Only Qantas flies you to New York and London without changing airlines.
7:42 Speaker 00 We all knew we had to learn how to work in television.
7:46 Speaker 06 We went to London.
7:47 Speaker 02 Qantas announces six jet flights a week.
7:52 Speaker 06 My name's Lea Schofield and I was born in 1935.
7:57 Speaker 06 Like a lot of people in my generation, we went to London. It was kind of like a Pavlovian response to imperial propaganda perhaps. London became the epicentre of the civilised world. And Bruce Pervisford, Clive James, all headed off to London. There was a huge little Kangaroo Valley clique there.
8:16 Speaker 04 London was certainly the place to be if you were young, creative and ambitious. But Australia was actually not that far behind.
8:25 Speaker 04 In 1956, just one year after commercial television was launched in the UK, Bruce Gingeal took to the airwaves here.
8:34 Speaker 02 Good evening and welcome to television. From wherever you are along the skyline of Sydney... Stand by for the opening night of the National Television Service.
8:46 Speaker 00 Television came in 1956.
8:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, I remember when television came in.
8:51 Speaker 02 Hello there and good evening, ladies and gentlemen and children.
9:00 Speaker 04 And the young Australian ad folk in London started heading home in droves.
9:06 Speaker 06 Australia, more than any other country at the time, absorbed television quicker and became enamoured of it, faster than almost anyone in the Anglophone world at least.
9:18 Speaker 02 One day, when there was nothing to do at Tintown, we all decided to take a trip to Melbourne and spend a day in the city. Hi, coming into bandstand. Hi there, just enjoying some ice molly. Nervous what a difference molly makes to keep you in top form. I'd like you to meet an important but nameless Australian. He's not much to look at.
9:39 Speaker 05 When I got back to Sydney, late December 1959, I looked in the newspaper, they all wanted people with television experience. And I said, "What's the best advertising agency to go to?" And they said, "George Patterson." I saw the managing director, who was Bill Farnsworth, and he said, "I think you'd better see our creative director," who was a woman called Bob Street, and saw her, and so they offered me a job. She said, "We would like to put you in television." And I said, "Well, I'm very happy about that, but I would like to do some print work for my campaigns." And she said, "Well, it doesn't work that way."
10:22 Speaker 05 But she said, "Don't worry, television won't last." And of course, I was just a gog at such a remark.
10:31 Speaker 05 She didn't know anything about television, and she did not want to know anything about television.
10:41 Speaker 05 So anyway, eventually, television grew and grew, and she retired, so they made me creative director. We had maybe three or four cameramen who knew anything about filming, because there was no film industry in Australia. The people we had worked at CineSound and places like that. But gradually, new people came into the business, and directors came into the business.
11:11 Speaker 04 Meanwhile, 28-year-old Philip Adams, still at his first job with Briggs & James, became fascinated by the power of the moving image.
11:21 Speaker 01 Well, no-one knew a damn thing about television, so I became, at Briggs & James, the television department. And I'll never forget my first job. It was making the commercial with the young Bruce Petty, who, having returned from international triumphs, couldn't get a job to save himself in Australia. So Bruce and I made, in an animation on a desk, we made our first TV commercial. It was a little montage of vehicles. It was called Big Cars, Bubble Cars, Trouble Trucks and Europeans, which was intended to flog petrol for the vacuum oil company, many years later to become Mobil.
12:00 Speaker 02 He says without hesitation, "What brand of gasoline you sell here?"
12:08 Speaker 03 From the top to the bottom.
12:12 Speaker 01 Television really took off at a very fast pace. It changed everything.
12:19 Speaker 02 By sparkling portery pearl from Metropolitan Bottle Apartments for eight and six, a large bottle.
12:27 Speaker 01 Talking 50s, 60s, this was all an unimaginable future.
12:31 Speaker 02 Yes, look good, as a man should. And nobody knew which twin had the Tony. For the girl who's got that lonely all by herself feeling, here's an invitation to happiness.
12:41 Speaker 01 Milk tray!
12:42 Speaker 02 Cadbury's Milk Tray.
12:44 Speaker 06 I came back to Australia in 1965. It was incredibly jolly time. I mean, 1965, having had what every management in agencies wanted. They wanted the magic, was overseas experience.
13:02 Speaker 00 When I came back to Australia, it was all fresh and new to me, although it wasn't ideal, you know. I was a single woman by then, I was divorced, and being alone was still a very questionable thing to be as a woman. But the job itself was wonderful. I loved the job, and I loved the work, and I loved the involvement in television, making of television commercials.
13:26 Speaker 00 With my impressive portfolio under my arm, I still have it, it doesn't look very impressive, but it was at the time. And references. So I got a job at J. Walter Thompson. At the time, that was the biggest agency in the world. They gave me the most wonderful job.
13:44 Speaker 01 The agencies were very vibrant.
13:50 Speaker 01 I started making television commercials in black and white, and there were all manner of restrictions.
13:57 Speaker 04 The young Leo Schofield joined the growing dislike of domination by the big international agencies, unwilling to take chances with Australian content. Marion Von Adlestein, although she enjoyed her job, felt she simply worked for her officer's New York parents.
14:15 Speaker 00 Well, working on accounts like Kellogg's.
14:17 Speaker 02 Golden flakes, creamy milk, luscious fruit, sparkling sugar. Here's the finest breakfast of all. More vitamins than whole grain corn and soap.
14:27 Speaker 01 And the Americans totally dominate. Listen to my story about a man named J.
14:31 Speaker 02 We don't. All that running, here makes about a hundred. Yeah.
14:36 Speaker 00 Beverly Hillbillies was a really famous situation comedy in America, and it was sponsored by Kellogg's in America.
14:43 Speaker 02 How about some Kellogg's corn flakes? Yeah.
14:46 Speaker 00 And for Kellogg's here in Australia, we were given permission to shoot something locally to fit the rest of the footage. So I had to sort of tailor some local content to fit into the Beverly Hillbillies format.
14:57 Speaker 02 You two are sure getting to be city slickers.
15:03 Speaker 01 Corny as flakes, anybody makes Kellogg's. J. Walter Thompson, George Pats and others were just surfing on their international brand names. And they were really just an extension of the corporations that hired them.
15:18 Speaker 00 So I got Kellogg's corn flakes. I also got Lux toilet soap.
15:21 Speaker 01 There wasn't a hope in hell of any little local agency ever getting them.
15:25 Speaker 00 International film star, Raquel Welch.
15:29 Speaker 03 Hello, do come in, I want to show you something.
15:33 Speaker 00 In the case of Luxe Toilet Soap, of course, it was always associated with movie stars. So I simply wrote scripts for movie stars.
15:40 Speaker 03 You know, I used to think there wasn't much difference between one soap and another. And there wasn't, until...
15:47 Speaker 00 My television producer at the time, who later became my husband, was wonderful at negotiating big deals with famous movie stars. Sharon Tate, Jane Powell, Raquel Welsh. Well, Australians didn't figure in that because they weren't considered glamorous enough at the time.
16:07 Speaker 03 In so many parts of the world now, in Europe where I live, and in Australia where you live, more and more women are using new international luxes.
16:17 Speaker 00 So much of what we did had to be adapted from what happened in America or elsewhere in the world.
16:31 Speaker 04 Ambitious creative director Bruce Jarrett was well on his way up the George Patterson ladder. And despite George Pat's being the largest and most dominant Australian agency, the majority of its clients were American.
16:44 Speaker 05 I remember the first ad I had to do was to adapt an American campaign for palm olive soap.
16:54 Speaker 01 Australian corporations who wanted to run their American ads were not legally permitted to do so. We managed to get legislation in to stop that happening. So they would send what was called a ghost crew to the United States. So a complete crew of Australian filmmakers would go to the US to sit on the set and pretend they made the commercial. They would then come back and it would go to air. It was a scandal that went on for quite a long time.
17:28 Speaker 00 Norma, how do you manage to have such a lovely complexion?
17:31 Speaker 05 A very attractive woman meets a less attractive friend. And the less attractive friend says-
17:38 Speaker 00 She's got two children and she looks so young!
17:40 Speaker 05 "Oh, you look so young. How do you do it?" And she said, "Oh, palm olive soap facials."
17:45 Speaker 03 They can help almost any girl be younger looking.
17:47 Speaker 05 Now, who would believe that palm olive soap could make you look younger? I mean, it's a basic soap that gets the dirt off your skin, you know?
17:56 Speaker 02 Doctors prove palm olive containing gentle olive oil can bring you a lovelier complexion in 14 days.
18:02 Speaker 05 So I had to adapt it to Australia. But I found particularly that one for palm olive, the whole theme of it, the concept of it was so unbelievable for Australia. But anyway, I had to do it. I was the new boy on the block, so I did it.
18:17 Speaker 02 Choose new creamy pink palm olive, enriched with pink beauty cream to help dry skin, or its famous sister in beauty, green palm olive.
18:32 Speaker 02 This is Madison Avenue, nerve center of the advertising world. Here in these steel and concrete beehives are born the ideas that decide what we the public will eat, drink, drive and smoke, and how we will dress, sleep, shave and smell.
18:50 Speaker 00 Thank you. It was 1967.
18:55 Speaker 00 To go to New York for an advertising person was like just going to the center of the world, because that is the center of advertising, still is.
19:03 Speaker 00 One good example of the way an image from overseas had to be adapted to Australia was Marlboro cigarettes.
19:11 Speaker 02 Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro country.
19:17 Speaker 00 Instead of making him a cowboy, the Marlboro man...
19:22 Speaker 02 Come to where the flavour is, Marlborough country.
19:26 Speaker 00 They turned him into a kind of Collins Street farmer, so he was a squatter in a way. So that Australianised him to the extent that, you know, we didn't really have cowboys, we had bushrangers, but that wouldn't be right for the brand.
19:41 Speaker 02 Marlborough puts all the flavour where it belongs, on your side of the exclusive Select Trade Filter.
19:47 Speaker 05 In those days, that was before the Trades Practices Act, you could get away with anything. I remember one cigarette campaign, the theme was "The Clean Cigarette That's Kind to Your Throat". Now, you know, I should have been sent to jail for that.
20:05 Speaker 02 The clean cigarette that's kind to your throat is Craven Filter. This is the era of the clean cigarette.
20:11 Speaker 05 Everybody around the board table was smoking except me.
20:17 Speaker 05 We weren't in the same category as used car salesmen.
20:24 Speaker 05 And I think we were paid a lot more money.
20:28 Speaker 02 The clean cigarette that's kind to your throat.
20:31 Speaker 01 I think advertising people were in the same category as car salesmen, and car salesmen were very energetic marketers. This is an era that's gone. The only employer for people of vaguely creative talents was advertising.
20:54 Speaker 00 It was one of the few outlets Australians had for their creative skills or creative inclinations. Bryce Courtney, Ken Doherty, with whom I used to work at a certain point, and Peter Carey, who went on to be a great writer.
21:15 Speaker 01 That's where I met Bruce Petty, it's where I met Fred Skepsy, Peter Carey. The entire what might be loosely described as the creative industry in Australia. Most had made commercials, the only other alternative was the ABC. But that was much harder to crack.
21:35 Speaker 04 For a kid from Sydney's western suburbs, Bruce Jarrett was lucky to have cracked the creative ceiling at George Pat's. And once he did, he was certainly taken into the fold.
21:45 Speaker 02 Good morning, Mr. LaSalle.
21:48 Speaker 05 I wouldn't say George Patterson in those days was a chic agency. I mean, it was a very well-established agen... it was the biggest agency in Australia. This is a very good example of the sort of agency Patterson's was. Television was growing at a tremendous pace. And the workload for me was just getting bigger and bigger. And occasionally, I would take a tranquilizer just to calm myself down. And foolishly, I told one of the account executives about this. And one Friday night, he and I, and Bill Farnsworth, were working late at Colgate Palmolive.
22:32 Speaker 05 And we were going up in the elevator, and they got off on the second floor. As they got out, this account executive said, "Have a good weekend, Bruce, and don't take too many tranquilizers." And I thought, gee, why did you say that in front of the managing director?
22:50 Speaker 07 Yes, Mr. Rufus, I called, he's on his way.
22:56 Speaker 05 Monday morning, I went into the office. Sure enough, five past nine. Phone rang, "Have you got a minute?" And I knew it was Bill Farnsworth.
23:06 Speaker 02 Mr. Rufus wanted to see me?
23:08 Speaker 07 Go in, Mr. Hunter, but watch out, he's probably on his fourth tranquilizer by now.
23:12 Speaker 05 Have a seat. And I thought, I'm going to get a late job. And he said, "Have you got your passport in order?" And I said, "No, it's expired." He said, "Well, get yourself a passport. You're going overseas for six weeks."
23:25 Speaker 02 Must be your fifth tranquilizer by now.
23:27 Speaker 05 That's the sort of people, you know, who managed George Patterson's. He'd just sent me there for a holiday, all expenses paid.
23:39 Speaker 05 New York, London, and Paris, Rome. I just enjoyed myself.
23:45 Speaker 05 All at the agency's expense.
23:51 Speaker 02 This is me again.
23:52 Speaker 05 It would have been early seventies.
23:54 Speaker 02 I'm a writer, an author of TV commercials.
23:57 Speaker 00 There were indulgences, there's no doubt about that. And they usually meant entertaining.
24:05 Speaker 00 I think Bruce Jarrett was in a unique position. His management had total trust in him. And that was rare. He was a rare phenomenon, Bruce himself.
24:16 Speaker 05 They said, "Do something mad."
24:18 Speaker 03 Excuse me?
24:20 Speaker 02 Got your fab, eh?
24:21 Speaker 03 Oh, yes, sir.
24:21 Speaker 02 Your wife uses fab. Grateful whitening, she says.
24:25 Speaker 05 And I said, "Well, why don't we have lemons bursting out of a packet?"
24:29 Speaker 02 It smells fresh, too.
24:30 Speaker 03 Well, fab's lemon charge.
24:32 Speaker 05 Everybody's smothered with lemons, you know.
24:35 Speaker 02 I know fab gets things really white, but lemon charge, I...
24:39 Speaker 05 And so we had these crazy commercials.
24:42 Speaker 05 It was very successful, very successful.
24:46 Speaker 01 The jeans up the back were the creative types. They really ran the show. They let the suits think they were running it. The suits were those up front who did the interaction with the corporations. And they were allegedly the bosses. But it was the jeans who came up with the ideas. The Bata Kingston Mans in town.
25:18 Speaker 02 The man from Anticole.
25:21 Speaker 04 And these creatives were becoming more confident, starting to form their own small agencies and beginning to make their mark on Australian advertising. Philip Adams was one of them.
25:32 Speaker 01 Some of the little agencies were full of such clever, clever people that little by little they gained a bit of oomph, a bit of courage.
25:41 Speaker 02 This is a courage man. Rub that ball. Build that first.
25:47 Speaker 01 And there was a golden age in Australia.
25:50 Speaker 02 Had a very good morning to you. 62 degrees in suddenly.
25:53 Speaker 04 Good morning world, it's brand new day. And as the 1970s arrived, Australia started to come into its own. Consumption was on the rise and our distinct culture and voice began to be heard.
26:10 Speaker 02 Hello world, this is John Laws.
26:16 Speaker 00 The most persuasive voice was the voice of John Laws, if you could get him for a commercial.
26:21 Speaker 02 This innocent little flower contains nature's own powerful insecticide.
26:26 Speaker 00 John Laws was rugged and lean and hungry-looking and very attractive in those days.
26:34 Speaker 02 A new improved formula, Mortine.
26:37 Speaker 04 Like Australia's economy, the advertising industry boomed.
26:43 Speaker 08 Time for freedom, time for moving.
26:49 Speaker 06 The arrival of the Whitlam government in 1972, there was a whole feeling that everything was going to change, that the rather stultifying and world of Australia would change into something more vibrant, more lively. And it did.
27:07 Speaker 01 The wind was in our sails and the cultural cringe, so-called, would soon become, in Keating's phrase, "the cultural trot".
27:16 Speaker 02 Other countries just don't seem to have the same spot for standards as we do, do they, listeners?
27:22 Speaker 01 Eventually, we started to do our own creative work, which was much better.
27:28 Speaker 02 Anyhow, well you sure sound like a sprayer to me.
27:33 Speaker 04 The golden age had dawned. The 1970s was to become a revolutionary time in Australian advertising. The tone and voices changed. The accents became broader, the jingle came into its own and we celebrated.
27:51 Speaker 02 Hey, canya.
27:56 Speaker 04 You've been listening to Where the Bloody Hell Were You? Stories from the early days of Australian advertising. Russell Stapleton was the sound engineer. Content advisor was Robert Crawford. And the programme was produced by Roz Blewett. Tune in next week when we hit the giddy heights of the 1970s and 80s. I'm Dee Madigan. Bye for now.
28:25 Speaker 04 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
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