Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page B

when I thought I was getting on top of sleepless teaching and settling into a routine, the principal called me into his office. He was a grave, authoritative man, and he asked me, gravely, authoritatively, whether I’d consider being sports master. The more I thought of it the more awful it sounded—so, true to my philosophy of constant movement to avoid responsibility, I applied for a vacancy in the Humanities Department of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
    The interview was a frightening experience. I was confronted by a semi-circle of men, but I had my words ready. ‘Inchoate’ had got me into the university, and I had a small lexicon of others at hand: ‘captious’—as in ‘I don’t want to sound captious, but in some ways Caulfield Technical College wasn’t challenging enough.’ ‘Peremptory’ also came in handy, as did ‘lucubration’, trotted out to let them know I studied at night; ‘recondite’ did not go amiss, and ‘plethora’ and ‘hermeneutics’ were also deployed. I thought afterwards I’d given them persuasive evidence that I would not teach English expression well, but I got the job.
    I joined an institution that had neither bike racks (as in Mildura) nor sports, and was elevated to lecturer, but my stay was short. Long words had got me into the place, and five short ones got me out of it: STUDENT DRINKS BEER IN CLASS. These words were on a Melbourne Herald poster outside Flinders Street station as I, with hundreds of other gaberdined commuters, hurried under the clocks to catch a train home.
    The student’s name was Ryan, and the lecturer involved was me. I walked into the classroom on a Monday morning and Ryan (I later testified in court) was drinking beer from a bottle. He held it high, proudly, like a trumpeter doing a solo. I escorted him from the room and remonstrated with him (the perfect , formal courtroom word, as I continued with my evidence) in the corridor. The defendant (there he was, in the dock, tall, raw-boned, aged about twenty, with a sullen stare) then swore at me and threw a punch. It came at me slowly, and got no further than a shoulder. I grappled with him (another good courtroom word). To continue, in non-legal language: he lunged at me and ripped my shirt. I got him in a headlock, a hold I’d perfected from years of wrestles with my younger brother, and by the time we stopped I was ahead on points.
    Ryan was found guilty of assault, and did a night in the slammer. (Later, tragically, he followed a girl to Tasmania, and when she rejected him he shot himself.) The head of the Humanities Department, an owlish bureaucrat, wasn’t happy with the publicity. I told him he seemed more concerned about the press report than the welfare of his staff. Perhaps, he replied, it might be best if I left. I agreed with him, and went into advertising.

Has he come good yet?
    In the employment ads, which I scanned regularly, I’d always been attracted to the sound of advertising copywriter, and decided now was the time to try to be one, despite the remonstrances of my father, ever ready to draw on his inexhaustible store of apothegms. (‘Never give up a steady job.’) He reminded me, unnecessarily, that I had a wife and four children to support, and this was not the time to jump ship (his phrase).
    It was 1963 when I leapt from the railings. I was thirty-two, with a handful of stories published in magazines advertising people had never heard of. I was hired as a copywriter by the manager of an agency called National Advertising Services at £2500 a year (heady money for an ex-teacher). The manager, a charming man called Ron Walker, who looked like a more dignified version of Groucho Marx, was just back from Madison Avenue with a new way of writing ads that he’d learned from a hot agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach.
    DDB (as those in the know called them) had developed a style so