Living Large: The World Of Harold Mitchell

By Harold Mitchell

When Harold was sixteen, he secured a job at a Melbourne advertising agency just by virtue of having travelled the furthest for the interview. Living Large traces Mitchell's journey as media buyer inside several agencies to his brave decision to start in 1976 his own media-buying operation, a radical and, to the established agencies, highly unpopular move.
Mitchell went on to become Australia's biggest media buyer. His business journey led to close friendships with the two Kerrys, Packer and Stokes, and a long relationship with the Packer family. His passion for the arts saw him experience some colourful moments with Gough Whitlam, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Dudley Moore and folk singer Odetta.
Living Large reveals Harold's loves: family, a great business deal, a brilliantly produced TV commercial, and dislikes: disloyalty, laziness and business yobbos, and presents guidance for young business executives trying to make it in the jungle.
Part autobiography, part guidebook, Living Large gets into the mind of one of Australia's most intriguing business identities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780522859430

Book preview

memories.

PROLOGUE

You know that feeling when you wake up and you can’t quite remember what’s wrong? You just know something’s not the way it should be? And there’s a feeling in your gut like you’ve been kicked by a horse? And it takes a few moments for your brain to adjust to reality? And then you wish it hadn’t?

It’s 1990, and a glorious autumn Saturday morning in country Victoria. The sky is an azure canvas, smudged here and there with some whipped-cream clouds. It’s 5.30 a.m. I can’t sleep so I get up and wander around the bushland surrounding our house. The magpies are making their beautiful warble; the sun is rising over the valley beyond our house. And that’s when the first tears come. I hold onto our fence, look over at the bushland and stand there and cry.

I am $32 million in debt, through no fault of my own. It’s so much money it’s almost ridiculous to contemplate. I have nothing to pay it back with. I am a banker’s pen stroke away from losing everything, maybe even the house to which I had brought my two beautiful children home after their birth, the house where I had spent so many lovely years with my wife Bevelly, where I had watched my children Stuart and Amanda take their first steps.

Could this be my reward for all my hard work?

Life should have been perfect. And it would have been, except I was the only one of a group of businesspeople who wanted to own up to the $32 million debt. The music had stopped, and I was the only one left on the dance floor.

The weekend dragged. I was out of sorts, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep, wondered where I was going, I wondered what would happen to us. How would I get out of this?

Two days later I was in my office in Melbourne when the phone rang. It was Kerry Packer.

‘Harold, I hear you’ve got some problems, son. Can I help?’

There’s a strange feeling when people are kind to you. His call was so unexpected, but so gratefully received, that my emotions were raw again.

Kerry offered me a loan of $1.9 million, interest free.

‘Come and see me.’

A couple of days later I flew to Sydney. I walked in; we shook hands. His assessment of my business strategies in relation to the series of poor investments I’d got myself involved with had a typical Packer economy about it. ‘Harold,’ he said looking down the barrel at me over his desk, ‘you’re an idiot.’

True to Kerry’s personality, he wanted to know the detail of how I had made so many mistakes. Kerry was intrigued as to what it was all about and wanted to go through it in his forensic way. He wanted the who, the what, the where. That was what he had spent his life doing.

Kerry and I never signed any paperwork about the loan. It was his commitment, his word, and I went away and prepared to work hard for seven years to pay it off. A couple of weeks later on a Sunday night I turned on the news on TV to see that Kerry Packer had had a heart attack on the polo field and was critically ill in hospital. I was aghast. It was only the next day that I thought of the offer he’d made, which had yet to be completed.

A week later I received a phone call from Kerry’s secretary, who asked if I’d call Kerry, who was recuperating at his country property, which I did. A voice not as strong as usual came to the phone. ‘OK, son, we’ll go through with that.’ What an amazing man. Fresh from his near-death experience, he still cared about our arrangement.

That loan was critical in my life. I was carrying such enormous pressure that I didn’t know where to go next. It was just enough to keep everyone at bay. It took me seven years to repay that debt, which wasn’t easy to do.

This chapter in my life taught me so many lessons.

It taught me the value of kindness and loyalty. It taught me that having high levels of debt can be very dangerous, that you can lose a lot of sleep, suffer a lot of angst and fear, and that you can nearly lose your house and place your family in jeopardy. It taught me that even though a friend had ‘died’ for eight minutes—‘I’ve been to the other side, and let me tell you, son, there’s f—— nothing there,’ he is reported to have observed—he still had a sense of duty and thoughtfulness to ensure that a promise was honoured.

These lessons were hard to swallow but easy to grasp. They made sense. And they would help me so much in the future.

Writing these words, I am sixty-seven years old, and I’m a happy man. I’m proud to say I’ve spent my life learning and acting on lessons. I don’t want to be preachy; it’s just that learning lessons is what made me what I am today.

I am a living example of the adage that you never stop learning. Having nearly been yet another victim of the 1980s, the decade that killed so many dreams and brought so many back down to earth, I was able to build a very successful business, and one of the reasons is that I kept my mind open. I know plenty of would-bes who could have done something with themselves in business, but they thought they knew everything so learned nothing. There’s a trail of them in business, especially from the 1980s. They were talking when they should have been listening. Kerry Packer’s greatest quality? His capacity to listen and absorb. And he did pretty well for himself.

Theory: the bigger the unrestrained ego, the less you learn. A big ego and tin ears are very dangerous characteristics for a businessperson.

Same for a husband. I have been married to the same woman— Bevelly—for forty-six years. My marriage has been one of the great triumphs of my life, especially, it must be said, in the world of advertising and media where business might succeed but marriages fail. Bevelly has never been shy in expressing her views, a quality in her I have always both admired and found strength in. There are many sycophants in my world, yet Bevelly’s honesty has kept me grounded and reminded me of the best things in life, like love through good times and bad. And, believe me, she has seen both.

I have two great children, Stuart and Amanda, and I have four beautiful grandchildren. I have a business that, together with some extraordinary contributions from both Stuart and Amanda, and many others, is a success.

It’s said I am a pioneer of a new way of placing advertisements, as a so-called media buyer. It’s true that I and a handful of others changed the way advertising works in Australia. I’m proud of that. An idea I had in 1974—elevating the people working the advertising budgets and working out how to best spend clients’ money—might have sounded crazy in the mid-1970s, especially to the advertising agencies who couldn’t believe the control was being taken away from them. Boy, did they hate that. Now it’s just the way it’s done.

What have I learned?

I learned that people, like my father, who brought up four children virtually solo, have astonishing strength and resilience that may surprise even themselves, and that the human spirit, when tested, can prevail in the most extraordinary ways.

I learned that, much as I admire the physical toughness of saw-millers like my Dad, I was never going to become one.

I learned very early that I couldn’t drink alcohol.

I learned how important it is to be courteous. To some would-be Masters of the Universe, it might sound marginal as a trait, but I can tell you that politeness breaks down more doors and brings more people to the table than a roomful of yelling business yobbos.

I learned that all you need to make it as a businessperson was to have a great idea, have faith in that idea, never waver in your commitment to the idea and to work hard every day.

I learned not to give up.

I learned that family is everything, and that a happy family can give you more strength than you could ever dream.

I learned that life is about loyalty and honesty, that it’s a poor idea to abandon colleagues when they hit the dust. That’s not the time to walk away—that’s the time to stop and help.

I learned that not everyone has had the same opportunities in life and that it is important for those of us who have been lucky to know how to share.

I learned that diets that seem easy aren’t.

I learned that if you have nothing else in your life apart from business success, then it’s an empty existence, just a set of numbers.

Sometimes I reflect on where my life has taken me—from the sawmills of Gippsland and Stawell, to the intimate circles of Australia’s richest and most powerful media families. From a sixteen-year-old office boy in an advertising agency to the owner of a $100 million company.

It’s only money. As the great Australian songwriter Paul Kelly once said, you can’t take it with you.

What I do take with me every day is four things: friendship, loyalty, honesty and family. And that hasn’t changed since I was a five-year-old boy walking through bushland around Merrijig with my father, gazing up at the massive gum trees and asking Dad with big eyes whether he thought it was possible to climb all the way to the top.

PART I

1

GROWING UP AMID THE SAWMILLS

The day my mother left home for the final time was the day I became a man. I was getting used to her leaving and coming back. It became part of the rhythm of our house. But my three siblings and I never thought the leaving would be final.

A still, cold June day. I’d come home from school. Dad was making dinner; my two brothers and little sister were playing around the house.

‘Where’s Mum?’

I looked at Dad. He didn’t need to answer. Harold Mitchell senior was a big, strong man, a sawmiller and bushman. He didn’t show much emotion, and he didn’t waste words. He held it inside, like so many of his generation. He was getting on with it, feeding the four of us. And while he was a hard man to read, I knew she was gone.

Without a goodbye or a hug, Mum had walked out the door that day and changed the lives of all of our family. With about an hour’s notice, my father had became a sole parent with four kids.

Dad showed me the farewell note she’d written, in her beautiful script. The other kids didn’t need to see it. I was the eldest, fifteen years old, the one Dad would sometimes take into his confidence, the one who protected the younger ones from as many of life’s hardships as possible. The words Mum had written are lost to me now, but the memory of that day will never leave me. I took the note to my bedroom and cried. I cried for her loss, I cried that us four kids wouldn’t grow up with a mother, and I cried for Dad.

And then I let her go, and started learning how to live without her. And I didn’t cry about anything else for years.

Later that evening, lying in bed unable to sleep, something strange happened. I realized that I didn’t feel sorry for Dad. He was such a strong character, and we had been brought up to be resilient, independent and uncomplaining, so I knew he’d be OK. Dad was a coper. Nothing fazed him. He would certainly have had moments in private, probably when we were all asleep in bed, when he wondered what would happen to us as a family, how he would juggle his four kids and his work. It was a struggle Dad had on his own. At sixteen, I wasn’t old enough to hear his concerns, to help work out a way forward for the Mitchells. I wasn’t equipped to give Dad advice, but I did vow to help him in any practical way I could.

Dad wouldn’t have been too surprised Mum had gone. Neither would my two younger brothers, Terry, thirteen, and Rodney, twelve, and little Vicki, at six a decade younger than me. We all thought she’d keep going and returning. After all, she had left three times and come back each time. Her pattern of leaving might have continued for all we knew. This last time, it was a year before we all saw her again. By then, she was largely out of our lives.

So I grew up fast. There was no choice, really. When you are sixteen years old, and your father is holding two jobs and your mother has bailed with another man and there’s not much money around, manhood comes to you quickly.

When I was little I didn’t really notice Mum’s leaving. I was too busy yabbying down at the local dam and building cubby houses out of fallen branches. Once we dug a tunnel and built a little cubby house underground. My father and I would fish in the Delatite River. We would often catch enough fish for dinner. Back at home, Dad would scale and gut them in front of his awed children, with blood and scales and fish heads and a great stink all over the place. We were all happy to be living in such a wonderland.

Spending time with Dad was great, but I also enjoyed being alone. You can’t be bored in the bush. Something is always happening. I was six years old when we lived at the foot of Mount Buller. It was a hundred degrees Farenherit, and I was wearing shorts and no shoes, the huge freedom of youth. I was running through the tinder-dry bush barefoot when I looked down to see that my foot was about to land on a snake. I shortened my step, and the next step was into a little pond where there were two steps to the other side. I don’t think my foot sunk into the pond at all, and it would be the first time in my life where I found myself running on water.

And, I can assure any of my enemies reading this, it was certainly the last.

I was born on 13 May 1942, in the small West Gippsland town of Trafalgar, 125 kilometres east of Melbourne. After a few days in hospital, Dad arrived to take Mum and me home. There was no car access, so the only way home was to walk along the railway track. While Mum walked beside him, Dad picked me up and carried me along the track back to our little house in the tiny town of Tanjil Bren in alpine Gippsland, on the way to the ski fields. It’s a striking image, this little week-old baby being carried by a strapping sawmiller, accompanied by his tired and proud wife, keeping half an eye out for trains coming in either direction.

We weren’t at Tanjil Bren for long, maybe two years. My first memories are of moving. Always moving. Pack the house, pack the car, let’s go. Dad’s work as a sawmiller ensured that we didn’t stay anywhere too long. We lived virtually an itinerant life. Dad would find a job at a sawmill, and we would all move to that town. The first mills he worked at were in the Victorian Alps. Later they were up in the mountains in tiny places such as Mirrimbah near Mount Buller. At Tanjil Bren there might have only been a dozen families. We rarely saw other people. It was a very insular existence. We lived in about twenty different houses. We never really settled down.

I had stopped noticing the moves we made as a family. New town, new house, the effort to make new friends. My early life was a blur of bedrooms, kitchens, gardens and saying goodbye to friends just made. I never minded. Kids get used to anything.

When I was in grade 5 we moved to Stawell, near Victoria’s Grampians, a booming gold-mining town of the mid-1800s whose glamour had long faded. Dad had found work at the local sawmill. We drove into town in a 1937 Chevrolet, the five of us and everything we owned, including two or three spare tyres. It must have been quite a sight.

My mother would leave us from time to time. We would sometimes wonder where she’d gone, but Dad didn’t talk about her, or where she was, or when she was coming home. We just got used to her not being around.

I didn’t miss her, but there was a gap. We were pretty busy just staying alive. Sometimes we were sent off to an auntie and uncle in Melbourne and we would see our cousins. I think that filled a bit of the gap. Each time Mum returned we accepted her back as our mother, unquestioningly. Strangely, looking back on it, there weren’t many questions asked of her. Like, for instance, where have you been, and didn’t you think we might have needed you? My memory is that it was a virtually wordless re-entry into our world.

Lorna Mitchell was a child of the Depression era. The daughter of poor dairy farmers in Gippsland, Mum grew up in an unstable family where the girls were encouraged to marry very young, and she did. She was eighteen when she married Dad, and had me when she was nineteen. She was still a girl herself. She had four children while still in her twenties, and if that wasn’t hard enough, life relying on a sawmill was not easy. Sawmillers were out of work with a week’s notice.

She was clever, nervous, often both kind and temperamental. Sometimes you had to pay attention around her. My sister often reminds me that she always knew the weight of a pound because my mother used to throw the butter at her, and when they connected my sister would get quite a good indication of how much a pound was.

I’ve always been grateful to these extended family members in Melbourne, who took us in temporarily, for the love and support they showed us. Each Christmas morning I get a list out and phone each of them, about a dozen. And each year, as their numbers dwindle, I have a struggle not crying. They all did so much for us. Even though families don’t stay together as much as they once did, what’s important is that the parents stay in touch and that there is a circle of support, and the kids will be OK in that cocoon.

Dad’s new life as a single parent was very tough for him, but he held it together all right. We had to have our clothes washed and ironed and dinner had to be made, and we had to be made ready for school. And then Dad would go to work. We all learned how to darn socks and iron shirts and do things around the house. Dinner, a rather fractured affair, not often a happy family meal, was always two chops and vegies. But the meal was always there. My father did a great job, against the odds. I think just being able to cope is quite an achievement. He held down three jobs: foreman in a sawmill, weekend work on a chicken farm and cutting wheat in the holidays.

In January 2009 the Age wrote about Dad. ‘I’d mend their shoes, darn their clothes, cut their hair,’ Dad told the paper. ‘I’d do young Vicki’s hair for her every morning before school.’

We didn’t have a lot of money, but I don’t remember minding. I learned at fifteen to patch the only pair of school trousers I owned.

It wasn’t long before Dad met Rose, and a good relationship developed between them. Rose worked at the same place my mother had, as a care worker at a school for invalid children. Rose was lovely. So, suddenly, we had a stepmother. That was probably more important for Vicki, aged six, than for the rest of us. She provided a female presence in a house that probably needed one. I left as she arrived, so I didn’t know her as well as my younger siblings. But I left knowing my little sister was going to be looked after. Stepmothers can be awful, but this lady was quite wonderful.

There were many costs to what had happened to us as a family. At the time there was a bit of a stigma attached to marriage breakdowns, or broken families as they were sometimes called. In the town I think we were suddenly social outcasts. I had a girlfriend who dropped me because of it. And I was working in a sawmill so my prospects weren’t great. I did have an idea of going back to that little town and meeting that girl and letting her know that I had done well, but I never did. Her name was Beverly. Not the Bevelly I married. I always wondered whether such incidents spurred me on. They probably did.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself after school, but Dad had perhaps inadvertently helped me along the path to a professional career. In Stawell there was the choice of two secondary schools, a technical school and a high school. My two brothers went to the technical school and I went to the high school, Stawell High. My father told me—many years later—he wanted me to go to the high school because he felt I would get a better job. And he didn’t quite know what all that meant. But I think that decision had a real influence on me. We learned about the arts rather than woodwork. It was a very good education, although I didn’t finish it.

I decided to leave school after year 11. I would have liked to have gone on, but it was obviously a disturbing time at home. I was just a little short of sixteen. In the late 1950s in Stawell, the only options for young kids out of school were jobs as a shearer’s mate or a labourer. I could not see myself being either for any length of time. I was fifteen and restless, and I felt myself to be a long way away from anywhere exciting. I knew neither sawmilling nor shearing were my destiny. Nevertheless I took the job at the mill, sweeping up, moving logs, doing whatever they told me to do. The older and more experienced guys pushed the logs into the saws. Me and a band of young labourers did everything else.

We worked with Australian gum for building houses. There was always noise, this screaming of the logs being pushed into the saws, dust constantly flowing about, and the splinters you get in your hands that stayed there until they were pushed out eight months later by new skin. It was really dangerous work, and I saw some horrifying sights. The men worked very close to the big circular saws, and often fingers were lost. I was told that sometimes this would be done on purpose. Some mill workers were so poor they would take advantage of a set formula for accidents—they would get paid on how much of a knuckle they lost or part of their body. So I believe some were losing fingers around Christmas time to get much-needed cash.

Sawmilling was a tough, sometimes brutal life. My brothers both worked in the sawmills, and followed my father to Orbost where he went for the work. For the eight months I worked there, at night I would come home exhausted, wipe the sawdust out of my eyes and pick splinters out of my hands. Surely this wouldn’t be my life? There must be something else.

And then I found it. I’ve heard friends tell stories of the moment they realized their lives had changed. One told me he saw a guitar belonging to the owner of a rented beach house in a wardrobe; he cautiously picked it up and played it, starting a lifelong love affair. Another remembers reading the Business section of the newspaper when he was twelve, fascinated by numbers and profits and the snakes and ladders of the stock market; he still had that habit at age seventy, after a long and successful business career.

My passion was discovered through a transistor radio.

We lived in quite a few different places around Stawell, including a converted shop. And then, in one of the houses we rented, one great day, I got my own bedroom. It meant that at night I could lie on my bed and listen to the radio. So, amid the monotonous drone of the cicadas, I would listen and dream that I was in the big city. I imagined those sophisticated adults sashaying into a radio studio and casually, confidently chatting to their thousands of fans out there.

I would tune into 3DB, for which we got great reception through a local station called 3LK Lubeck in Horsham, which was where the transmitter was. On 3DB I would listen to a confident, cheeky young radio performer called Ernie Sigley, who was just the coolest cat you could ever imagine. Ernie, just a bit older than me, seemed to know everybody. Or I’d sometimes be able to get 2UE in Sydney, which at eight o’clock would broadcast dance bands.

It was such an exciting world, with all these glamorous people saying witty things. It seemed so immediate, such a fascinating and wonderful world where everyone was enjoying themselves.

It was my escape from life in a mill town. And I wondered how I could become part of it. I’d been to Melbourne several times to