The Talk of the Town: real life Eustace Tilley found in ineffectual marketing department. Part Two (or possibly three) of an occasional series.
Of course, it was an extraordinary coincidence that I had been a witness to both the Coles' home brand launch in Tooronga and to the northern suburbs store manager's acid comment about the brand on the other side of town.
O (the literary 'O') yes! It was a long way from Tooronga to Pascoe Vale; so far distant that never had it been heard that any person from that hilltop eyrie looking imperiously across Gardiner's Creek (and no less a freeway than the Monash) had ever come to visit, or even pass through, that flat square of a suburb stretching itself taut from Hadfield's cream-brick nightmare in the north to hippy North Brunswick in the south, and North Coburg in the east before dropping off a western cliff at Gaffney Street into the muck of Moonee Ponds Creek and the murk of that other freeway, the Tullamarine; which is not to say it hadn't happened – but who, and when, and where, and why – was as lost in the unrecorded minutiae of life in a city of five million as a wedding ring tossed into Port Philip Bay.
Except me. I lived there, that is to say, in that stretched handkerchief of post-war houses and suburban football grounds and streets named after English counties – 'Essex Street' – not the aforementioned dowager of a suburb in between stuffy, blue-rinse Camberwell and toffy Toorak.
This is probably an exaggeration. An art director daughter of an agency principal (she couldn't draw) I worked with once said she'd never been to Sunshine (a western suburb), but that an uncle of hers had driven through it once – like you'd remember being on the first manned flight to the moon, or your cousin was on death row once. It doesn't matter. The point is that there was a deep gulf between the simpering, social climbing inner eastern private school Brighton-accented class that ran the marketing departments of large corporates, and the northern suburbs supermarket workers who stood outside smoking in the darkness in between shifts and could nail the truth of something in five well-chosen words. This puzzle has never been solved, or explained: that the latter class can (note: can) be articulate bordering on terse, and instantly dismissive of obvious stupidity; while the private school educatarchy (yes, no such word but there should be) has a natural tendency to produce verbal sludge, whether typed into their keyboards or spoken out loud, albeit in well-rounded modulated tones. Those long drawn out vowels are hell to listen to. They could also convince themselves that black was white. You'll Love Coles.
This particular bunch of grapes was led by a dandy who wore very good dark blue suits and who preened and surrounded himself with mainly female acolytes. He also liked to have imported newspapers and magazines delivered to his office, rather than to his home. On one particular occasion when I was in the same building doing some kind of rudimentary – it could not have been anything else – writing, I actually saw him become cross if not angry because someone had borrowed one. Where's my New Yorker magazine? he thundered. Who took it? Like there were two members of the look-at-me intelligentsia on the same floor. As if. He wore glasses, and was tall and thin. Hell, if he had broken his specs in two and peered through one half he was Eustace Tilley! Coincidences like this don't occur daily.
His acolytes had that accent, and they swished around headquarters in a cloud of fine white linen/cotton/whatever and bobbed haircuts, and wore dangerous-looking earrings and red pumps, and carried important-looking folders into meetings and frowned. They all frowned, because it made you look intelligent instead of vacant.
Then the wheel/circle/name your mixed metaphor turned. Ian McLeod, the hard nut Scot retailer was brought in from the UK to fix Coles. He was briefed on its state. People did not like the Coles 'shopping experience', they told him. He arrived in Australia, visited one of the stores, and was confronted with a shelf holding seven thousand cans bearing the logo: You'll Love Coles. His words echoed the prescient reaction of that store manager out in the suburbs several months earlier:
You've gotta be fuckin' joking.
The story got back to Tooronga about five minutes later. People froze. It was comical. I was there. It was like in those cartoons where a character gets rooted to the spot, and then it cracks all over, and then it falls to the ground in bits.
O (the literary 'O') yes! It was a long way from Tooronga to Pascoe Vale; so far distant that never had it been heard that any person from that hilltop eyrie looking imperiously across Gardiner's Creek (and no less a freeway than the Monash) had ever come to visit, or even pass through, that flat square of a suburb stretching itself taut from Hadfield's cream-brick nightmare in the north to hippy North Brunswick in the south, and North Coburg in the east before dropping off a western cliff at Gaffney Street into the muck of Moonee Ponds Creek and the murk of that other freeway, the Tullamarine; which is not to say it hadn't happened – but who, and when, and where, and why – was as lost in the unrecorded minutiae of life in a city of five million as a wedding ring tossed into Port Philip Bay.
Except me. I lived there, that is to say, in that stretched handkerchief of post-war houses and suburban football grounds and streets named after English counties – 'Essex Street' – not the aforementioned dowager of a suburb in between stuffy, blue-rinse Camberwell and toffy Toorak.
This is probably an exaggeration. An art director daughter of an agency principal (she couldn't draw) I worked with once said she'd never been to Sunshine (a western suburb), but that an uncle of hers had driven through it once – like you'd remember being on the first manned flight to the moon, or your cousin was on death row once. It doesn't matter. The point is that there was a deep gulf between the simpering, social climbing inner eastern private school Brighton-accented class that ran the marketing departments of large corporates, and the northern suburbs supermarket workers who stood outside smoking in the darkness in between shifts and could nail the truth of something in five well-chosen words. This puzzle has never been solved, or explained: that the latter class can (note: can) be articulate bordering on terse, and instantly dismissive of obvious stupidity; while the private school educatarchy (yes, no such word but there should be) has a natural tendency to produce verbal sludge, whether typed into their keyboards or spoken out loud, albeit in well-rounded modulated tones. Those long drawn out vowels are hell to listen to. They could also convince themselves that black was white. You'll Love Coles.
This particular bunch of grapes was led by a dandy who wore very good dark blue suits and who preened and surrounded himself with mainly female acolytes. He also liked to have imported newspapers and magazines delivered to his office, rather than to his home. On one particular occasion when I was in the same building doing some kind of rudimentary – it could not have been anything else – writing, I actually saw him become cross if not angry because someone had borrowed one. Where's my New Yorker magazine? he thundered. Who took it? Like there were two members of the look-at-me intelligentsia on the same floor. As if. He wore glasses, and was tall and thin. Hell, if he had broken his specs in two and peered through one half he was Eustace Tilley! Coincidences like this don't occur daily.
His acolytes had that accent, and they swished around headquarters in a cloud of fine white linen/cotton/whatever and bobbed haircuts, and wore dangerous-looking earrings and red pumps, and carried important-looking folders into meetings and frowned. They all frowned, because it made you look intelligent instead of vacant.
Then the wheel/circle/name your mixed metaphor turned. Ian McLeod, the hard nut Scot retailer was brought in from the UK to fix Coles. He was briefed on its state. People did not like the Coles 'shopping experience', they told him. He arrived in Australia, visited one of the stores, and was confronted with a shelf holding seven thousand cans bearing the logo: You'll Love Coles. His words echoed the prescient reaction of that store manager out in the suburbs several months earlier:
You've gotta be fuckin' joking.
The story got back to Tooronga about five minutes later. People froze. It was comical. I was there. It was like in those cartoons where a character gets rooted to the spot, and then it cracks all over, and then it falls to the ground in bits.
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