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RETIREMENT & LIFESTYLE PLANNING | |
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| ISSUE - 29 - Summer 2007/2008 | |
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Turning the tables on Hugh Mackay
For more than 30 years, Hugh Mackay was the model listener while Australians share their thoughts on everything from refugees to retail therapy. How did he get there, and where to now?
It's a sunny spring morning and we're seated in my office. But for once, Hugh Mackay is not the fly on the wall, I am.
I want to ask him, ‘What's on your mind, Hugh?', the question he has asked thousands of Australians in his 30-year career as a social researcher. And although he says talking about himself is his least favourite topic, he has agreed to oblige me – and does so with the same sharp eye, good humour and fine sense of irony that inform both his books and public presentations.
He evokes a childhood that was “bliss, really. If I wasn't outside playing with the gangs of kids in our street, I was reading.” He did baulk when he was snatched away from his friends to spend grades five and six at the selective Artarmon Opportunity School, “ but it was, in fact, the two most magical years of education, sensational for me in my head – but socially disastrous!
“I can't quite work out why I became such an unpopular kid,” he says – did his family's fundamentalist Christian background make him something of a goody two-shoes or even a bit judgemental? Or was he already choosing to observe rather than participate, an ability that has stood him in such good stead in his professional life?
If the latter, the habit intensified in his secondary years at Sydney Grammar School. On a full scholarship he was, nonetheless, not a good student; “I thin
I was in a bit of a dream, I enjoyed just being outside the scene and observing.” The fates, on the other hand, seem to have been hard at work, because his first job – secured via a casual enquiry from his father – was in public opinion research, then very much in the embryonic stage. While his role with the McNair organisation (now ACNielsen) was that of a low-grade clerk, “I was intrigued almost from the beginning”.
He was not intrigued by the economicsdegree he was instructed to tackle at night: “I hated it,” he says. “At the time I was still passionately involved with the church and contemplating a career in the ministry, so I took a year off study and then started an Arts degree instead.”
There was one more interruption before the fates had their way with Hugh and he settled into a career in social research: a year as “a really unsuccessful” schoolteacher at Toowoomba Grammar. His nemesis was bookkeeping. “This subject wasn't mentioned until I arrived and I told the headmaster I knew nothing about it,” he says. The remedy was simple – Hugh would duck around to the retired bookkeeping teacher's house each afternoon to learn the next day's lessons. “And that's what I did for weeks and weeks. I was hopeless; I only hope none of those poor kids tried to become accountants!”
Class dismissed, Hugh joined the ABC and its trailblazing work in qualitative audience research. At McNair everything had been based on numbers, but now Hugh and his colleagues went into people's homes to observe them interact with each other and their televisions. “It was the first glimmer I had of intensive, naturalistic research being used to diagnose and explain why people do what they do,” he says – a research approach The Mackay (now Ipsos Mackay ) Report elevated to an art form.
Hugh launched The Mackay Report in 1979, having left the ABC first to set up a qualitative research unit for advertising agency George Patterson, where he stayed for eight years until 1971, and then to establish The Centre for Communication Studies, teaching the psychology of communication – another passion – to businessmen and women. He ran the Centre for 15 years, and “it nearly wore me out”, but it was during this time he hit on how to make a living as an independent social and political researcher.
“The idea came from a client, who suggested I devise a program offering my research results to commercial organisations on a syndicated basis. They would pay a small annual subscription in return for which they would receive four reports giving them insights into what was going on in Australian society.”
Since then, many thousands have heard Hugh report on ‘the state of the nation', based on data collected in kitchens and lounge-rooms in every corner of Australia and meticulously analysed by Hugh and his associates. Even more have read one of the four books that distil this information into highly readable accounts – in equal parts eagle-eyed and wryly affectionate – of the forces that are shaping contemporary Australia: Reinventing Australia (1993), Generations (1997) Turning Point (1999) and the newly released Advance Australia ... Where?
So it's a bit of a surprise when Hugh reveals he thought that Reinventing Australia and The Good Listener (1994), a summary of his work on communication psychology, would be his only books of non-fiction. But the truth is, by the mid-1990s, he had become passionate about writing novels.
“I wrote two novels in my 20s; one was very nearly published but wasn't, to my now great relief, and the second was encouraged by no one at all. But I loved the process, the immersion, the whole unleashing of the imagination. I found that very liberating.” And so it is we have Little Lies (1995), House Guest (1997), The Spin (1999) and Winter Close (2002) to enjoy.
“ Little Lies , to my great amazement, was not a bestseller,” Hugh reports – although the first, damning reviews (“a disgrace to the imprint”) may have signalled early reviewers had failed to recognise the book as highly ironic. “I was crushed, but a few months later, some really lovely reviews started appearing. One said, ‘At last an Australian has written an original novel', and I clung to that.
“I can't wait to get back into the next novel, (it's the sequel to Winter Close) because letting the imagination do the work is wonderfully therapeutic. And although it may seem contradictory, while my research work is solidly grounded in fact – and I stand by my non-fiction – I feel there is more truth in my novels.
When people, events and interactions come straight out of the imagination, unfiltered, there is an authenticity that's not there when I'm listening to other people tell me what they think.
“One thing I didn't realise until I wrote Winter Close is that all the characters in the novels are me. By that I don't mean I do and say some of the dark things my characters do and say, but these things are in me. They're something I could be pushed to do, which is why, for example, otherwise peaceable people go to war or we say things when we're angry that we regret later.
“I'm a great believer in civilisation, and that means keeping all that dark stuff on a leash; prejudice is an ugly sign that we have let out the darkness that is inside all of us and, in a truly civil society, we wouldn't do that.”
While convinced of the truth flowing from the imagination, Hugh agrees that everyday happenings remain stranger than fiction. “Events occur which are either so complex or irrational or horrific that if you tried to put them in a novel, people would dismiss it as unbelievable.”
Which helps account for those occasions when, as the fly on the wall he thought, “I don't believe I'm hearing this”. Like the group talking about refugee boats, who wonder why the RAAF doesn't just bomb them.
“This is not said in a light-hearted way, but earnestly, by an apparently pleasant middle-class Australian with a wife and children who's talking to his mates over a few beers, and his mates are nodding and saying, ‘Yeah, why don't they just bomb them?'.
“Then, of course, I just feel like leaving, but my professional discipline forbids it. One colleague recently retired because she found herself too often hearing stuff she found so disappointing and offensive.
“But it's still true to say these are the exceptions; more often I'm moved by the extent to which people want to lead good lives. And I've been constantly amazed and thankful for their generosity in letting me into their homes to eavesdrop on what's on their minds.
“It's been an incredible experience.” YL
More
Advance Australia ... Where? by Hugh Mackay (Hachette Australia, RRP $35.00) was launched in August 2007 and is available at bookshops and online.
What's on Hugh's mind?
Hugh continued to lead his team of flies-on-the-wall after Ipsos Australia acquired The Mackay Report in 2003; however, while remaining a consultant to the project, he has recently stepped back from a hands-on research role. Which explains why, in Advance Australia ... Where? he felt free to reveal his own thoughts on six key issues: global warming, parliamentary behaviour, the monarchy, public education, poverty and arts funding. Of these, the last is the most intriguing and, unlike the others “purely a personal take”.
“You feel terrific – I feel terrific – if you sing in a choir, put on a play or become a serious photographer instead of just taking happy snaps,” he says. “It's the ‘great secret', that creative self-expression is therapeutic, and it badly needs sharing in a society with record consumption of tranquillisers and anti-depressants, record levels of debt and where more and more people are feeling disconnected. “I think there's a huge missed opportunity with arts funding; too much emphasis on which big company to fund or which promising artist to support. I'd like to see far more private and corporate philanthropy going into that sort of thing and public money getting us all singing and dancing.
“We'd become a different kind of nation. The material goal (and the stress that goes with it) becomes much less significant to people who are engrossed in creating music, words, pictures. Whereas John Howard dreams of a nation of shareholders, I dream of a nation of arts participants. “I hear people say, ‘I haven't sung, or painted a picture or written a poem since I left school – I wasn't very good, but I remember the joy of it'.”
What about the boomers?
“In 1997 I wrote Generations , about baby boomers, their parents and their children. I think it's quite a good book, but I also think generational labelling has become completely out of hand – talking about people as homogeneous lumps – and in a way I wish I had never raised the subject.
“Nonetheless, the emergence of the baby boomer generation did signal a real break with the past. It took place in a period of unique and unprecedented prosperity and progress in Australia, but overshadowed by the threat of nuclear oblivion. This gave boomers a sense of urgency that made them revolutionaries, pioneers, iconoclasts – embracers of the concept of instant gratification.
“One of the great ironies is that many baby boomers now look at what's been dubbed Gen X and say how selfish they are, the ‘me generation', although boomers were virtually the prototype. But there are critical differences and I must admit the rising generation of young Australians constantly inspire me, even though they get very bad press. They love material comfort but they're not on the treadmill in quite the way their parents have been; they may have their priorities much straighter than their parents' generation did. “So you can discern these broad social attitudes but there are always lots of exceptions; these generational labels have come to be used a bit like star signs and are less interesting to me now.”
The Mackay Dossier
Passions
Reading – fiction, including gritty crime fiction.
Music – classical (think Bach, Mozart, Elgar, chamber music; the list goes on) and jazz (especially James Morrison and Janet Seidel).
Is a former choral singer, plays piano “for therapy” and would happily dance if he had the knack.
Walking and bushwalking; playing cricket and footy with the kids (five children, seven grandchildren); also kayaked and played tennis and squash “until my shoulders gave up”.
Politics
While the books are necessarily apolitical, “my work has politicised me a bit,” Hugh admits. “I began always voting Liberal but became less comfortable as the liberals became more conservative, and in the lead-up to this year's federal election even had conservative commentators at The Australian sniping at me. “What I'm passionate about is social justice, so I'd describe myself as a left-leaning liberal but not rusted on to any political party.”
Pronunciation
The second syllable of ‘Mackay' rhymes with ‘day' – probably testimony to Irish ancestry.
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