Paul Gaskin

Memories of Fort Street for me are a happy blur – playing on the Hill in front of the Observatory, singing in Terence Hunt’s School music broadcasts, learning baseball in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge stand out, but day to day classroom activity hardly at all. Each day I took the train from Waverton to Wynyard. A couple of times a week I would walk (with parental permission) along York Street to the Queen Victoria Building to borrow new books from the City Council Library. And wander (without parental permission) through the wonder-filled streets of the city on increasingly circuitous routes – down to Darling Harbour, up to the Mitchell/State Library and Hyde Park. It was a wonderfully free existence.

I had hoped to go on to North Sydney High, but I carelessly won a scholarship to Shore, and it seemed churlish of me to turn it down when my parents had had me booked in there anyway! I didn’t much like a very structured Shore after Fort Street. “What are the rules of cricket?“ No one thought I mightn’t know. I was hopeless at Rugby, since any running brought on asthma, and wheezing. But my Fort Street experience paid off in the only two prizes I won – both for General Knowledge. And I’m still a media junkie!

I went on to Engineering at Sydney University, but failed second year, more deeply involved in campus theatre (in a backstage role) than in any Engineering activity or sport.

Jobs were easy to find in the 1960s and I soon found economics might be worth studying, and spent seven years part-time getting to UNSW at Randwick after work. (Those were the days in universities – 700 in the evening first year economics lecture, most of them asleep at 6.15 pm!)

Halfway through I married Margaret, and we are still together 39 years later. Our three daughters – all now in their 30s – have interesting lives, and also – for the present, at least - live in Melbourne. Two are married, each with two children; our grandkids are aged 1 to 5.

By the end of my degree, I was at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, in the research department, and the next five years gave me a wonderful foundation for my subsequent career. I rose to head the research department and was able to travel to London and New York as part of the job.

I became the first Australian to teach advertising at university level in Australia - at Queensland Institute of Technology (now QUT) in 1976. QIT sent me – all of us! – to the UK for a year, where I did an MBA at Cranfield. Something must have gone right, since I subsequently introduced undergraduate advertising at Monash University (1995, at the Berwick campus) and a Masters in advertising management at RMIT (2002).

Never being prepared to stay more than six years in a job has deprived me permanently of long service leave, but made for interesting job switches. After QIT, I returned to advertising in the 1980s at McCann-Erickson and also worked as a market researcher with Roy Morgan, Reark Research and the (former) Myer Emporium.

We lived in Brisbane for six years, and have now been in Melbourne for 25 years - out of Sydney for 30 years. And we nearly moved to the US early this year, but that’s another story.

I’m still teaching part-time at Victoria University, and will retire sometime in a year or so.

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