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A rebel, generally speaking: Lunch with Jane Caro

Learning how to talk the talk can be the difference between good spin and bad, writes Tim Dick.

KNOWING something about everything rather than everything about something is useful in pub trivia, but as a career goal? Who's done that since the Renaissance?

Western education tends to be specialised and careers even more so: people are emergency nurses, tax lawyers or hydrogeologists. Few are generalists, many are ultra-specialised and their occupations are changed with difficulty, luck or misfortune. Rarely do people do three or four or more ''things'' at the same time.

Yet at last count, Jane Caro, a former advertising executive, is an author, commentator and speaker. She is a semi-professional atheist, feminist and public education advocate. She is a lecturer, a fiery panellist on The Gruen Transfer and an occasional radio host. At risk of alluding to the negative second half of the phrase, she is a jack-of-all-careers.

''Australia has a problem with that,'' she says, sitting in a Millers Point pub over salad and a glass of still water, having declined one of sparkling because the bubbles tickle her throat. ''It wants you to be 'that' thing, or 'that' thing, or 'that' thing. My thing is words. I speak them and write them. That's what I like to do.''

Caro is full of words and opinions but manages not to be full of herself, unlike the reputation of many in her original industry. At school she was told to try harder and talk less and, 40 years on, it's clear the second half of that advice had precisely no effect.

She can talk, and then some, making a reporter's questions largely redundant as a lunch interview gives way to a lively canter through the fields of class, education, rebelliousness, the good side of advertising, its sexism, education again, Labor Party spin and why you should not say mean things about people on Twitter, especially after a glass of wine.


She is forthright but her positions usually come delivered with a twinkle in her eye, demonstrating how she has turned the stuff of general conversation into a life as a professional generalist. But that occupation sits uncomfortably in modern Australia.

''There's this desire to want to pack me up and put me in a nice little box and say, 'That's where Jane Caro is,''' she says of an Australian attitude to wanting to know what people do. ''There's this problem with people being open to all sorts of things, interested in the general.''

She thinks professionals in particular want to hire focused people who are perfectly qualified for a particular job. Many are uncomfortable with someone having a varied history, rather than a long-standing and well-credentialled specialisation.

''We need specialists. We need people who are absolutely obsessive about finding a cure for cancer or whatever it is. But we also need generalists who can say to them, 'That's great, but you're not going to get the grant unless you appeal to all these different areas.' We need context-setters.''

Caro's context is this: she is a 53-year-old mother of two, a born rebel who is still married to her children's father, a city woman who lives in Artarmon but has a farm on the edge of the Barrington Tops, someone who was born in London but migrated south when she was five. As she puts it, she is Australian by choice, English by accident.

Her father, Andy Caro, came with a posh accent; her mother Kate's was not so much - and her mother's Manchester way of speaking didn't have the same effect in Sydney in 1963. ''She fell in love with Australia the minute she stepped off the boat because, for the first time in her life, people just thought she was English. They didn't automatically think where she sat in the hierarchy in terms of class.''

Sent to a public school, she had a ''fantastic education'' at Forest High School - David Koch was in her year and INXS one or two behind. She was not particularly academic and she tended to the rebellious. ''Cigarettes round the back. Wore my skirts very short. Hung out with the wrong kind of boys. Wow, was it fun!''

She went to Macquarie University when seeking a degree was free and education more about enrichment than matching skill sets to selection criteria. Allowed to do a degree with no idea what she would do when she left, she majored in English literature.

On campus in the '70s, her intended career - advertising - was not the preferred destination of her contemporaries. ''It was like saying I wanted to murder babies,'' she says. ''Everyone was way more left-wing than me then. Funny how things change. I watched the world go right by me. At university I was further right than Genghis Khan. No, I wasn't as far right as Tony Abbott but now I'm considered frightfully left-wing.''

She had considered journalism but her father was in marketing. ''For a girl in the 1970s, it was hard to get into any of those things unless you were a really top-level student, which I wasn't, or you had connections,'' she says. Hers were in marketing, so there she went.

After an unspectacular start, she turned to advertising. Bryce Courtenay, an advertising executive before he was a bestselling author, told her some material she prepared for him was good and advised her to get a small job in a big agency. ''That gave me just enough encouragement, because at that time there was no way for girls to get into creative agencies.''

She was deft at taking the dull and making it not. She won awards. She career-hopped. She ended up at The Campaign Palace, then one of the best agencies in Sydney. She was retrenched.

''It was devastating. I kind of knew they were going to do it because they lost an account and I was pregnant. I'm sure they would deny it, but come on. It was at least partly because of that … Why would they fire someone who wanted to stay when I was going to go in April, anyway?

''So that was a bit of a sit-me-back-on-my-arse.''

After a stint freelancing, she returned to agencies and discovered one way having children can help a career: it stopped male colleagues staring at her breasts while she was trying to sell her ideas. ''Somehow you'd go from being single girl to being a mother and suddenly no one wants to sleep with you any more.''

But, despite motherhood and an established creative reputation, she could not bag the title of creative director. She attributes that to sexist prejudice. After becoming bored and frustrated, she found a way out from her specialty and into generalism.

She had a gig on Channel Seven's breakfast show, Sunrise, then wrote a book, The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education, with a former school principal, Chris Bonner. She began writing opinion pieces, including for the Herald, and wound up on the ABC's hit show about advertising, The Gruen Transfer.

She has spent this summer filling in on ABC Newcastle's drive show and, after two attempts, her first novel, Just a Girl, will be published this year. It's young adult historical fiction about a sleepless Elizabeth I on the night before her coronation.

She frets most often about education, railing against the growth in private schooling at the expense of government schools, and against the narrowing of education to doing what it takes to pass certain exams.

She says there are two ways to run an education system: ''One is to teach our kids what to think, and the other is to teach them how to think.

''More and more, now we're teaching them what to think, which is crazy. The world needs the opposite. It needs people who can adapt to a very rapidly changing world.''

Generalisations aside, advertising taught her how to communicate, and two lessons in particular.

One: there is such a thing as good spin, like taking a friend with a problem out for a drink and pointing out a way to look on the bright side. Then there is bad spin, and she gives three examples: Building the Education Revolution, No Child Left Behind and Fair Work Australia.

''The minute they tell you it's fair, you know it isn't. The minute they need to tell you they're building something, they're not. The minute they tell you there's a revolution, there isn't. The minute they say no child left behind, you can be absolutely sure there'll be more children than ever before left behind.

''They protest too much. They are trying to cover something up. And that's bad spin.''

And the final lesson of our lunch: the most effective weapon in almost any argument is humour. ''Humour is the most disarming thing you can do. I learnt that slowly and with difficulty. I often say to feminists: if you're going to deface a poster, make it a witty defacement. You don't shriek people into changing their opinions.''

Life and times

- Born London, 1957

- Migrated to Australia in 1963

- Graduated with BA in English literature from Macquarie University in 1977

- First copywriter job in advertising at USB Needham in 1980

- Advertising career included The Campaign Palace, JWT, Saatchi&Saatchi, Principals, FCB and freelancing

- First book was The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education (written with Chris Bonnor) published in 2007. Second in 2008, The F Word: How We Learned to Swear by Feminism (written with Catherine Fox)

- The Gruen Transfer began 2008.

- Her first novel, Just A Girl, will be launched at the Sydney Writers' Festival in May