Jim was fortunate to get into PR at a time when it was still in its infancy in Australia, and make it up as he went along.  His first taste of the role was at a public company called Gollin, where he was Group General Public Relations Manager, even though his only experience was a couple of client newsletters and running a social club at just about every other place he had worked.  

He later described his time at Gollin as a “crash course in corporate communications and investor relations… I was able to develop my own way of doing things, without preconceived ideas or having learned bad habits”.

He also learnt what he didn’t want to do.  Jim remembered an experience where he took an external consultant and his wife out to dinner, to say thank you for the successful completion of a project.  He couldn’t believe it when he got the final invoice from the consultant which included a charge for his time at the dinner.

His time with the Royal Air Force in the UK in the early 1960s also stood him in good stead throughout his career, teaching him discipline and a strong sense of duty.

The traits of fairness, transparency and organisation were central to his professional success.

Jim built media relationships the same way he approached everything – directly. “Not knowing any journalists, I simply phoned finance editors, introduced myself and asked if we could catch up for lunch… I found out what I needed to do to get coverage.” When Gollin ran into trouble in 1975, those relationships held firm. “To my surprise the relationships I had built in the good times remained strong and lasted all my working life.” A colleague later said he had been instrumental in building a bridge between journalists and PR people.

After Gollin collapsed, he knew he didn’t want to work for a large organisation again and so decided to set up his own consultancy working from home.  He learnt how to run a business as he went along, although he says he made many mistakes at first, such as not charging enough!  But the fear of failure kept him determined.  

For example, in those days, having a media monitoring service meant there were people whose job it was to read through every single publication in the country, and cut out (“clip”) any coverage that met the key words.  Jim would drive out to where they worked every week, and collect bags of newspapers and magazines.  He would read around the holes that had been cut out, learning about the stories those publications were interested in, and which journalists wrote them.

He also had great stories about some of the boozy media lunches he used to arrange, where journalists would sit around for hours going through bottles of wine and having wonderful conversations with the executives.  Then, just when he thought it was all done, one of the journos would pull him aside and suggest going down the pub for a cleansing ale!  They would pop off to a phone booth to call in a story, and then settle in for the evening.

The business was a success, later growing Corporate Communications Pty Ltd with around 20 staff.  In the mid-‘80s he sold it to the UK’s biggest PR firm, Shandwick Plc, and returned to working independently from a backyard cabin.

Jim lived through enormous workplace and technological changes. Early in his career, typewriters were manual and typing pools supported whole offices. Maggie, his wife, remembers using one of the first ‘word processors’ in the early 1970s. When they started their business in 1976, they bought an electric typewriter - an IBM gold-ball machine - and by the early 1980s had a networked word-processing system linked to a daisywheel printer – advanced for the time. Before calculators, it was mental arithmetic or comptometers, and pre-decimal currency made calculations even harder. Photocopiers arrived only in the 1970s; before that it was carbon paper, stencils and Roneo machines.

He began thinking about retirement in 2000, but it took another decade. I joined him in 2003, gradually taking over as he moved into a mentoring role. He remained proud of the profession, saying, “Public relations encouraged companies to be more communicative and to open up more through the media”.