The American television series Mad Men ,now in its fourth season, is compelling viewing both dramatically and as social commentary.  It is set on the cusp of the fifties and sixties in the  fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency, Sterling Cooper . Baby boomers and their offspring when watching this show are looking at the prime years of the  World War II  generation  at work and play.   What immediately strikes one about this historically authentic show is the depiction of the social attitudes and mores in this busy office setting . Most noticeably everyone is smoking, constantly and in the office! The executives when not at a long lunch are regularly pouring a colleague a whisky from a bottle prominently on display in the office.  The ethos of sexuality in the office is of the louche kind. The typing pool and models are fair game for conquest and open comment by  the executive  staff  which is predominately male.

This show brought to mind the changing nature of the Australian workplace and in particular for me the thirty five years  of my working life in industrial relations and the legal profession.  Attitudes where I worked from the mid seventies onwards were not too far from the ones depicted in Mad Men. The cultural zeitgeist of my working world then was still under the orbit of the World War II generation or those following and closely influenced by it.

 Smoking at work was ubiquitous. The eponymous smoko break was sacrosanct and proselytising in its effect. One wonders why a break was needed as you could smoke in any office. It appeared to be de rigeur in negotiations on an ambit log of claims or  at strike meetings. When one refers to  meetings in smoke filled rooms one is not engaging in hyperbole.

  Then there was the drinking!  Alcohol was the fuel of union and management negotiations, always after a successful negotiation  regularly during them. The  lawyers’ Friday long lunch was observed  as if a religious event. I can recall doing a case in Brisbane when all the participants in the  Conciliation and Arbitration Commission adjourned to the local pub. There the so-called negotiations continued  during a  liquid lunch.  That is lots of beer and  only chips..  Another occasion when the federal Commission  was sitting in the Law Courts Building in Queens’ Square, Sydney  an urgent hearing was set for  9am. The matter  was adjourned at 9:40am to the usual place.  I had no idea where the usual place was until I was directed to the Vintage Bar of the Carlton-Rex  Hotel in  Elizabeth Street, where the negotiations continued with  the late Commissioner Brack  having (for breakfast) a gin and tonic and  the officials each had successive  schooners of Reschs. I recall in the seventies Industrial Relations Society conferences  in Bathurst.  The weekend started at Central Railway station   in a crowded  carriage where there were full  eskies. Thereafter drinks and singing   all the way to the  Blue Mountains and beyond .Once there the festivities continued apace  all weekend, with the  learned speakers addressing an almost empty  auditorium with the bulk of the  conference attendees  across the road in the pub.  One union official told me never to trust anybody who didn’t drink. No wonder that heroic Oxford drinker Bob Hawke rose, like the head of a well poured beer  to top of the ACTU.

That  openness of sexual peccadilloes and ingrained sexism  shown in Mad Men were equally evident in the industrial relations and legal worlds of seventies Australia. Cases like the recent David Jones imbroglio were unknown and perhaps regarded as droit de seigneur. I can recall one barristers’ Christmas party at the Sydney Cricket Ground where a couple’s alcohol laced ardour led to congress on the hallowed pitch. The counsel in question achieving legendary status.

How when and why the work culture changed so dramatically in the two  closely allied industries is worth a longer examination than this piece can supply. Change it has.  Smoking has at work been  banished  from indoors,  drinking even during lunch is restrained and generally after work. The sexual banter and sexism openly gone or in code. Office flirtation is careful, off the set and secret.

The past is indeed a foreign country.