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Picking Margaret Fulton's olives
Twenty five years ago (I think) I worked as an Agency TV producer on New
Idea magazine's TV commercials (Dulcie Boling was editor then). Once a month we'd fly to Sydney and
with a Melbourne crew, videotape a batch of Margaret Fulton's five second
inserts for the coming weeks TV spots. We worked in her tiny kitchen and
as we tried to cut costs, as the agency producer I started to direct the
sequences. (One five second shot wasn't very taxing, some we did with
Barbara Stephens as co-presenter with them bouncing lines off each other.)
If we finished them all,
I'd shout the crew and Margaret lunch at Dawn Fraser's pub nearby.
(Remember expense accounts?) I must have done a year or
so of those commercials and I remember it as enjoyable and Margaret was
so easy to work with. Looking back at the commercials
now on some old history reels I'm amazed at the slow pace and the clunky
video graphics but they seemed pretty good TV advertising for a magazine at the time.
When GREY, the agency in Canberra Jan works for as creative director,
asked me if I'd help produce a public service TV commercial with Margaret,
of course I said yes. While I'd love to say Margaret remembered me, she
did remember 'that nice girl' (Barbara) however. We shot the two
commercials, once again in her tiny kitchen and Margaret was terrific, a
bit tired by the long day but when the camera rolled she lit up and
'performed'.
 I'd forgotten how beautiful her tiny terraced back yard was and the last
level near the harbour, is shared with the house next door. It has a tiny
boathouse, a great view and ... a row of olive trees.
They'd been let grow as if wild and were quite tall but they were really
beautiful, with that distinctive soft grey
 green 'olive' colour. From the
overhanging fence I reached out and picked a handful of them, and from the
ground picked up a few more. When I took them inside and gave them to her.
She was surprised and pleased as she thought they'd all been eaten by
birds. Margaret said she knew she should have had the trees pruned so that
someone could reach the fruit, but was now resigned to leave them grow
wild.
A wild olive grove on the edge of Sydney Harbour? That seemed to fit ok to
me.
 Margaret wrote Cooking
for Dummies at the peak of the 'Dummies' series success. I noticed it's
still in print and it's the kind of book I should have given to our
daughters as they left home. Or would they now be offended?
(The reason Margaret was feeling a bit tired was that
she'd just returned from an interstate tour to promote her 'revised'
Margaret Fulton Cookbook. She told a story of a particularly taxing
evening when a special dinner was given in her honour at a Victorian
country winery, with such a large number of guests turned up that they had
to move the long tables out to the Winery sheds, great location and with only a little bit
of heating she had caught a cold. 'But', she said, 'I stayed up way past
my regular bedtime, and it was a lot of fun'.)
Olive trees easily live a hundred years, here's wishing Margaret, that you
may live as long.
Fred Harden
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