Don Burke’s personality explored in 1991 interview

A 1991 magazine profile on Don Burke went in depth on the star’s personality, revealing friends jokingly called him “the Antichrist”. He was so angered by the result, he threatened to sue.

A 1991 MAGAZINE profile of Don Burke painted the TV gardener as “arrogant, conceited, egotistical and obsessive” — and so enraged the star, he threatened to sue.

Veteran journalist Richard Glover today posted to Facebook a profile he wrote on Burke that originally ran in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine in April 1991.

In his Facebook post, he wrote that he “tried to smuggle some of the sexual allegations into the Herald back in 1991 ... but didn’t quite have the evidence to convince the lawyers”.

“Even so, Burke threatened, for a considerable time, to sue me over this piece,” Glover wrote.

Burke this week stands accused of a pattern of sexual harassment and bullying, with allegations from a number of former co-workers.

Glover conducted more than 50 interviews with Burke and those around him for the 1991 piece, and noted that among his colleagues, friends and former classmates, “Don Burke is never described as normal”.

1990s-era Don Burke.

Glover wrote that those who he spoke to “report a darker side, offering their nickname for [Burke] as a kind of jokey summary: they call him the Antichrist”.

Several anonymous former Burke’s Backyard staffers are quoted throughout the piece — one recounts that Burke once told him: “I could learn your whole job in a day if I wanted,” while another recalls contacting world experts in a field “only to be told constantly by Burke that he knew more about the subject”.

“He reckons that he knows more about cameras than the cameraman; more about editing than the editor; more about the topic than the expert they’ve brought in; and more about television than Kerry Packer,” Glover quotes one unnamed ‘TV heavy’ as saying.

One former staffer refuses to speak Glover — a friend relays that the person “is too cut up, too destroyed by the experience of working there, to be able to talk about it quite yet”.

Another colleague gives Glover a warning: “Watch what you write about him, mate. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll pursue you for years.”

Burke describes himself as “different” in the piece, saying he “kept a lot to himself” while growing up.

Journalist Richard Glover.

“I wanted to be the one who walks through the crowd that no-one notices; but to carry a big stick so if anyone has a go at you, you can defend yourself,” Burke said.

“If you box me into a corner and have a go at me, I will try to resolve it, but when I’ve had enough ... well, I don’t take prisoners.”

The TV star also told Glover tales of his outstanding success in his previous endeavours — delivering genetics lectures by the age of 15, working for a bank and quickly devising a way to save the company millions, leaving his university degree after sitting the professor down to tell him his course was a mess and he was a failure in his job.

But his former colleagues say they were unsure about some of his claims.

“He’s just intensely competitive,” said one, “so he can’t stand meeting, say, a runner and admitting the guy is better at something than he is. So he makes up a story about how he was once a great runner too.”

In reposting the piece on Facebook, Glover notes the original publication date and points out that “people saying ‘we didn’t know’ — at least about the bullying — don’t really have much excuse”.

Despite this, some in the entertainment industry have reacted to the allegations this week with shock, among them media veteran Ita Buttrose, who on Studio 10 today said she’d known Burke since they worked together in radio in the ‘80s.

“I had two female producers and I spoke to them yesterday and none of us ever heard any of these allegations about Don,” she said.

“As far as we girls were all concerned, he was fine. He was a nice guy. Quite funny, very ambitious. I don’t know about the rest of it, maybe he changed.”

Tziporah Malkah (formerly known as Kate Fischer) also spoke out today, saying she’d never witnessed or heard of any improper behaviour during her time hosting a Nine program in the ‘90s while she was engaged to James Packer.

“Maybe I was protected because I was the boss’s son’s fiancee. Because I didn’t hear anything,” she said.

“He wasn’t touchy-feely with me. I’m a hugger. And he’d never press himself into me. I know those men. They press themselves into you and they really wanna feel your nipples pressing into them. Don never did that,” Malkah insisted.