Phillip Adams (29 page)

Carlyon's description of Adams' character and his part in that battle are pertinent. Under the will of David Syme,
The Age's
original owner, control was to pass to the family's third generation when his last son Oswald died. The family, management, staff and supporters were worried that the third generation would cash in their shares to get their hands on the money. Already, the Herald & Weekly Times, which Rupert Murdoch much desired but had not yet bought, and Sir Frank Packer (Kerry's father) had shown interest in buying
The Age.
The board arranged a marriage with Fairfax under which
The Age
became a 53 per cent Fairfax subsidiary but the Syme family retained editorial control. Les Carlyon said in his book: ‘The marriage to Fairfax was consummated amid bizarre diversions. While the documents were being finalised on the fifth floor of
The Age
, an emissary from Rupert Murdoch was wandering around with a piece of paper which amounted to a counter offer. Sir Frank Packer of Consolidated Press sent a counter offer over the reporters' room telex.' Adams, perhaps Australia's best-known columnist, film maker, advertising man and wit convened the Friends of The Age and arranged a public meeting for December 17, 1979.

Adams told the meeting his column had been ‘torn to shreds' by Fairfax and eventually disappeared from
The Sydney Morning Herald
. He ended what was a typical Adams production — lively, witty, highly personal and a touch exaggerated — with the rhetorical: ‘God, we've already lost David Williamson and Graham Kennedy to Sydney. I'd hate us to lose the paper as well.'

In 1981 the Victorian Government set up the Norris inquiry by Sir John Norris QC into the ownership and control of newspapers in Victoria. It revealed that between 1923 and 1981 Australian capital city and national daily newspaper companies fell from 21 to three. Les Carlyon's book described Adams, then in his early forties, as ‘something of a cult figure. To some, he is a hero in what they see as a world of journalistic sameness. To others, he is a deep pool of contradictions. He is a frantic worker: he used to write his
Age
columns as a sort of Sunday purgatory. For years he has worn black skivvies, which presumably save him the bother of shirts and ties; equally, the beard saves the bother of the razor. What no-one denies are Adams' gifts. He is a rare person: someone who writes the way he speaks. In conversation, as in print, he is witty, inventive, fluent and gently mocking. His voice is modulated and his speech, like his writing, is a mixture of whimsy and the best, the freshest, of Australian idiom. He was never an ambulance-chasing cadet reporter. He is rarely in
The Age
building and doesn't waste his time drinking with journalists.

‘His columns are usually free of conventional journalistic ploys and forms that can become boring. They are free-ranging in style, anything from dialogue to question and answer, plays, essays, ribaldry, send-ups, pieces from the heart and jabs into other people's viscera. Adams strides eagerly into areas like religion, death and sexuality, which often seem to threaten more conventional columnists. And he takes as his agenda not necessarily the headlines of the week, which so many columnists do, but what interests him. For Adams loves ideas and the more outlandish the better. He loves to offend and he hates to bore. His writing is relaxed, witty, mordant and above all conversational. He writes with pathos about childhood and death, obviously subjects that attract and trouble him. He writes with bitterness, almost like a defrauded customer, about orthodox religion. His satire can be savage, yet many of his victims seem grateful. There are many reasons why Adams has become a cult figure but one is obvious: he is a sparklingly good writer who refuses to be dull or to take himself too seriously.'

A key to the Friends of The Age members' concern lay in Adams' statement to the inquiry: ‘An organisation like ours is essentially a naïve one and an idealistic one. All that we could see was that the Fairfaxes might wish to relinquish their ownership of
The Age
.' As it happened, the inquiry found that Victorian newspaper ownership was concentrated; so far there had been no noticeable side effects, partly because of the proprietors' goodwill; but there was a potential danger if they acted without it. In any event, Fairfax steadily bought more and more of
The Age
; and in 1987 Murdoch succeeded in buying its only rival, the Herald & Weekly Times, reducing metropolitan and national newspaper companies in the Australian eastern states to two: News Ltd and Fairfax. Like many government inquiries, the Norris Inquiry achieved nothing except acres of words.

The only way to prevent increasing media concentration in Australia is by legislation. But bodies like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Foreign Investment Review Board listen far more to business lobbyists and merchant bankers intent on gaining huge takeover fees than to the idea that the public benefits from maintaining as much competition as possible.

Adams claims his nine Penguin joke books with Patrice Newell have sold more than a million copies since the first,
The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes
, was launched in 1994. This would be a phenomenal, hardly-believable average of more than 100,000 copies per book, well over ten times average Australian book sales. They were a magnificent money-spinner for Adams, Patrice Newell and Penguin. Adams likes cracking jokes on his programs and in person but says the books were Penguin's idea, not his. He had to find the jokes and rewrite thousands of them into a house style. He thinks they found almost every joke in history. He said in his National Library oral history: ‘It was an appalling experience and deeply depressing. But that's what jokes are. Jokes are little acts of exorcism where people deal with things they dislike or fear, whether it's sexual intercourse, impotence, nuns or politicians. So to fill a book which is a record of what people are laughing at — an oral history really — is crazy. Penguin panicked and took out some of the more lurid jokes, a wonderful one about the Queen which I really miss, and some of the more objectionable jokes about Aborigines which would not shock the Aborigines. Censorship in any form is dangerous.'

Adams also discovered that there are few genuine Australian jokes because almost every one has been recycled from overseas. His favourite joke is, however, genuinely Australian, about a couple of bushies who'd been making fences back o' Bourke. One asks the other, ‘What are ya gunna do when ya got ya money, mate?' The other replies, ‘I dunno. I might go down to S'nee.' The first bushie says, ‘Yeah. S'nee's a pretty good place. And what route are ya taking?' The other bushie replies, ‘Ah, I think I might take the wife. She's stuck with me through the drought!' The series included
The Penguin Book of More Australian Jokes
,
The Penguin Book of Jokes from
Cyberspace, The Penguin Book of Schoolyard Jokes, The Penguin Book of World Jokes, The
Penguin Book of All-New Australian Jokes
,
Pocket Jokes, More Pocket Jokes
and
What a Gag!More Kids' Jokes from the Net.

How does Phillip plan his
Weekend Australian Magazine
columns? Not much at all, really. Usually he thinks up a topic but doesn't know where it will go; anything from a dog that has died on his farm to an idea the government should keep alive, like combating climate change. He writes up to four weekly columns in a weekend on the farm and the magazine editor and he decide by email which ones will be run in which weeks. He admits his columns are written quickly and intuitively rather than logically and thoughtfully. Often, this is obvious. Usually, the columns involve no research except through his extraordinary mind and memory.

Adams' columns and broadcasts have one thing in common: he tries to introduce people to ideas. In politics and public affairs, he sees his job as putting a counter view to what is being debated because usually the community is ill-informed, either through shortcomings in the media or in people's minds or because people don't want to be informed. He told me that in the Pauline Hanson era, when people were being brutal to refugees, they chose not to know that the refugees were completely within their legal rights to ask for asylum. To admit to this would have been too disturbing to Australian's sense of being tolerant. Many people did not want to know the truth. They'd rather go shopping.

Adams follows up very few of his
Late Night Live
conversations with highly intelligent and articulate people around the world by writing about the same people or ideas in
The Weekend
Australian Magazine.
Obviously he couldn't just repeat his broadcasts, but he could follow-up ideas or concepts in some broadcasts by doing more research and writing about it in his column. Some of his listeners and readers would be the same people. However, my own conversations with 30 of Phillip's fans and non-fans revealed that almost all either listen often to the broadcasts but rarely read the columns, or the reverse.

My favourite Adams
Late Night Live
conversation was with Arthur Miller on February 6, 2001, repeated a few days after Arthur died in February 2005, and followed up in his
Weekend Australian Magazine
column on June 14, 2008. Adams told how he had asked his producers to assure Miller he would not mention Marilyn Monroe but Miller kept talking about her ‘as if still awestruck by their improbable and ultimately sad relationship'. (I declare a special interest, as when I was a young freelance journalist hitchhiking around the world in 1956, I read in
The Los
Angeles Examiner
that Marilyn was planning that day to fly to New York City to marry Arthur. I got a bus to the airport and tagged along behind a batch of Hollywood reporters. Marilyn sat in the doorway of her limo with her legs well displayed. I asked her as many questions as I could think of while she held my hand.)

Finally in his conversation with Arthur Miller, Adams got him to talk about
Death of a
Salesman,
which had its opening night in 1949 but is still being played around the world. Adams wrote in
The Weekend Australian Magazine
, ‘In the final scene, Willy Loman's old friend Charley gives one of the greatest speeches ever written for American theatre — about the inevitable end of a salesman's sustaining dream. Willy's wife kneels by the grave of the man she loved, for all his faults, and says, “I made the last payment on the house, Willy, but there'll be nobody home.”' Adams said: ‘Miller remembered standing at the back of the theatre on the opening night as the curtain fell. Total silence. Behind the curtain the actors were frozen with bewilderment. The silence went on for several minutes. Then they started to clap and they've been clapping ever since. It's no exaggeration to say the play changed my life every bit as much as it changed theatre.'

What interview or column subjects does Adams avoid? He does not talk about business and leaves his partnership in Monahan Dayman Adams out of any CV because ‘I always see it as an accidental detour. But to be honest, it gave me money and with money (lots of it) I could bargain with prospective media employers because I was never desperate. I'm not terribly interested in business or economics. I get my weekly economics lecture from Paul Keating when he rings. I've never been numerate so I'm not good at economics.' Adams has, however, often had
Late Night
Live
conversations with financial people since the world crash and its aftermath made finance a hot topic. Sport? Not a subject. ‘It's not that I despise it or anything. It's wonderful for people who are good at it. But I do not like the mass-marketing of sport — or anything.' One sports interview he had on-air was with Aboriginal Australian Football League hero Kevin Sheedy, about his work with Aboriginal children. Typically, Adams spent the first ten minutes joking with him about their common low-income upbringing in Melbourne suburbs.

Adams tells how once he saved Keating from public embarrassment when Keating's clash with Bob Hawke was hot news. Keating bowled unannounced into Adams' office while a
Sydney
Morning Herald
journalist was interviewing him about the arts, and started mouthing obscenities about Hawke. The
Herald
reporter thought Christmas had arrived. Adams said, “Paul, Paul, this is a journalist from
The Sydney Morning Herald
”. But he wouldn't stop. After Keating left, Phillip appealed to the reporter not to report the outburst because she had been his guest at the time. She did not report it.

Chapter Eighteen:
Outspoken Views — He Stirs the Possum

In conversations with me and in his
Weekend Australian Magazine
columns, Phillip Adams tells how to elect an Australian president; why voters have become more conservative; why they join community groups and not political parties; why solar power is an answer to the biggest community concern of climate change; why the world has so much information but little wisdom; why there are some reasons to be happy; what John and Heather did to save families; how drugs killed a politician's son; how the real pornography is violence not sex; how companies indulge in paedophilia; where Melbourne is different from Sydney; how high executive salaries are obscene; how radio talkback taught him a lesson; how he has searched for a solution to Aboriginal problems; and how Western society censors death.