Phillip Adams (20 page)

To add to Patrice's problems, her marriage to Cameron Allan was encountering difficulties. She left him, bought her own flat in Sydney and switched from the Seven Network to SBS Television as a newsreader and current affairs host. That was when her life changed direction completely because, when doing SBS interviews for a program on the film industry, she was sent to interview Adams.

Something clicked for both of them at that interview, in spite of Adams being 17 years older than Patrice and the father of three children. Patrice stayed with SBS until 1986, when she became a presenter for the Nine Network's
Today
show.

***

Adams told me his own story of how, not long after they met, he and Patrice came to live at Elmswood: ‘We went on immensely long drives looking at houses in isolated parts,' he said one morning. ‘Neither of us had any interest in farming — that wasn't the exercise. We were driving around near Scone heading towards Belltrees, the great home of the White family, of whom Patrick was the most famous. Patrice remembered being at Belltrees as the handbag of a gay White, who needed a girlfriend for a family function.

‘I saw an extraordinary house, two storeys, plonked on a hill, looking like an abandoned paddle-steamer on the Mississippi, completely out of place. I thought it was wonderful and I said, “That's where I'd like to live.” So we drove in and found a strange woman planting things in the garden. I asked her whether we could have a look around, so we did, and she gave us a cup of tea. I said, “I'd like to buy your house”, and made her an offer she couldn't refuse. She sold it to us for what was regarded locally as a ludicrous price, although I thought it was dirt cheap. It included about 3,000 acres. Over a hundred years it had shrunk, as old properties tend to do. Little by little, it has grown again to 10,000 acres, the title of one of Pat's books about it.' The book is
Ten Thousand Acres — A Love Story
, published by Lantern, a Penguin imprint.

‘Pat got a passion for farming,' Adams continued. ‘Every weekend we go out on a four-wheel bike, looking for cattle, counting calves or checking dams. We've been doing that for twenty-five years but the farm is so complex and big and full of valleys that we're still discovering new places.'

Watching Adams talk about Elmswood, I can see that the place and the life he lives there make him happy. Patrice once said, on television, that one reason she, Adams and Rory connect so well is that each of them is an only child and so is Rory. So they accept each other's loner personalities.

But they have different attitudes to their cattle and it was shown in the case of Adams' favourite bull, Malcolm X, which used to come to him for a hug across a paddock, like a puppy dog. Malcolm X was so called because he was huge and magnificently black, like the American activist of the same name. Both sadly suffered the same fate: the activist was assassinated when giving a speech in New York City in 1965; the bull was causing havoc and used to collect fences as it strolled across paddocks and was assassinated one week when Phillip was away in Sydney. Adams said it was ‘the lowest point of Patrice's and my relationship'.

Despite that, Adams said in
Australian Story
that Patrice is more ethical than almost anyone he's met, a constant inspiration and challenge, determined, full of courage and with an irreverence that ‘takes the piss' out of any tendency he has to be pompous, whereas he challenges her with humour.

Patrice sounds self-possessed and self-indulgent in
The Olive Grove
(Penguin, 2000), which probably pleases her readers. Each of her books had sales of between 5,000 and 6,000. She has become very attached to the property; she's proud of what she has done there and becomes emotional when nature damages her crops, especially olives. She goes for long walks alone in the bush on the property and sometimes strips off and has a swim in a dam. Adams and she have wide personality differences. For example, Adams collects things, like pieces of wood, because he likes to surround himself with things rather than people. He also has very simple food tastes, such as biscuits, while Patrice likes to cook creatively, which results in Adams being well fed with good meals when he is at home, whereas he doesn't eat much at all when in Sydney.

Aurora completed her Higher School Certificate in 2009 and in September 2010 Adams and Patrice farewelled her from Sydney Airport on her way to Edinburgh, where she will go to the university for four years. Adams wrote a good column about it in
The Weekend Australian
Magazine
on September 25, 2010, a column that would appeal to parents. Obviously sorry to farewell Aurora, he told how eighteen years ago he used to sit on an old couch at the farm — ‘the couch is on its last legs and we're both shabbily upholstered' — and toss Aurora as a little girl into the sky and catch her. ‘But yesterday she was aloft again. She took off in a big way. Tears all round at Sydney Airport and she was flying high to Edinburgh. Her home for the next four years. Her choice of city and university. Why Edinburgh? Probably osmosis. After all, our nearest towns are Scone and Aberdeen. The homestead was built 120 years ago by Presbyterians fresh from Scotland. Our cattle are mainly Angus, the black-faced sheep would be at home in the highlands and the dogs are Border Collie crosses.

‘Emotions had been running high. I took her for a last ride around the place. On a four-wheel bike, the way I have since she was a one-year-old. The place couldn't have looked lovelier. After a decade of drought we splashed through the creek and went up and down hills now lush and plush with grass,' Adams wrote. ‘All the animals are having kids. The heifers are calving, the sheep giving birth to black lambs, the kangaroos to joeys. We parked on a ridge and Rory (sorry — Aurora now she's grown up) looked around at the landscape she was born into. It feels as if 18 years have passed in 18 months. Yet Rory is still here. All the Rorys. Like the ever-smaller figures in a Russian doll. The tiny Rory, the big Auroa, and all the others in-between. Little Rory, bouncing around the paddocks on the four-wheeler, laughing with her mum in the kitchen as she learned to cook, which she learned very well indeed. Listening wide-eyed to the ghost stories I made up — all the more plausible in an old house with ghosts galore. Playing with the dogs, collecting the eggs, waiting for the school bus, splashing in the rock pools and the river. Sitting reading book after book. Doing what every child does. Thinking, learning, dreaming, growing.

‘And now going. All kids must go. Into an unknown future in a world with unprecedented problems. A young woman full, nevertheless, with confidence and hope. Determined to do something about those problems. Bon voyage, Aurora.'

***

I wanted more information about Phillip's partnership with Patrice Newell, and got it from Matt Noffs (Ted Noffs' grandson). Matt, who was thirty-one in 2010, meets Adams regularly and at one meeting, Adams asked him, ‘Do you have a strong woman? You need a strong woman.' Matt Noffs told me, ‘When I met Patrice, I knew what “strong” meant. Patrice is an incredibly sharp, tough, resourceful and knowledgeable woman who matches Phillip's intelligence. You can tell she's the ruler of the family. I've heard Phillip say that's why they live separately half the week, when Phillip stays in Sydney to broadcast — not so many arguments.

‘When I see them together,' Noffs continued, ‘they act as if they could kill each other, but they're also loving towards each other. They hold each other and adore each other. Each is trying to get the most out of life, all the time. When they're apart, it's work, and when they're together, it's family. Patrice told me Phillip's a big softie who wants people to think he's tough, which is why he's abrupt on the phone.

‘Phillip told me that when Patrice wants something, she just goes for it. He's her number one advisor and she takes his advice very seriously. But it's not as if he runs anything. She runs the home and the farm.'