Phillip Adams (28 page)

Hazel, of Golden Square, Victoria, wrote: “You have really gone too far. This week you again took the Mickey out of all those good people who believe in the supernatural. You degrade a most worthy group, who deserve your sympathy. You refer to pigs' ‘trotters'. Really, Mr Adams, sheep have trotters, pigs have feet, as any butcher could tell you.'

Simon, of Dunnstown, Victoria, wrote, ‘As a believer in God, I have read widely and made some fascinating discoveries in the past few years. The Bible does not forbid God's ministers to marry but encourages marriage. Celibacy is the Catholic Church's idea.'

Barbara emailed, ‘The greatest weapon of mass destruction is religion. There is but one god, so why do we belt each other on his or her behalf?'

Finally, this gem from Alexis, of Tully, Queensland, ‘My dad is an intelligent, compassionate atheist. Mum is a kind, devoted Catholic. Dad reckons the Pope needs five kids, a wife and a cow to sort himself out. Mum agrees.'

Chapter Seventeen:
Adams and Other Media Grumpies

Phillip Adams moved from the communist
Guardian
to
The Bulletin
, to
The Australian
before Rupert Murdoch sacked him, to
Nation Review
, back to
The Australian
, to
The Age
and back to
The Australian
. Along the way he tried to stop
The Age
becoming a takeover target, edited nine joke books and indulged in hate wars and petty squabbles with rival media grumpies.

He told me his generation of commentators and public intellectuals are still calling the shots and occupying the front ranks in their sixties and seventies while people in their twenties, thirties and forties are “pissed off” waiting for a chance. But will he surrender
Late Night Live?
In Australia, once you're on the totem pole, you stay there, whereas you don't in the United States or Britain, because others push you off, the competition is so fierce. In Australia, most film makers, for example, are in their sixties and seventies; also newspaper columnists and radio commentators. It's the same in public life — much of the public agenda is still controlled by ageing baby boomers. Many talented young people communicate via the internet, but that doesn't yet create public recognition like the old media does for people like Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell, Clive James, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Adams himself — The Media Grumpies. They and many others have benefited from boom newspaper years, now declining as newspapers close down or shrink in size in the face of the internet boom and the 2007-09 world financial slump. Adams would no doubt be killed in the rush if he offered his
Weekend Australian Magazine
half-page to a younger columnist.

Why do The Grumpies stay on their totem poles longer in Australia? ‘I don't know,' Adams said in one of our regular fruity sessions, at about 9.30 a.m. with Phillip grumpier than he had sounded on-air at 11 p.m. the previous night. He fortified himself with tea (two teabags), rolled the first of several cigarettes, left his shoes off and leaned back in his office chair under the eyes of an ancient Egyptian head. ‘The new generation of commentators is blogging, not going into the old media. So the doddering old master class is unchallenged but in a newspaper medium that is declining. It's not healthy. And it wasn't always the case that most media commentators are right-wing while many other media people are left-wing. At
The Age
, the opposite was true and the commentators' left or liberal attitude was quite marked. I remember telling Graham Perkin, the editor (1966-75), that
The Age
really needed some conservative commentators. Graham said he would appoint one if he could find one with a sense of humour. This became a huge obstacle.'

But for the past 15 years, lefties have been rare except for cartoonists. It's hard to think of any Australian cartoonists who are not left-wing. The grumpy old columnists have grown grumpier and have been joined by new, younger conservative columnists like Miranda Devine. If Adams or I were running a newspaper today, we would look for younger, fresher, progressive voices to balance the conservatives.

Adams has caustic views about some fellow grumpies: “Piers Akerman (Sydney
Daily
and
Sunday Telegraph
) is a performing seal. There he is with simulated rage, like Miranda Devine (formerly Fairfax and now News Ltd tabloids). Andrew Bolt (Melbourne
Herald Sun
) is unreadable. They get everything wrong and never apologise. They're now even angrier than ever. So whatever they're on, I want some.”

On a slow news day, columnists and commentators get stuck into each other. Adams wrote in
The Australian
that John Laws will become morose and melancholic now that he has retired from 2UE and Laws wrote back that Adams twenty years earlier had been ‘without a doubt the greatest failure ever to open a microphone there because he couldn't deal with talkback people'. Laws returned to radio (2SM) in 2011, aged 75.

But no columnist upsets Adams as much as Gerard Henderson, executive director of the conservative think tank The Sydney Institute. Adams told me, ‘Gerard and I are old enemies. He is a bizarre form of stand-up comic. I don't take much notice of him' (incorrect) ‘as he's utterly predictable.' Both Adams and Henderson did take enough notice of each other to engage in a typical spat via emails and newspapers in May and June 2009. On May 17, Phillip wrote in his
Weekend Australian
Magazine
column: ‘Many columnists are content to proffer the same column ad nauseum. Gerard Henderson is the classic case. In
The Sydney Morning Herald
, he regularly erects the same column in the space provided, attacking either Robert Manne (Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne), the ABC or me, or all three at once. Readers know it off by heart.' Henderson replied in an email to Adams, headed ‘Phillip Adams' wilful distortion': ‘This statement is entirely false. The fact is that I have never devoted a
Sydney Morning Herald
column to attacking you or Robert Manne. Not one. You, however, have used your column in
The
Weekend Australian Magazine
to attack me previously, for example in February 2007'. On June 5, 2009, Adams emailed Gerard: ‘Would it be possible for you to stop, just for a moment or two, being such a humourless bore? Silly question. The average house brick is more amusing, the most pigeon shit-splattered bronze statue of some long-forgotten 19
th
century personage propped up in a park is less pompous than Gerard, who spends so much time and effort trying to keep himself on his pedestal. Big hug, Phillip.'

Henderson said in his
Media Watch Dog
newsletter on June 23, 2009, ‘Nancy (who I suspect is Henderson in drag) was thrilled to receive an email this week from
Late Night Live
presenter Phillip Adams. The good news is that Phillip is an enthusiastic reader of
Media Watch
Dog.
So enthusiastic, in fact, that he believes he was short-changed in the gongs area last week, as the following documentation demonstrates:' Then followed Adams' email to Henderson: ‘As well as two Orders of Australia, I've got not one but FOUR hon. doctorates. And you'll have to add FAHA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities) to the honorifics. Let's gloss over my being (along with Don Bradman and John Howard) an official National Treasure, a Walkley, the Human Rights Medal, a pile of AFI Awards, the Longford, Humanist of the Year and even an ancient Logie … etc. etc. Don't forget to take your pills.' Henderson replied the same day to say he had in his
Media Watch Dog
a few days earlier referred to Adams as: Phillip Adams AO (1992), AM (1987), Hon Duniv (Griffith), Hon Dlitt (ECU), Hon DUniv (SA), FRSA.'

I have chosen a few examples of these rather silly spats between Adams and Henderson to help reveal their personalities. But they should avoid boring their readers and insulting each other in print and either choose genuinely funny jokes or (better still) worthwhile subjects.

Local shock jocks are pale imitations of American ones and on his worst day, Alan Jones is about ten per cent as fierce as Rush Limbaugh, who has 13.5 million listeners in the US. Adams told me American right-wing radio commentators are raving monsters and Rush is said to be now more or less running the Republican Party. In
The Weekend Australian
on May 26, 2007, Adams wrote: ‘I loathe shock jocks and I detest the way locals mimic and plagiarise the bigotries and production tricks of Rush Limbaugh — the US source of such John Laws phrases as “femi-nazis” and the “keeping the dream alive” twaddle.'

Adams has been back and forth to and from
The Australian
three times and is now its longest contributor. After being a teenage freelance on the Victorian Communist Party's
Guardian,
he began writing part-time for the old pink-cover
Bulletin
, sometimes under established writers' bylines when they were too sick, or too drunk, to write.
The Bulletin
, which had a rip-roaring, legendary background with J F Archibald as owner-editor and Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson as contributors, was well past its prime when in 1961 its owner, Samuel Prior, sold it to Frank Packer (Kerry's father) and its new editor, Donald Horne, turned it into a glossy newsmagazine modelling it on
Time
. Kerry Packer kept it going despite losing circulation and money until the financiers who took control of his company after he died closed it in January 2008.

The cartoonist Bruce Petty persuaded Adrian Deamer,
The Australian's
editor from 1966 to '71, to hire Adams as a television critic, and as
The Australian
had no television investments, Adams could write as he pleased, which he did, usually not about television at all. The staff journalists had a whip-around to buy him a TV set and it was a standing joke around the office that he never saw television but wrote about it. He also wrote an
Adams Rib
column in
The Weekend
Australian
and recalled to me: ‘I experimented with mumblings about things previously the province of novelists, poets or academic essayists, juxtaposing them with political satire. The response to my self-educated, indulgent outpourings was surprising — we got sugarbags full of letters, often in response to such non-newspaper topics as death, dying and the deity.' He began the trend towards irreverence, which was widely imitated both in
The Australian
and in
Age
columns like
Pinkney's Place
.
Adams Rib
lent weight to the rebelliousness of the era, satirising institutions such as schools, religion and censorship. Adams later equated the spirit of censorship with ‘the great hush up' and Western taboo about death. Former High Court Judge Michael Kirby, in
Murdoch's Flagship
by Denis Cryle (Melbourne University Press), subsequently characterised Adams' distinctive journalism as a ‘jumble of history, philosophy and whimsy, humorous anecdotes about his past and musings on popular culture, a combination of self-confession and nostalgia, more burlesque than macabre.'

But the first blow struck Adams' career after Rupert Murdoch,
The Australian's
owner, bombed in a 1969 British television interview with another satirist, David Frost. Murdoch had published, in his muck-raking
News of the World
, the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the call girl who six years earlier was at the centre of Britain's biggest postwar sex scandal, the Profumo Affair. Frost's show had been running for only three weeks when it caught fire over the way he poured scorn and dislike over Murdoch. Murdoch himself had only recently arrived as a London publisher but in Frost's interview defiantly defended the story in spite of the fact that the disgraced ex-Cabinet minister John Profumo had devoted his post-scandal life to charitable works and the story had already been thrashed to death. Murdoch arrived in Australia, asked Adrian Deamer whether he had any satirists on his staff and told him to sack them. Adams switched to Gordon Barton's
Nation Review
but was reinstated by
The Australian
when Deamer pointed out to Murdoch and Adams himself that
The Australian
received more letters about Adams' columns than about the Vietnam War, although for almost 12 months Adams' column was buried in
The Australian's
marketing section before returning to the weekend issue.

Adams had another row with
The Australian
and accepted
Age
editor Graham Perkin's invitation to join it with two columns a week after Perkin arranged for the column to be syndicated also to
The Sydney Morning Herald
, the Brisbane
Courier Mail
, the Adelaide
Advertiser
and the Launceston
Examiner.
He didn't last long in
The Advertiser
or
The Examiner
and the
Courier Mail
and
Sydney Morning Herald
worried about what he wrote and censored some of it. But he stayed with
The Age
until the fierce battle over Fairfax control of it. This was described by the author and journalist Les Carlyon in
Paper Chase: The Press Under Examination
(Herald & Weekly Times) as the most important battle in Australian media history.