Phillip Adams (32 page)

***

‘On Growing Up': In the same book of his columns, Phillip, then 42, talked of his ‘advancing years': ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child. Trouble is I still do. As with a significant percentage of my fellow adults, growing up has eluded me. Having looked forward to maturity for damn near 40 years, it continues to elude me, receding like the rainbow. And discussing the problem with others of advancing years, it emerges that a majority still feel far, far younger than their dilapidated externals suggest. Well, where have we gone wrong? Why didn't we gain the appropriate dignity? Why has the wisdom of our age eluded us? Why are we bogged in a never never land with so many psychic Peter Pans simply pretending to be adults? Always afraid that others, especially our kids, will find us out. In the beginning, I thought that one matured or grew up fairly dramatically, at one or another of life's punctuation marks.

‘The odd thing is that while your outsides changed, while you puckered, creased, lost your hair and gained responsibility (and weight), the essential you didn't change at all. So one's situation is perilous. If people woke up to the deception, if they realised that you suffered from this curious form of retardation, they wouldn't let you ride in a lift on your own or vote at elections. And if your children were a wake-up, your already beleaguered authority would diminish completely, anarchy prevailing. Where I'd heard, of course, of second childhood, I'm now inclined to disbelieve it. How can you have a second when you can't escape the gravitation pull of the first? Perhaps the second childhood is merely the moment when you stop pretending, when you just lie back and enjoy it. For all that, it's depressing to see the way your own kids ache for adulthood, trying to force the pace.'

***

‘On Yarralumla' (
Uncensored Adams
): ‘
The Bulletin
has, as you know, a proud tradition of anti-monarchism. There was a time when the
Bully's
Republican rhetoric was so savage that Queen Victoria must have considered sending a gunboat to blast editor Archibald out of his quayside pub. So I cannot understand why my gentle gibes at the Windsors have provoked such an apoplectic mail. I am, after all, perfectly willing to let our Royals linger on as a Tussaud-like tourist attraction. For no matter what you say, Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh are remarkably lifelike, albeit in a rather waxen way. So let the Queen be ‘heads' to our democratic tails. Let ageing knights wear their decorations on proud bosoms, just as Twinings flash their ‘Royal Appointment' crest on their tea chests.

‘The Royal Family deserves the same consideration as other beleaguered species, such as the Crest-Fallen Kingaroy Cockatoo and the Splay-Toed Aardvark. Royal breeding stock is at an all-time low and, of course, haemophilia could break out at any moment. You may remember my recent complaint that people of leftish political persuasions rarely receive a gilt-edged invitation to Yarralumla. Well, to my astonishment, one of the crisp, elegantly-embossed cards arrived. Gilt-edged, it suggested that if I presented myself and the child bride at the front door, in dinner jacket and long dress respectively, we'd be given some nosh. Anxious to bury the hatchet, to negotiate a truce, to build a little bridge of understanding, I decided to accept — on condition that I was given special dispensation from the dinner jacket and permitted to front up in my skivvy. This, the aide-de-camp suggested, would be fine.

‘Once inside, while I did a quick calculation on the value of the McCubbins and Nolans, the wives piled their pelts on a table in the hall and the husbands were given their marching orders. That is, we each received a little card showing Who Sat Where and Whose Wife we'd be taking into dinner. I cracked it for the beaut Mrs Brissendon, who's wedded to old RF, the chairman of the Literature Board. Later I learned that a Mr Baillieu had won my missus in the raffle. But first, we formed ourselves into two-by-twos so we could be Announced, whereupon I found myself grinning sheepishly at His and Her Excellencies, the very charming Cowans. Sir Zelman, you might have noticed, closely resembles the late Sir Charles Chaplin. The same piano-key smile below the same scrunched-up eyes.

‘Having run the Vice-Regal gauntlet, we had a glass of sherry by the fire. Then we promenaded into the dining room, an intimate little chamber for 40 guests and, it seemed, almost as many servants. I found myself between the resplendent wife of a Rear Admiral (a beaut lady with a naughty sense of humour) and an absolutely enormous bloke who turned out to be the token trade unionist.

‘“I could have danced all night,” Mrs A sang in the back of the cab on our way home, looking curiously dishevelled. She'd also collected a bag full of business cards, two American Expresses and one Diners, not to mention two medals, an Order of Australia and a Royal Darby saucer. As for me, I paid dearly for a good feed — I have sacrificed my last shred of credibility with the left.'

***

Gough Whitlam said in the introduction to
Uncensored Adams
: ‘It is a fortunate coincidence that Australia's leading comic writer is also her most perceptive social critic. In no-one else do we find that irrepressible and conquering blend of wit and seriousness that mark Phillip Adams' writings: a worried amusement at the eccentricities of our society, allied to an unerring instinct for the absurd and a Nabokovian fondness for verbal ingenuity.'

***

In
The Inflamable Adams
(1983, reproduced with permission by Penguin Group Australia), Adams wrote: ‘As an ardent monarchist, my heart goes out to Her Royal Maj. I think it's awful the way we've been allowed to invade her privacy, to read the innermost details of her private life. Why can't the poor Queen be left in peace to have a squalid love affair, if that's what she wants? And why not? After all, it's a palace tradition. Ever since that princess had it off with a frog, your royals have been drawn to the virility of the lower orders. In Henry V111, Shakespeare makes mention of the king's promiscuity with ‘a little touch of Harry in the night' while a few coronations later we had Charles 11 lusting after Nell Gwyn. There was Louis X1V and Madame Pompadour, Edward V11 and Lilly Langtree, Hamlet and Ophelia, the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert — even Prince Charming and Cinderella. You'll recall the nursery rhyme about the king in his counting house counting out his money while the poor queen was in the parlour, consoling herself with bread and honey.

‘No-one complains when Prince Andrew, known far and wide as Randy Andy, goes slumming in the least salubrious of night spots. No-one objected when Prince Charles went out on the tiles. Even Princess Margaret was allowed to marry a member of the paparazzi, Tony ‘Flash Bulb' Snowdon. If anyone deserves the solace of romance, it's Elizabeth 11. Yet the only declaration of love she's had in the past 20 years was that “I did but see her passing by” line from an old age pensioner who happened to be prime minister of Australia.'

***

Former High Court Judge Michael Kirby said in a Foreword to
The Inflammable Adams:
‘Temperence, restraint and decorum are not the strong points of our author. Indeed, I doubt that these sterling but boring qualities are to be found in these pages at all. The infuriating thing is that Adams offers the most telling commentary on our country, our world and our times, almost without our noticing it. So complete is Adams' command of the language that he can instruct us with humour, apparently irrelevant facts and an assortment of ideas. And the whole powerful mixture is utterly painless as it does its devilish work.'

***

‘Two-Up' was the story of a kangaroo joey which chose Adams as its new mother in
Adam's Ark
(Viking, 2004, reproduced with permission by Penguin Group Australia). Adams wrote: ‘At Elmswood, most animals make a lot of noise, which is why we're woken around dawn by the crow of roosters, the braying of donkeys, the barking of dogs, the whinnying of horses and the bellowing of cattle. Almost every animal, wild or domestic, has its characteristic sound, if not a variety of them. Except for the kangaroo. As the world knows from Skippy, kangaroos are immensely talented animals that can not only box but can also defeat evildoers and play the piano. But they have no identifying cry, no mating call, no vocal signal of danger or distress. All you hear from kangaroos, and you have to be very close, is that little Skippy-style chirrup. Even when kangaroos are being culled, they're silent.

‘Finding that some paddock gates had been left open by uninvited shooters, I went off on the four-wheel bike to check others and found a female kangaroo dying from a rifle bullet. She made no noise at all but her eyes were huge and reproachful. I hurried back to the homestead, returned with a rifle and gave the poor animal a coup de gr
â
ce. At which point I heard a noise, the angry chirrup of a joey. It slowly approached and, as I stepped back a few yards, wriggled into its dead mother's pouch.

‘Once again I went back to the homestead and this time returned with an old black skivvy. I knotted the arms and closed the neck with some bailing wire and then eased the joey from the pouch. The chirruping became much louder, yet it didn't put up much of a fight when I popped it into the skivvy. Back at the homestead I dangled the substitute pouch from a doorknob in the laundry. Patrice rang a local vet, who said yes, he had some suitable powdered milk and an appropriate teat that we could stick on an empty Coke bottle, so I made a mercy dash into Scone. We mixed up the milk, popped on the teat and to my astonishment, the joey took the teat instantly, hungrily, and lay curled up in my lap while it drank a good half-bottle. And that was it. Joey decided I was Mum. And from that moment we were inseparable. Everywhere I walked, it would hop behind me. And if I crouched and unbuttoned my shirt, it would stick its head and front paws inside and do a complete roll until it was lying quite happily against my bare chest, its hind legs sticking out near my collar. When I went to the bathroom, it hopped in, too. If I had a shower, it would hop into the shower. Extraordinarily, it would also jump into the swimming pool with me.

‘An examination of its ambiguous genitalia hinted that it was a female but, to be on the safe side, we gave it an ambidextrous name: Two-Up. Two-Up and I began a whole series of adventures. At night, she would roll happily into the skivvy and I'd dangle it from the door. While still devoted to her rubber nipple, Two-Up was starting to pick at grass and grow very quickly. She became too heavy for skivvies and increasingly curious about the world around her. Sometimes she'd disappear for ten minutes or an hour. Just when I was getting worried, I would see her hopping back from an inspection of the chicken coops or the hay shed. Two-Up was entirely feminine. She had lustrous eyes, long eyelashes and delicate hands that were almost human in their dexterity. She remained entirely friendly and utterly charming.

‘Nonetheless she went AWOL more and more. Soon she was disappearing for a day or a night or a couple of days. Nature was calling; Two-Up was responding to the pangs of puberty. So, sadly, I accepted the inevitable. Two-Up would leave home. And she did.'

***

In ‘Dogs Are Weird' in
Adam's Ark,
Adams showed his astute understanding of animals of all breeds, particularly dogs: ‘The dog is busy. Very, very busy. It is a particularly busy little dog. It has, in rapid succession, gone yelping after a rabbit, had a pee in the garden and followed its nose over a zigzag course across the lawn, as if propelled by its energetic sniffing. It has returned to have a long scratch, sniffed the battered boots lined up against the wall, snapped at a number of blowies orbiting its muzzle and managed to swallow one. It has gnawed at one of the osso buco bones from its considerable collection, run and barked at a passing cattle truck and growled at a couple of brown chooks free-ranging their way through a garden bed. It has run to the kitchen door wagging its tail in the hope of conjuring a pat, a snack, and a walk. It has chased a blue-tongue lizard off the path. It has gnawed the ear of an entirely unbusy, drowsing border collie, desisting when it provoked an angry growl. And it has rolled, cringing, on to its back at my approach, its body language saying something along the lines of “Have mercy upon me, oh mighty one.”

‘Contrasting with its frenetic behaviour are long periods when it simply switches itself off. It stops scurrying, burrowing, scratching, sniffing, chasing, barking, everything, and it sits, sphinx-like. Or sleeps. Which reminds you that dogs live in an eternal now, their consciousness shining in front of their muzzles like a hand-held torch. They have an area of brilliant illumination, and everything else is obscured, unseen, unconsidered. Dogs aren't into abstract ideas or intellectualising and, consequently, are safe from boredom. And from time itself. Our dogs welcome us back as rapturously after an hour away as they do if we've been gone a month. Instantly alert, instantly gratified, instantly blank of mind, that's a dog.

‘A long line of dogs have lived and died at Elmswood. Willy, the greatest boot-rooter of all time, died in a kamikaze attack on a passing truck. Willy, silly Willy. Then there was Annie, half Willy's weight, delicate and deft, but still unmistakably a Jack Russell. No, not a Jill Russell, imbued with the feminine but a little butch bitch who, for all her ladylike appearance, liked to eat cow poo when she wasn't rolling in it. Annie, who liked to chase rabbits down burrows risking permanent entombment in the middle of a honeycombed hillside, only to emerge as dusty as a four-wheel drive, often with a gob full of fur. Often she'd appear at the door muddier than a gumboot following an altercation with a ram in the shearing yards. Annie recalled the poem about the little girl who had a little curl in the middle of her forehead. When Annie was good, which was infrequent, she was excruciatingly good, mincingly good, Lady Fauntleroy good. But when she was bad, she was the Hound of the Baskervilles, a canine crim who you couldn't train to do anything, not even respond obediently to such reasonable requests as, “Come here, you rotten little bastard, or I'll drop-kick you halfway across the bloody paddock.”