Phillip Adams (33 page)

‘Now there's Molly, who is almost exactly the same as Annie, though, as far as we know, they're not related. Same size, same colouring, same temperament. Her tail is highly articulate and can communicate urgent desires for bones, rides in the car or a long yelping run up to the letterbox at the main road. The same tail can also sink to the road in a gesture symbolising the most abject apology. Will Molly last the summer? So far the problem isn't snakes but tyres. I spend a lot of time charging around the place on an ATV, one of those motorised trikes with four wheels. Molly hates my ATV and attacks it as soon as I press the starter button. She doesn't bark so much as shriek, emitting a series of high-frequency percussions that set the nerves on edge to exactly the same degree as dentistry without anaesthesia. I scream at her, she shrieks at the ATV and, not content with that, does her best to disappear beneath its large balloon tyres. If Molly does survive the vehicles, she's a dead cert to fall victim to venom, because she's drawn to places where snakes hide in the same self-sacrificial way as a Fred Nile is drawn to the habitat of sin. Piles of rocks cleared from the paddocks; stacks of old timber and firewood; the final pile of bales in an emptying hayshed. She's drawn to those snake motels like Imelda Marcos was to shoe stores.

‘She digs like the Western Mining Company. Sometimes she'll sit beside us at the gravelly edge of the river and if we start digging in the sand with just one finger, she'll immediately take over, chucking sand around like an erupting volcano without the foggiest idea of why she's digging, or for what. If we dig a few centimetres, she'll dig a metre until, finally, we have to rescue her from the inevitable cave-in. It's even worse when she's near where a snake could conceivably be coiled. Dogs are the traitors of the animal kingdom. They have betrayed all the other species to hunt with man, to herd for man to drive other animals into our clutches, our pens, our bellies. All they ask for in return? That we feed them, protect them and love them. It's a measure of the stupidity of domestic herds that word hasn't passed among them from cattle to sheep to goats to all other victims of canine duplicity — that it's time to trample dogs to death. Overwhelmingly, the dogs have got the other animals bluffed, and they've got us bluffed as well.' The best Adams column I have ever read.

Chapter Twenty:
Ten Bonzer LNL Episodes

In these ten vibrant edited episodes of
Late Night Live
, Bob Ellis typically bares his soul but thankfully not his body; Hazel Hawke reveals her life before and after Bob; a wombat fancier digs to find their secret life; Phillip Adams burrows into the soul of Jim Cairns; Miriam Margolyes tells how the cruel adulterer Charles Dickens saved fallen women; listeners experience the Romanovs' last days; we hear why Winston Churchill stopped the spy Noel Coward from getting a knighthood; acerbic reporter Alan Ramsey finds grit and grime in 43 Canberra years; incest was probably the reason Lord Byron's prim wife left him after only 54 weeks; and how Bobby Kennedy, the president who never was, inspired America.

***

The terrible years of Bob Ellis:
Author, playwright, film and speechwriter Bob Ellis had an amusing conversation with Phillip Adams on
LNL
on May 7, 2009 about his memoir from June 2007 to November 2008,
And So It Went: Night Thoughts in a Year of Change
(Penguin).

Adams said: ‘There's no holding you back, Bob. You start the book with a good way to end it, at 7 a.m. on Sunday November 25, 2007 (the day after Labor finally beat the Howard Government). You talk about John Howard's last walk from Kirribilli House. You talk about his courage and audacity at expressing himself in this way.'

Ellis: ‘He outran me. I was puffing about a quarter of a mile behind. I saw him below in the park under the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons, dwindling, getting smaller and smaller and being snapped by the paparazzi as he continued resolutely to walk. It was astonishing. Him in denial. Him in courage, carrying on as if nothing had happened; a remarkable mediocre man.'

Adams: ‘It's a measure of your book's quality and impeccable Labor connections that Bob Carr, the ex-NSW premier, compared it with
War and Peace
and
The Iliad
. Surely even you blush at that, Bob. You love writing more than anyone else I know. Prose pours from you. Did you always love it?'

Ellis: ‘I've never been near the crime and the lice, such as at a meeting between a property developer and a Labor minister. I concentrate on sex and death.'

Adams: ‘Do you think Kevin Rudd will be a heart-breaker?'

Ellis: ‘It's likely. There is an element of coldness, tenacity, Puritanism and slave-driving in him that will eventually undo him. I fear for his survival because of the valve in his heart and his sleeplessness. He has no friends that I know of, and fewer allies. He's brilliant but changeable and Napoleonic. He should sleep now and then, and take advice from someone over 30.'

Ellis' predictions and the reasons for them proved to be spot on.

***

Humble Hazel Hawke at her peak:
The
Late Night Live
interview Adams had with Hazel Hawke in April 1998, three years after she and Bob Hawke were divorced, showed her strength of character and determination to go on contributing to society. Three years later, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Adams said when the ABC repeated their conversation on February 24, 2006, Hazel Hawke was ‘as bright as a button' when he talked with her in 1998 about: Her romance with Bob; her support for him as he achieved a Rhodes Scholarship; his mother Ellie's determination that he would become a leading politician; her lonely life in suburban Melbourne while he ran the Australian Council of Trade Unions and in Canberra from 1983 to 1991 while he ran Australia; his string of affairs; their divorce and his marriage to Blanche d'Alpuget. It was a poignant conversation particularly because of her eventual Alzheimer's.

Hawke: ‘I'm a pretty average girl and I've experienced many things that affect middle-aged and ageing people. I take opportunities the media sometimes gives me to speak out about topics that affect others.'

Adams: ‘That's why people love you, Hazel. What was it like to wake up in The Lodge and realise that you were the most scrutinised woman in Australia?'

Hawke: ‘I don't think I had such an experience. When Bob became prime minister, I felt a very strong sense of responsibility and opportunity. I was attracted to women's and community issues, and to children's television.'

Adams: ‘How old were you when you met Bob?'

Hawke: ‘Eighteen or nineteen. He was six months younger than I was. He went to Oxford University for his Rhodes Scholarship and I followed a few months later. All that was exciting because I had no tertiary education and started work at 14. During our courtship, his uncle, Albert, was the West Australian premier (1953-59). Bob and I were married in 1956. His family was very ALP-orientated and there was a stated expectation in the family that he would become a Labor politician.'

Adams: ‘A prime minister?'

Hawke: ‘It was talked about in the family.'

Adams: ‘Did you urge him, or did you urge caution?'

Hawke: ‘I'm not an urger either way. Basically I agreed with the moves he made. We lost a baby boy (Robert Junior) at the time Bob ran (unsuccessfully) for the federal seat of Corio, which made it hard.'

Adams: ‘How's life for you now, post the Bob years?'

Hawke: ‘Very good, very busy and full of interest. I do things I like doing, such as community work. I have one family in Sydney, one in Canberra and one in Perth. That's how I like to see our children, Susan, Stephen and Roslyn.

(Hazel and Bob lived in Melbourne from 1958 until 1983 while he was ACTU President, but in 1970 he met Blanche d'Alpuget and in 1976 they met again and started one of the most publicised affairs in Australian history.)

Hawke continued in her conversation with Adams in 1998: ‘I've got another go at life. I'm not the slightest bit lonely. I've got a lot of friends and a good neighborhood where I live in Sydney. Life moves on. I wasn't raised with books but now I've become more aware of the treasure trove they are. I've got friends who lend me books and round and round they go. Friends and family get you through. Women's friendship is a great resource. In Melbourne, I was out in the suburbs with not much money and really on my own. I had no family there and had not yet made friends in the local community. You find each other, for example at the local kindergarten. Many of those people I got to know in Melbourne, where I was for 25 years, were from somewhere else and we were looking for each other.

‘Melbourne is more organised. Melbourne families have their churches and schools. Totally different to Sydney, not snobby but not so welcoming as Sydney, where it's “How're you going, mate?” Sydney has a different personality altogether. Melbourne has its social structures, and I admire them. For newcomers it takes time, but once you make your connection and your friends, it's a wonderful city, resourceful and with a great community spirit. If an appeal is well organised, Melbourne people give to it. Sydney has a different mentality. It's not mean but it's different in the way it approaches community.'

Adams: ‘You must realise you have millions of friends. Is that a good feeling?'

Hazel: ‘It's lovely, yes. I do feel a sense of friendship and belonging.

(Three years after the
LNL
conversation, Hazel Hawke was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease; two years later she agreed to take part in an ABC Television
Australian Story
about living with Alzheimer's; in 2004, she and her family launched the Hazel Hawke Dementia and Care Fund; in 2009 she was placed in high-level care.)

***

Wombats' secret underground life:
James Woodford,
Sydney Morning Herald
environment writer and author of
The Secret Life of Wombats
(Text Publishing), said in a
Late Night Live
conversation with Adams on July 30, 2001: ‘Wombats are mysterious creatures and Europeans know little about them after living in Australia for more than 200 years. Forty years ago, a schoolboy called Peter Nicholson used at night to sneak out of his dormitory at Timbertop, a Victorian country branch of Geelong Grammar School, crawl down wombat burrows, get to know the wombats and learn to make the noises they make. It's a sort of “humpff” and there is another noise, like a loud “shhh” when they want to scare other animals.'

Adams: ‘I'll try that when someone is unhappy about being interviewed. I've always been fond of wombats. They are about a metre long and a third of a metre high, like a barrel on legs; they keep themselves to themselves when they're not being skittled by cars, and they do most of their business underground.'

Woodford: ‘I had my first wombat encounter when I was 17 and went camping in the mountains behind Nowra after finishing the Higher School Certificate. My uncle left the three of us with a case of beer and we stupidly drank the lot. When I woke up in the morning, a big wombat was three feet away.'

Adams: ‘Did you say “humpff' to it?'

Woodford: ‘I should have. I've been fascinated by them ever since. They are smarter than kangaroos or other marsupials.'

Adams: ‘I've always said that on the Australian coat of arms are a kangaroo and an emu, which have the biggest bums and the smallest brains. I think that's deeply symbolic of our culture.'

Woodford: ‘Some scientists say wombats are the smartest marsupials in the world. Their lives are surprisingly complex. People I've spoken to have been sleeping in a tent across a wombat's path and the wombat will just go straight through the tent. They have more personality than a kangaroo and they're much smarter than a koala. A woman made the mistake of building her house on a wombat trail and one day she opened her front door and found a wombat there. It walked straight through her house.'

***

The enigma of Jim Cairns:
Adams called Jim Cairns, who has a unique place in the Australian Labor movement, ‘one of the most valiant and vulnerable people I have ever met'. Adams had a warm and revealing conversation with him on October 28, 1996 and it was repeated on October 19, 2007, four years after Cairns died at the age of 89. Cairns was the minister for overseas trade and the minister for secondary industry in the first Whitlam Government, then deputy prime minister and treasurer but was sacked by Whitlam for his involvement in catastrophic foreign government loans and for misleading Federal Parliament. His career was also ruined by his affair with his sex-charged personal assistant Junie Morosi.

Adams: ‘No-one in the Labor movement has attracted more flak than you. Why?'

Cairns: ‘The determining forces in society are out to keep you in step, in politics and everywhere else. If you are an employee, you get on in the same way, by pleasing the boss. When Rupert Murdoch comes into the room, everyone knows what he should do. The most important day of my life was May 8, 1970, when I took a leading part in the anti-Vietnam War moratorium march of 100,000 people in Collins Street, Melbourne. It was completely peaceful and completely ineffective. The people had a human energy that could be felt. I've never had that experience before or since. It demonstrated what democracy really is. Parliament is a stage play, like something on television. If democracy is to mean anything, it has to be collective action by the people over something important. The moratorium was the clearest possible example of precisely that.'