Phillip Adams (37 page)

In spite of his radio interviews, chairing of meetings and circle of friends, Adams is essentially a loner. His friendships with people quoted in this book are typical of male friendships and unlike intense, intimate female friendships. Apart from Paul Keating and Barry Jones, Adams and his other friends don't talk often or at length but would help each other readily if help were needed. They re-open phone conversations where they left off months or years previously.

Adams has a reputation for being a gossip, but not in a destructive way. The stories he tells about well-known people are usually affectionate, with rare exceptions, such as his stories about Bob Hawke. Even there, his gossip is not poisonous. One of Adams' oldest friends, the composer Peter Best, told me Adams talks a lot about Paul Keating, who he really admires. But it is always good natured gossip. For example, Adams once said Keating had been seeing some woman. Adams asked Keating, ‘Are you playing doctors and nurses?' Keating got quite huffy and replied, ‘We've only been out a couple of times.' Peter Best thought how charmingly old-fashioned that was. Adams sometimes told him some light gossip about the Labor Party leadership. He would tell Best, ‘I've been trying to persuade them to do this or that.'

Adams has a diverse mind and a huge curiosity about almost any subject from technology to wombats. In fact, he has a soft spot for wombats: the
Late Night Live
theme music until January 2011 was ‘Russian Rag', by the Uzbekistan-born Sydney pianist and composer Elena Kats-Chernin, but Adams called it ‘The Waltz of the Wombats'. Wombats abound at Elmswood, via Gundy near Scone in the Hunter Valley of NSW, but Adams looks and acts more like a city person than a country landowner. He had no previous rural connections apart from living as a lonely boy with his maternal grandparents on their poverty-stricken little flower farm in the suburban streets of East Kew in Melbourne. Patrice Newell's only rural experience had been growing a pot plant at her flat in King's Cross in Sydney, although she had a burning desire to quit presenting television and to grow organic meat and fruit and vegetables. Adams told me he has no idea whether their farm makes a profit or not. Obviously the prolonged Australian drought has made farming profits harder to make, but the fortune Adams and his partners made when they sold Monahan Dayman Adams, plus his steady and good income from writing his column and presenting his program, means he has remained wealthy.

Adams enjoys himself on and off-air. Almost all his friendships are work-related. His personality is passionate engagement. On-air, he grabs people he has never met and knows only from his producers' briefings. He talks to them across thousands of kilometers by phone or radio cable as if they're across his desk at the ABC. He is good at understanding people. He understood some points of my personality the first day we met, although if he believed I would write only complimentary things about him and not apply honest writing to him as the subject of a biography, he was mistaken. He likes enthusiastic people with a lot of energy and those, like himself, with a love of humanity and a concern for its future. Even if he doesn't like a person, he can like their enthusiasm. He finds Alan Jones, the right-wing 2GB breakfast presenter, politically appalling but says his output is fascinating and he has been so successful as a broadcaster because he does a great deal of his own research, and he's unstoppable — his relentless energy jumps out of the radio and chases people around the room.

Adams himself worked flat-out from when he left school at 15 until he was 45, which was when he left Rosemary, went to Sydney and started his relationship with Patrice Newell. He was tired and at a low ebb, in spite of having a new romance with a challenging intellectual woman. He started again. Kerry Packer had just bought 2UE, which phoned him and asked him to do a breakfast program. Neither 2UE nor Adams liked his program and he was switched to late night. He didn't do well with commercial talkback and 2UE did not renew his contract, which was just as well because in 1990 the ABC managing director Brian Johns phoned him and asked him to do
Late Night Live
, and he's been there ever since.

He now has a life that suits him. He slams the advertising industry, which made him wealthy, but it is very rare that anyone succeeds well in both business and a creative occupation like broadcasting and writing. He has given up the ad business; he has been either shown the door or has walked away from an infinite number of government committees; he's walked away from the film industry; few other journalists have had, for 40 years, the luxury of being able to write about anything they like. He still keeps busy, but now with less pressure.

He has a huge collection of awards and appointments (listed in the next chapter), which shows how, once people are on the awards gravy train, the awards rain down, often largely to the benefit of the organisations making the awards.

He regrets not giving his first family enough attention, when he was ludicrously busy. He regrets not being more formally educated, although Phillip Adams with a university degree might have lost his attractive common touch. He is disappointed that he won't leave a monolithic work, although he has a bigger audience of listeners and readers than any Australian author.

Chapter Twenty-three:
Appendix — Awards and Appointments

This information was supplied by Phillip Adams:

Honours:

Phillip Adams was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1987 for services to film and television.

Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1992 for services to the arts and journalism.

Chosen in a National Trust opinion poll to be one of Australia's One Hundred Living National Treasures.

Received the film industry's highest award, the Raymond Longford Award, for services to the industry in 1981.

Senior ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corp) Fellow in 1985.

Humanist of the Year in 1987.

Henry Lawson Australian Arts Award in 1987.

His campaign for the United Nations International Year of the Disabled Person won the Golden Lion award at the Cannes film festival in 1982.

His feature films have received ten Australian Film Institute awards, including two Best Film:
Jack and Jill: A Postscript
in 1969 and
Lonely Hearts
, directed by Paul Cox, in 1982.

The Adelaide-Auckland International Film Festival awarded
Jack and Jill: A Postscript
its Grand Prix, the Golden Southern Cross, in 1970.

Responsibility in Journalism Award at the University of New York in 1996.

Awarded Honorary Doctorates by Griffith University in 1996, by Edith Cowan University in Perth in 2003, by the University of South Australia in 2004 and the University of Sydney in 2005.

International Astronomical Union named a minor planet orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter the Phillipadams in 1997.

A painting of Adams won the Archibald Prize in 1979.

Received a Walkley Award for journalism in 2005.

A Pater Award for excellence in radio.

A Television Logie.

The Celebration of Ability Media Award in 2000.

United Nations Media Award in 2005.

In October 1996, when a poll of 200 prominent academics was conducted to identify Australia's Most Influential Public Intellectuals, Adams was in the top five with Robert Manne, Henry Reynolds, Tim Flannery and Noel Pearson.

Republican of the Year in 2005.

Fellow of the Academy of Humanities of Australia.

Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.

Appointments: Adams has served as:

Chairman of the Australian Film Commission.

Chairman of Film Australia.

Chairman of the Australian Film Institute.

Chairman of the Australia Council International Committee.

Chairman of the Australia Council Research Committee.

Chairman of the National Australia Day Council.

Foundation Chairman of the Commission for the Future.

Foundation Chairman of the Film, Television and Radio Board.

Foundation member, Film Victoria.

Foundation Chairman of the Independent Feature Film Producers' Association President of the Victorian Council of the Arts.

President of the Australasian Academy of Broadcast Arts and Science.

Chief Executive Officer of Southern Cross Film Productions Pty Ltd.

Chief Executive Officer of Double Head Productions Ltd.

Chief Executive Officer of Longford Productions Pty Ltd.

Chief Executive Officer of Adams Packer Films Pty Ltd.

Foundation director of the Australian Caption Centre.

Foundation director of the Australian Children's Television Foundation.

Representative, arts and film industries, Taxation Summit, 1982.

Member of the Children's Television Committee for the Nine Network.

Member of the Australian Governments Committee on the Centenary of Federation Member of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee.

Member of Amnesty International.

Member of the National Museum of Australia Board.

Member of the Museum of Victoria Board.

Member the National Council of the Australian Opera.

Member of the Sydney Opera Company Board.

Member of the Greenpeace Australia Board.

Advisor, Victorian Sesquicentenary Committee.

Board member, Interim Council for a National Film and Television School.

Member of the CARE Australia Board.

Member of the National Federation Centenary Committee.

Member of the Australian Labor Party Arts Committee.

Member of the Federal Government Committee on the French Bicentennial.

Member of the Landmark Committee of the Victorian Government.

Member of the Joan Sutherland Sculpture Committee of the City of Sydney.

Member of the Queen's Birthday Reference Committee, Government of NSW.

Member of Advisory Committee, Institute of Multicultural Affairs.

Member of the Council of Victoria.

Examiner, Swinburne Film School.

Convenor, Friends of The Age.

Member of Wallenberg Committee Board.

Life Member, National Trust of Australia (NSW).

Foundation Chairman, Ideas at the Powerhouse.

Foundation board member, Don Dunstan Foundation, University of Adelaide.

Member, Australian International Documentary Conference.

Currently, Adams is:

Chairman, Advisory Board, Rights Australia Inc.

Chairman, Advisory Board, Centre for the Mind, University of Sydney and Australian National University.

Member, Advisory Board, Architects Without Frontiers.

Member, Convocation of the Australian Film, Radio and Television School.

Member, Australian International Documentary Conference.

Member of the Board, Anti-Football League.

Editorial Advisory Board, the Council for Secular Humanism, New York.

National Council member of the Adelaide Festival.

Advisory Board, Adelaide Festival of Ideas.

Board member and Australian representative, Index on Censorship, UK.

Board member, Families in Distress Foundation.

Foundation member, Independent Scholars Association of Australia.

Member, Australian International Organising Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles.

Member, Council for Media Integrity, New York.

Board member, Festival of Ideas, Adelaide.

Board member, Festival of Ideas, Brisbane.

Board member, Ausflag.

Board member, National Heritage Committee.

Board member, Montsalvat Artists' Colony.

Ambassador, Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

Ambassador, Australian Capital Territory.

Patron, Manning Clark House.

Patron, Australian Humanists.

Patron, Australian Skeptics.

Patron of Defense for Children International.

Patron, the Trade Union Education Foundation.

Patron, Freedom From Violence Australian Inc.

Patron, the Humanist Society.

Patron, the Dorothea Mackellar Society.

Patron, the Strzelecki Society.

Patron, Youth Challenge Australia.

Patron, Jannah, SIEV-X Memorial.

Vice-Patron, United Nations Association.

Fellow, Royal Society of the Arts.

Co-Founder, The Voltaire Society.

Feature Films:

Jack & Jill: A Postscript
(with Brian Robinson). Winner Best Film, AFI Awards, winner Grand Prix, Adelaide-Auckland Film Festival.

The Naked Bunyip
(with John Murray).