by Philip Luker
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Adams himself was ‘lying at death’s door’ (his words) in a Sydney hospital after ‘massive surgery’ when, as he was coming out of the anaesthetic fog, he saw Jim Soorley, a former Catholic priest and from 1991 to 2003 the Labor Party Lord Mayor of Brisbane, sitting at the end of his bed. ‘I told him to bugger off because I thought he’d come to give me the last rites.’
Soorley did not bugger off but cheered Adams up. Like Carmen Lawrence, he is a lapsed Catholic — ‘they bring with them the great strength of Catholicism, its universality. It is the world’s biggest multinational corporation.’ Jim Soorley achieved a lot as Lord Mayor of Australia’s biggest local government area, from improving the sewerage to starting the Brisbane Festival of Ideas. He is now a management consultant and until recently wrote a column in the Brisbane Sunday Mail.
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Another newspaper, another era, another city — Nation Review, the 1970s, Sydney and the most colourful character Phillip Adams has ever known, Gordon Barton. Gordon came from Java, got three degrees simultaneously at Sydney University (which then changed the rules), drank with The Push, admired the notorious philosophy professor, John Anderson, who used to recommend free love in the 1950s, built a fortune from the Ipec transport company he formed, expanded into merchant banking in Tjuringa Securities, started the Australia Party, which became the Australian Democrats, became a careless millionaire in the way he spent his money, conducted multiple affairs at the same time, and in 1970 launched Nation Review, which was how Phillip knew him.
Adams, together with a string of other left-wing Nation Review contributors, poked fun at the establishment with verve and style, which were words that fitted Gordon Barton, the Australian version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby character.
By 1981, Nation Review was costing Gordon too much money and he asked Adams to meet him in his city apartment. Adams told me the story, ‘As Gordon’s butler filled the open fire with mallee roots that Gordon had freighted from Victoria, he offered me Nation Review for not much money at all. I was about to shake on it when he showed me a file of unsettled libel actions and I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”’
Barton closed Nation Review, got bored with Australia, set up Ipec in Europe and moved into a medieval castle in Holland, where according to Valerie Lawson in The Sydney Morning Herald, he once met a group of bankers dressed in a suit of armour. Within ten years, he had to sell his European Ipec to pay for losses on his Australian companies. It was the start of a sad decline — sad for such a rip-roaring entrepreneur. He became increasingly deaf and started to lose his memory and his reasoning and he died in Spain in April 2005, aged 76.
Chapter Eleven:
The Ideas Adams Gave Two Premiers
From one idea, others flow: Greg Mackie owned the Adelaide bookshop Imprints and took part in Adelaide Writers’ Week … He listened regularly to Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live on Radio National and realised it was a festival of ideas … So he asked Adams to help launch the SA Festival of Ideas in 1999 on alternate years to Writers’ Week. Adams has played a large role in developing the ideas festival and chairing many sessions ever since. Often the speakers have already had conversations with Adams on Late Night Live. Mike Rann, the South Australian Premier, told me by phone from Adelaide, ‘The festival is a wonderful event that attracts thousands of people to sessions ranging from astronomy to feminism and modern Islam to sex.’ The 2009 festival theme was ‘Pushing the Limits’. The man who originally came up with the idea, Greg Mackie, is now Deputy CEO of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in SA.
But the ideas festival was only the start. Mike Rann wanted the state to benefit more from the brains of people who came to the festival and were prepared to stay in Adelaide for several days or several months, attend Cabinet meetings, give public lectures and talk to local people. So he launched Thinkers in Residence. Four recent Thinkers in Residence have been: Professor Fred Wegman, managing director of the Holland Institute for Road Safety Research; Fred Hansen, general manager of TriMet, the transport authority of Portland, Oregon; Genevieve Bell, who also came from Portland as a director of Intel Corporation’s Digital Home Group; and Laura Lee, Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.
One of the earliest Thinkers in Residence was Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and Director of the Royal Institution of Science. Ideas keep flowing: As a result of her visit, the institution established its first branch outside London in Adelaide in October 2009, the Royal Institution of Australia. It holds forums where scientists, engineers, students, educators, media, government and industry can discuss the challenges of science in shaping the future. The Australian Science Media Centre, which was set up by the Rann government to give the media information and access to scientists, has been moved into the Royal Institution of Australia’s premises.
Another idea that Adams initiated: He interviewed Geoff Mulgen, who was one of Tony Blair’s chief advisors on social policy, on Late Night Live. Mike Rann told me, ‘I brought him to Adelaide as a Thinker in Residence and he gave us the idea of establishing the Australian Centre for Social Innovation. We naturally made Phillip the chairman. Another example of the ideas chain of events was when Phillip interviewed Rosanne Hagerty, a New York expert on homelessness. We invited her here as a Thinker in Residence and the ideas she gave us led to Common Ground being set up to tackle homelessness. It has now gone national. Just as more than 30 years ago Phillip influenced Australian film policy, the ideas and people he has introduced to us are having a profound effect on national policy in areas such as social innovation, social justice, climate change and science.’
Mike Rann said Don Dunstan used to always tell him, when Rann was his young press secretary and speechwriter, that we must always question our own assumptions and that people who always held the same beliefs show intellectual cowardice. Adams had never been an intellectual coward and had always been prepared to tackle hard issues and to support unpopular causes. That was why he was respected, said Mike. He first met Adams when he was working for Don Dunstan, who told him a lot about Adams.
‘Phillip and Don set up the South Australian Film Corporation in 1972 and it was the renaissance of the Australian film industry,’ Rann told me. ‘Many of the corporation’s films, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Breaker Morant, Ten Canoes and Look Both Ways, have won Australian Film Industry Awards. Don was the first person in Australia to set up government-funded studios and films. If you look at the film industry today and how rich and varied it is, it came about because Phillip came to see Don Dunstan when he was South Australian premier and told him that if he wanted to get a film industry going, someone had to build facilities for it. It was Phillip who convinced Don to embrace film as an art form as well as an industry and to use film to tell the Australian story, to help define us to the world and to explain Australians to themselves. Almost every other state followed, but the idea came from Phillip,’ said Mike Rann.
The ideas link: Mike said Adams’ position in society is similar to the late US Senator Ted Kennedy’s. During the entire Reagan Presidency, when liberalism was unpopular, Ted Kennedy had held his course and sailed against the wind, which is why he was enormously respected by politicians of both sides. Likewise, Adams had always been prepared to question not only other people’s assumptions but also his own, which was critically different to most people. He had always been prepared to say ‘Maybe I was wrong.’ His deeply-held views had never been influenced by fads or populism. Rann said Adams had earned his enormous respect because he had always been about ideas. He asked difficult questions in the nicest way, which was why he evoked such good responses. Some other interviewers backed you into a corner. ‘The great thing about being interviewed by Phillip is that he brings you into the centre of the ring and dances with you,’ said Mike.
Mike Rann was born of manual-worker parents at Sidcup in Kent and in 1962 moved with them to New Zealand. He was ins
pired by the ideas of Don Dunstan when in 1977 he travelled from New Zealand to Adelaide to go to his brother’s wedding and, while he was there, found a job in Don’s Unit for Industrial Democracy later becoming Don’s press secretary and then a Labor MP in 1985. In the late 1990s he married Jenny Russell and they had two children, David and Eleanor. In 2006 he married his second wife, actress and Greens MP Sasha Carruozzo. His Labor government was re-elected in March 2010 but lost two seats, with 26 seats to the Liberals’ 21.
What drives Phillip Adams? ‘A love of ideas and also a profound view that Australia should be a leader, not a follower,’ Rann told me. ‘He is deliciously naughty. When he was on the Commission for the Future, he used to chair meetings lying on his back in his lounge room, surrounded by Egyptian mummies. One moment he is serious and encouraging and the next naughty and provocative. He is simultaneously both supportive and provocative.’
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A man of ideas: Anna Bligh, the Queensland Premier, was reading Adams’ columns long before she met him, in connection with the Brisbane Ideas Festival. The festival was suggested by Adams and the former Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley and has been held every two years since 2000, with Adams in the chair. Adams is the Queensland Government’s Ideas Advisor and he has helped plan every festival. The 2009 festival from March 25-29 had more than 50 sessions in five streams: Invention and Innovation, Development and Design, Ecology and Ethics, Action and Advocacy and Self and Society.
Anna Bligh was the 30th person I interviewed about Adams and one of the very few who I had to interview by phone, but I could feel her drive. It was in July 2009, the same month as her 49th birthday and Adams’ 70th and four months after her Labor government was re-elected and Anna was re-elected Premier. She told me, ‘Phillip is a man of ideas, and all political movements need to be driven by ideas. His ideas have not atrophied, which is incredibly valuable in the public life of our country and among politicians. Phillip continues to hold strong views about right and wrong and justice and injustice.’
The challenge of ideas: Anna Bligh said Adams challenges us, particularly the busier you are and the more responsibilities you take on. You had to guard against your ideas becoming stuck in the past, which meant you needed people who will challenge you with a new way of thinking. ‘Phillip is a larger than life character, not only intelligent but generous with his time and ideas. He wants to be part of great community activities. For someone who has spent 70 years on the planet, he’s still looking for ways to make the world better. That’s very attractive to everyone. He is never condescending and does not seek to dominate people, in spite of having so much to contribute. He is just as interested in listening as talking.’
The ideas festival: Anna said Adams has driven the success of every Brisbane Ideas Festival, has used his network to encourage people to take part and broadcast some debates from every festival on Late Night Live. Adams himself was a big drawcard and the calibre of the festival’s speakers reflected people’s confidence in him.
Thriving on ideas: Adams’ column in The Weekend Australian Magazine is one of the columns Anna Bligh said she turns to regularly because she knows it will contain something to provoke her thinking, even though she would not agree with everything in it. ‘It’s always intelligent and provocative and exposes me to a way of thinking or an idea that has happened in Australia or the world. I listen to Late Night Live now and again if I’m coming home from a function. Phillip has loomed large in the Australian landscape for a long time. He absolutely thrives on ideas and relishes debate.’
Bligh said Adams has had an influence on Labor ideas in Australia and it is hard to think of major public debates that he has not been part of. He had confronted the Labor Party with its own failings, but he did it from such a constructive framework that you were compelled to at least listen to him. He wasn’t inside the party having to grapple with getting the numbers.
Anna Bligh grew up on the Gold Coast; her parents separated when she was 13; she considered becoming a nun, but the fact that the Catholic Church would not allow her divorced mother to take Communion estranged both her mother and Anna from the church. She and her husband, Greg Withers, a senior public servant, have two sons, Joe and Oliver. She is the great-great-great-great granddaughter of William Bligh, the fourth NSW Governor and captain of the Bounty, which was overthrown by mutineers in 1789.
I asked Bligh, ‘As a woman, what is Phillip Adams’ appeal to you? Cautiously, she replied, ‘That’s a leading question. As a woman, I’ve always felt Phillip treats me as an equal. He is interested in what I might be doing and the challenges I’m facing just as much as his own ideas. While he has a very healthy ego, it is not one — as with many men — that gets in the way of a great conversation. Ego is not a dirty word; it’s a healthy thing. If I have a mind as useful as his when I am 70, I’ll have nothing to worry about.’
Chapter Twelve:
Phillip Adams’ Seven Women
Phillip Adams is attractive to intelligent women as a charming, super-brainy softie who does not talk down to them. He has had particularly seven women in his life: His mother Sylvia (their relationship is covered in Chapter Two, on his childhood), his first wife Rosemary, their daughters Rebecca, Meaghan and Saskia, his current partner Patrice Newell and their teenage daughter Aurora. His relationship with each of them is intriguing. For example, Rosemary used to accuse him of having affairs with well-known personalities like Jana Wendt and Patrice has said twice on television that when she first interviewed Phillip, he was flirtatious.
While in Canberra at the National Library reading thousands of letters to Phillip stored there, I bought a transcript of an oral history the library had of two days’ verbatim conversations it had recorded with Adams in 1994. He had told me about the recording and given me the necessary permission to access it.
In it Adams said he was eighteen when he met Rosemary, the beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who became his first wife. He said, ‘Rosemary came out of the bohemian thread of life. I’d moved into a building in Brighton, Melbourne, where Brian Robinson (his friend) had an apartment. I had an apartment and Brian’s artist mates had apartments. So we shared this mouldering pile. Brian told me he was having an affair with a girl called Julie. He hadn’t come out then. I knew he was gay but he hadn’t told me and he wasn’t telling anybody. So often he had “handbags” and Julie was a very decorative handbag and a very amusing lady. Brian said, “Julie’s wonderful but you should see her sister. Her sister is the most beautiful girl on earth.’’ That was a bit of a build-up, wasn’t it? One day I walked into one of the apartments in the building where a party was taking place and sitting on a beanbag in a corner of the room was this astonishingly beautiful human being. It had to be Julie’s sister.
‘I looked at her, she looked at me and I was overwhelmed by what I’d seen. I just could not believe that a human being could look so astonishing. She was excruciatingly shy, and I was this terrible young man who was a communist, so I wasn’t exactly the sort of young man who respectable middle-class people would want hanging around their young daughter. Even Julie and Brian tried to prevent anything happening between Rosemary and me because I was regarded as just too wild, disreputable and unsavoury. When her parents, who were very distinguished, upmarket Brighton people, found that I was in the offing, they announced that they were going to take her to England to keep her away from me. But nothing, nothing consolidates a relationship like opposition. So Rosemary and I were destined for each other from that moment and when she was nineteen and I was twenty-one, we got married in a church.’
Adams thought the wedding was ‘a bit of a hoot’ and all he remembered about the ceremony was that a dry-cleaning tag was attached to the vicar’s vestments with a safety pin. The reception was at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. Adams and Rosemary moved into a funny old two-storey house in Oakleigh and started an idyllic life together.
Well, as idyllic as it could be. Rosemary was, by Adams’ account, excruciatingly shy and
threatened by the outside world and by what Adams was doing, because he was becoming ‘faintly notorious and even a bit well-known’ as a result of his writing. In the oral history he remembers being invited to a house where the Australian author Xavier Herbert (Poor Fellow My Country) would be. Adams wanted to go but Rosemary didn’t — ‘she was terrified of meeting people’, he said — but Adams remembers actually dragging her out of the house, shoving her into a car and driving to Mt Eliza, where Herbert ‘fell in love with her and they sat and talked all night. But it was always like that. To get Rosemary out into the world required almost physical violence because she just wanted to recede.’
Rosemary had gone to finishing school in Brighton and worked as a dental nurse. She was very intelligent but was threatened by the news in the newspapers. She found people so terrifying that Adams never brought people home for dinner, and Rosemary and he didn’t go out much. Some of his friends believed he was keeping beautiful Rosemary out of reach, although the truth was the opposite: he wanted her to come out into the world with him and she resisted.
They moved into a small house in Hawthorn and bought the three houses alongside it. Adams put his rapidly expanding library of books and antiquities into the other houses, knocked down the dividing back fences and built a high fence around the whole compound so the world would be kept away from Rosemary.