by Philip Luker
They had three daughters, Rebecca, Meaghan and Saskia, and Adams was glad they were daughters because ‘girls don’t break things and don’t go to the football’. He lived quietly with Rosemary and their young family at night, but once he went out their front door on weekday mornings, he worked not only in advertising at Monahan Dayman Adams and writing Age columns but also took part in government committees.
He told Margaret Chalker, who interviewed him for the National Library: ‘Little by little, tension started to develop because of this. I was a great dad for Rebecca, our first child, an average dad for the second and a hopeless dad for the third. By the time Meaghan and Saskia came along, I was having a public rather than a private life. Although I didn’t have a lot of friends, I knew everybody. I was on the Australia Council, running the Film Board, having major shit fights with politicians, and forming alliances with Gough Whitlam (prime minister from 1972 to ’75) and Jim Cairns (Whitlam’s deputy PM). I was doing what I’ve always done, rushing around playing with things. Rosemary focused on the girls and withdrew more and more.
‘Having been absolutely, scrupulously faithful for all those years, I was being accused by Rosemary of having affairs and I must say she picked some pretty good people for me. She’d always be saying, “You’re having an affair with Jana Wendt”, or someone else. I wasn’t at all. In fact, when anything was on offer and occasionally it was, I would be very prim,’ Adams said in his oral history in 1994.
‘But then I worked out that if I was always going to be accused of it, I might as well do it, so it became my hobby. I became very active and I had a terrible habit of falling in love at least once a fortnight. I fell in love all the time and this didn’t actually help the marriage, as you can imagine, but Rosemary rarely commented on it. She just endured it, but after a while it became untenable and my life, by then, was so public that she hated it.’
I admire Adams’ honesty, if not his actions. Even highly intelligent people can fail to have adequate insight into their lives and where they might have gone wrong.
After thirty years of marriage (and after he had met Patrice Newell), Adams and Rosemary ended their marriage. ‘Rosemary and I decided it was too painful to have any dealings and so we’ve had none,’ he explained to Margaret Chalker. ‘I have not seen her since then.’
Adams said in his oral history that his older daughters, Rebecca and Meaghan, understood it, were not judgmental and thought it was a good decision. They understood that the marriage, which had been great, was now painful for both their parents. But his youngest daughter, Saskia, was ‘the meat in the sandwich,’ he said. ‘She was the one who really felt it and so she became bitter and recessive. She’s fine, she’s a fire-breathing little radical who’s writing novels furiously but she and I have a negligible relationship.’
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Adams told me the very first day I met him and convinced him to talk to me for this biography that Rosemary would certainly not meet or communicate with me and, in deference to their mother, neither would their three daughters, which meant I had to find out about them from him or other sources.
From what he told me, all three of their daughters show evidence of his nature — or nurture — by working in caring or writing occupations or both. Rebecca, who is in her late forties, studied medicine in Melbourne and later worked as an intern for a progressive Jewish magazine called Tikkun run by a rabbi and political activist, Michael Lerner, in Berkeley, California. (‘Tikkun’ is a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repairing the world’ or ‘perfecting the world’.) Later Rebecca rang her father from California, told him she was converting to Judaism and asked how he felt about it. He admired the magazine and the fact that, as a member of its staff, she would have contact with many progressive American Jewish contributors, such as Woody Allen. But then Rebecca told him that she and Michael were going to get married.
‘I was a bit appalled,’ Adams told me, ‘because Michael was much older than Rebecca. I didn’t think the wedding would happen — and it didn’t.’
Regardless, Rebecca concluded her conversion to Judaism and phoned her father from New York City to tell him about it, again asking whether he was upset, to which he replied, ‘Not as upset as if you’d become a Methodist.’ Rebecca continued medical studies, became a duty psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and then a psychiatrist in a US Vietnam and Korean War veterans’ hospital in the Bronx; she kept taking tough jobs because they could increase her chance of gaining a Green Card, which would enable her to work permanently in America. But it never came. In 2000 she returned to Australia, became a psychiatrist in private practice, went to Sweden, married a psychologist from South Africa and now practises in West Perth.
Rebecca wrote a tribute to US President Barack Obama and America in general on Page One of Tikkun in January-February 2009, under a photo of Australians celebrating his election: ‘Thank you for what you have done for the world already. Thank you for your brave and beautiful words, which have revitalised our formally despairing and paralysed political hearts. Washington and Perth, Australia, are geographically far apart. But every day since I discovered your speeches and books a few years ago, you have been very near, in my psychiatric consulting office, as I’m sure you’ve been to millions of other non-Americans who love America. We love America for her energy, her creativity, her yet-unrealised possibilities, her contradictions and complexity.’ Like many others, Rebecca is possibly disillusioned by President Obama’s lack of progress in reform since she wrote those words.
Meaghan, Adams’ second daughter, has always been involved in non-government organisations, usually focusing on people with disabilities. In 2009 she was Manager of Community Relations at the Alkira Centre, which is at Box Hill in Melbourne and cares for people with intellectual disabilities, including dementia. Alkira is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘a happy place in the sun’. The Alkira website says it ‘strives to meet the needs and wishes of people with intellectual difficulties through care and support, to enrich and challenge them to be part of the world community’. It recently completed a ten-year project to create seven ‘ordinary homes in ordinary Box Hill streets’ to house some of the people it cares for.
Saskia, Adams’ youngest daughter with Rosemary, did a Monash University publishing and editing course and now works as an editor at Penguin Books in Melbourne. Rebecca is Adams’ only married daughter. None of his daughters has children.
‘They are all fine women,’ Adams told me, ‘and all do creative, highly ethical work. I see a lot of Rebecca and Meaghan, and Saskia is a very good friend of Rory’ — his teenage daughter with Patrice. ‘So it’s all reasonably okay.’
Adams probably suffers a normal amount of guilt for a hard-working father — guilt for not seeing his children enough when they were small and for his part in the collapse of his marriage to their mother. His children have grown up and made their way in the world; his job as a parent is done. But it’s clear that he devotes a lot of thought to them and his relationship with them.
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He said in his Oral History in 1994, ‘I packed up and left home and ran away with Patrice Newell, who was compering an SBS public affairs program when we met. I was going to leave anyway, but Patrice was a sort of detonator. She decamped from her marriage and I from mine.’ He was forty-seven; she was thirty.
In ABC Television’s Australian Story on October 4, 2001, Patrice gave her version: ‘I met Phillip when I was doing a report for SBS on the film industry. I didn’t know that much about him. So I was quite taken aback when I interviewed him and he was pretty pompous and quite patronising to me. He would say things like, “Oh, Patrice, that’s a silly question” … but he was flirtatious as well.
‘Phillip and I were both married at the time we met,’ she continued. ‘The relationship didn’t come easily in that way. You had to really believe that it was worth it, to make it happen. I suppose, in the back of my mind somewhere, I knew something had happened.’
In Australian St
ory Adams recalled his first meeting with ‘a rather stern young woman in a rather aggressive interview, and these are characteristics of Patrice that survive to this day — she’s a stern, hardworking, to some extent humourless and rigorous person. I thought she was great fun. I think we brawled from the first time we met. We argued about everything, and I like that. Patrice is a minimalist and I’m a maximalist. By that I mean she would like to live in a world without clutter; I collect anything and everything. Aurora collects, of all things, skulls. So she and I collect and Patrice is a minimalist, surrounded by ratbags who are accumulators, an area of some tension. Our arrival in the district raised the odd eyebrow. Patrice and I have never accepted invitations to anything. I haven’t been to a party for thirty years. We’re deeply happy because we love the physical work and we’re happy at night because I get a huge fire going. We spend as much time as we possibly can reading and talking.’
Adams continued in Australian Story, ‘When I met Patrice, she had a little flat in Kings Cross and her only agricultural interest was a ficus plant in a terracotta pot. Within a year or so, she was running a 10,000-acre cattle property. We’re both pretty intense. She’s very difficult to live with. She says the same of me. I think we might have in fact murdered each other by now if we didn’t have fairly long periods of apartness,’ when Adams lives in Sydney during the week while Patrice lives permanently on their farm Elmswood, via Gundy, near Scone in the Hunter Valley. It’s an arrangement that has worked for twenty years.
Phillip wanted me to meet Patrice at the farm, but she declined. ‘She is a very formidable woman,’ he explained. ‘She doesn’t want to have her life examined by others.’
I’m annoyed and challenged — for someone who doesn’t want her life examined, she’s gone about it a strange way. She has written five books about the farm and the environment; she stood (unsuccessfully) as an independent candidate endorsed by the Climate Change Coalition in the 2007 NSW Legislative Council elections; and she was at the top of the NSW ticket for the same coalition’s unsuccessful tilt for the federal Senate in November 2007. The party received 0.89 % of first preferences or 0.0622 of a quota, needing 1.0 to win a seat. She did not stand in the 2010 election.
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Any worthwhile news journalist, when refused information he wants, strives to find the information from other sources, and I did that by talking to several people who know her. Patrice discovered only recently that her mother was a Victorian Aboriginal woman who committed suicide and that she was adopted by the Adelaide couple who she knew as her parents, Felix Newell and Thelma Colechin. In July 2009, Adams and Patrice went to her birth mother’s unmarked grave in Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne and put a plaque on it and also visited her mother’s brother in hospital. In Adelaide as a child, she lived with her adopted parents in the humble suburb of Kurralta Park, in a humble brick cottage that was back to front: The front door opened into the kitchen. But her adopted parents worked hard at low-paid jobs and the family was never hungry. Felix was a mail sorter at the General Post Office and Thelma cleaned offices and worked in a shoe factory to help pay for Patrice’s schooling at St Aloysius Catholic College in Adelaide. She called them Dad and Mum, she didn’t know they were not her real parents, and she always remembered her father’s motto, ‘Be grateful for what you’ve got’.
But Patrice dreamed of escaping from suburban Adelaide and planned to train as a nurse in Darwin — until Cyclone Tracy flattened the hospital and her nurse-training job on Christmas Day in 1974. While she waited in Adelaide for the hospital to be rebuilt, she applied for and got modelling work at the John Martin department store in Adelaide and appeared in their catalogues. A modelling agent saw her in a fashion parade and sought her as a client. She moved to Sydney, then, at the age of eighteen, to Melbourne. From there she travelled to Manila, Guam, Chicago, New York and other places, waitressing, modelling, promoting products and conducting interviews with celebrities for magazines. In 1980 at Niagara Falls, she married a composer, Cameron Allan, and they returned to Australia, where they rented a small flat at Kings Cross in Sydney.
Like many intelligent women who make their living from exhibiting their bodies, Patrice wanted more of a challenge than modelling and in 1982, aged twenty-six, she found a job as a Seven Network researcher in Sydney at well under half the income she had earned as a model. Soon she was reporting for Seven. Patrice handled the same problems as most people have in their late twenties. She became frustrated with her life. She wondered what life was all about.
To add to Patrice’s problems, her marriage to Cameron Allan was encountering difficulties. She left him, bought her own flat in Sydney and switched from the Seven Network to SBS Television as a newsreader and current affairs host. That was when her life changed direction completely because, when doing SBS interviews for a program on the film industry, she was sent to interview Adams.
Something clicked for both of them at that interview, in spite of Adams being 17 years older than Patrice and the father of three children. Patrice stayed with SBS until 1986, when she became a presenter for the Nine Network’s Today show.
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Adams told me his own story of how, not long after they met, he and Patrice came to live at Elmswood: ‘We went on immensely long drives looking at houses in isolated parts,’ he said one morning. ‘Neither of us had any interest in farming — that wasn’t the exercise. We were driving around near Scone heading towards Belltrees, the great home of the White family, of whom Patrick was the most famous. Patrice remembered being at Belltrees as the handbag of a gay White, who needed a girlfriend for a family function.
‘I saw an extraordinary house, two storeys, plonked on a hill, looking like an abandoned paddle-steamer on the Mississippi, completely out of place. I thought it was wonderful and I said, “That’s where I’d like to live.” So we drove in and found a strange woman planting things in the garden. I asked her whether we could have a look around, so we did, and she gave us a cup of tea. I said, “I’d like to buy your house”, and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. She sold it to us for what was regarded locally as a ludicrous price, although I thought it was dirt cheap. It included about 3,000 acres. Over a hundred years it had shrunk, as old properties tend to do. Little by little, it has grown again to 10,000 acres, the title of one of Pat’s books about it.’ The book is Ten Thousand Acres — A Love Story, published by Lantern, a Penguin imprint.
‘Pat got a passion for farming,’ Adams continued. ‘Every weekend we go out on a four-wheel bike, looking for cattle, counting calves or checking dams. We’ve been doing that for twenty-five years but the farm is so complex and big and full of valleys that we’re still discovering new places.’
Watching Adams talk about Elmswood, I can see that the place and the life he lives there make him happy. Patrice once said, on television, that one reason she, Adams and Rory connect so well is that each of them is an only child and so is Rory. So they accept each other’s loner personalities.
But they have different attitudes to their cattle and it was shown in the case of Adams’ favourite bull, Malcolm X, which used to come to him for a hug across a paddock, like a puppy dog. Malcolm X was so called because he was huge and magnificently black, like the American activist of the same name. Both sadly suffered the same fate: the activist was assassinated when giving a speech in New York City in 1965; the bull was causing havoc and used to collect fences as it strolled across paddocks and was assassinated one week when Phillip was away in Sydney. Adams said it was ‘the lowest point of Patrice’s and my relationship’.
Despite that, Adams said in Australian Story that Patrice is more ethical than almost anyone he’s met, a constant inspiration and challenge, determined, full of courage and with an irreverence that ‘takes the piss’ out of any tendency he has to be pompous, whereas he challenges her with humour.
Patrice sounds self-possessed and self-indulgent in The Olive Grove (Penguin, 2000), which probably pleases her readers. Each of her books had
sales of between 5,000 and 6,000. She has become very attached to the property; she’s proud of what she has done there and becomes emotional when nature damages her crops, especially olives. She goes for long walks alone in the bush on the property and sometimes strips off and has a swim in a dam. Adams and she have wide personality differences. For example, Adams collects things, like pieces of wood, because he likes to surround himself with things rather than people. He also has very simple food tastes, such as biscuits, while Patrice likes to cook creatively, which results in Adams being well fed with good meals when he is at home, whereas he doesn’t eat much at all when in Sydney.
Aurora completed her Higher School Certificate in 2009 and in September 2010 Adams and Patrice farewelled her from Sydney Airport on her way to Edinburgh, where she will go to the university for four years. Adams wrote a good column about it in The Weekend Australian Magazine on September 25, 2010, a column that would appeal to parents. Obviously sorry to farewell Aurora, he told how eighteen years ago he used to sit on an old couch at the farm — ‘the couch is on its last legs and we’re both shabbily upholstered’ — and toss Aurora as a little girl into the sky and catch her. ‘But yesterday she was aloft again. She took off in a big way. Tears all round at Sydney Airport and she was flying high to Edinburgh. Her home for the next four years. Her choice of city and university. Why Edinburgh? Probably osmosis. After all, our nearest towns are Scone and Aberdeen. The homestead was built 120 years ago by Presbyterians fresh from Scotland. Our cattle are mainly Angus, the black-faced sheep would be at home in the highlands and the dogs are Border Collie crosses.
‘Emotions had been running high. I took her for a last ride around the place. On a four-wheel bike, the way I have since she was a one-year-old. The place couldn’t have looked lovelier. After a decade of drought we splashed through the creek and went up and down hills now lush and plush with grass,’ Adams wrote. ‘All the animals are having kids. The heifers are calving, the sheep giving birth to black lambs, the kangaroos to joeys. We parked on a ridge and Rory (sorry — Aurora now she’s grown up) looked around at the landscape she was born into. It feels as if 18 years have passed in 18 months. Yet Rory is still here. All the Rorys. Like the ever-smaller figures in a Russian doll. The tiny Rory, the big Auroa, and all the others in-between. Little Rory, bouncing around the paddocks on the four-wheeler, laughing with her mum in the kitchen as she learned to cook, which she learned very well indeed. Listening wide-eyed to the ghost stories I made up — all the more plausible in an old house with ghosts galore. Playing with the dogs, collecting the eggs, waiting for the school bus, splashing in the rock pools and the river. Sitting reading book after book. Doing what every child does. Thinking, learning, dreaming, growing.