by Philip Luker
Alex emailed, ‘I am 20 years’ old and began reading your articles three years ago. Thank you for opening my eyes, Mr Adams. I appreciate your relentless ability to not accept the world as it is and to strive instead to make others aware. You are a beacon of light.’
Josie, of Camp Hill, Queensland, wrote, ‘Last night I picked up a woman and brought her to my house for a visit. My friend was visibly upset telling me that in the past few weeks she had found out that her two daughters (now 25 and 29, then four and eight) were sexually molested by the man she lived with after her husband left. The widespread repercussions of the terrible things that people perpetuate on one another are complex and far-flung.’
Hazel, of Golden Square, Victoria, wrote: “You have really gone too far. This week you again took the Mickey out of all those good people who believe in the supernatural. You degrade a most worthy group, who deserve your sympathy. You refer to pigs’ ‘trotters’. Really, Mr Adams, sheep have trotters, pigs have feet, as any butcher could tell you.’
Simon, of Dunnstown, Victoria, wrote, ‘As a believer in God, I have read widely and made some fascinating discoveries in the past few years. The Bible does not forbid God’s ministers to marry but encourages marriage. Celibacy is the Catholic Church’s idea.’
Barbara emailed, ‘The greatest weapon of mass destruction is religion. There is but one god, so why do we belt each other on his or her behalf?’
Finally, this gem from Alexis, of Tully, Queensland, ‘My dad is an intelligent, compassionate atheist. Mum is a kind, devoted Catholic. Dad reckons the Pope needs five kids, a wife and a cow to sort himself out. Mum agrees.’
Chapter Seventeen:
Adams and Other Media Grumpies
Phillip Adams moved from the communist Guardian to The Bulletin, to The Australian before Rupert Murdoch sacked him, to Nation Review, back to The Australian, to The Age and back to The Australian. Along the way he tried to stop The Age becoming a takeover target, edited nine joke books and indulged in hate wars and petty squabbles with rival media grumpies.
He told me his generation of commentators and public intellectuals are still calling the shots and occupying the front ranks in their sixties and seventies while people in their twenties, thirties and forties are “pissed off” waiting for a chance. But will he surrender Late Night Live? In Australia, once you’re on the totem pole, you stay there, whereas you don’t in the United States or Britain, because others push you off, the competition is so fierce. In Australia, most film makers, for example, are in their sixties and seventies; also newspaper columnists and radio commentators. It’s the same in public life — much of the public agenda is still controlled by ageing baby boomers. Many talented young people communicate via the internet, but that doesn’t yet create public recognition like the old media does for people like Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell, Clive James, Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Adams himself — The Media Grumpies. They and many others have benefited from boom newspaper years, now declining as newspapers close down or shrink in size in the face of the internet boom and the 2007-09 world financial slump. Adams would no doubt be killed in the rush if he offered his Weekend Australian Magazine half-page to a younger columnist.
Why do The Grumpies stay on their totem poles longer in Australia? ‘I don’t know,’ Adams said in one of our regular fruity sessions, at about 9.30 a.m. with Phillip grumpier than he had sounded on-air at 11 p.m. the previous night. He fortified himself with tea (two teabags), rolled the first of several cigarettes, left his shoes off and leaned back in his office chair under the eyes of an ancient Egyptian head. ‘The new generation of commentators is blogging, not going into the old media. So the doddering old master class is unchallenged but in a newspaper medium that is declining. It’s not healthy. And it wasn’t always the case that most media commentators are right-wing while many other media people are left-wing. At The Age, the opposite was true and the commentators’ left or liberal attitude was quite marked. I remember telling Graham Perkin, the editor (1966-75), that The Age really needed some conservative commentators. Graham said he would appoint one if he could find one with a sense of humour. This became a huge obstacle.’
But for the past 15 years, lefties have been rare except for cartoonists. It’s hard to think of any Australian cartoonists who are not left-wing. The grumpy old columnists have grown grumpier and have been joined by new, younger conservative columnists like Miranda Devine. If Adams or I were running a newspaper today, we would look for younger, fresher, progressive voices to balance the conservatives.
Adams has caustic views about some fellow grumpies: “Piers Akerman (Sydney Daily and Sunday Telegraph) is a performing seal. There he is with simulated rage, like Miranda Devine (formerly Fairfax and now News Ltd tabloids). Andrew Bolt (Melbourne Herald Sun) is unreadable. They get everything wrong and never apologise. They’re now even angrier than ever. So whatever they’re on, I want some.”
On a slow news day, columnists and commentators get stuck into each other. Adams wrote in The Australian that John Laws will become morose and melancholic now that he has retired from 2UE and Laws wrote back that Adams twenty years earlier had been ‘without a doubt the greatest failure ever to open a microphone there because he couldn’t deal with talkback people’. Laws returned to radio (2SM) in 2011, aged 75.
But no columnist upsets Adams as much as Gerard Henderson, executive director of the conservative think tank The Sydney Institute. Adams told me, ‘Gerard and I are old enemies. He is a bizarre form of stand-up comic. I don’t take much notice of him’ (incorrect) ‘as he’s utterly predictable.’ Both Adams and Henderson did take enough notice of each other to engage in a typical spat via emails and newspapers in May and June 2009. On May 17, Phillip wrote in his Weekend Australian Magazine column: ‘Many columnists are content to proffer the same column ad nauseum. Gerard Henderson is the classic case. In The Sydney Morning Herald, he regularly erects the same column in the space provided, attacking either Robert Manne (Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne), the ABC or me, or all three at once. Readers know it off by heart.’ Henderson replied in an email to Adams, headed ‘Phillip Adams’ wilful distortion’: ‘This statement is entirely false. The fact is that I have never devoted a Sydney Morning Herald column to attacking you or Robert Manne. Not one. You, however, have used your column in The Weekend Australian Magazine to attack me previously, for example in February 2007’. On June 5, 2009, Adams emailed Gerard: ‘Would it be possible for you to stop, just for a moment or two, being such a humourless bore? Silly question. The average house brick is more amusing, the most pigeon shit-splattered bronze statue of some long-forgotten 19th century personage propped up in a park is less pompous than Gerard, who spends so much time and effort trying to keep himself on his pedestal. Big hug, Phillip.’
Henderson said in his Media Watch Dog newsletter on June 23, 2009, ‘Nancy (who I suspect is Henderson in drag) was thrilled to receive an email this week from Late Night Live presenter Phillip Adams. The good news is that Phillip is an enthusiastic reader of Media Watch Dog. So enthusiastic, in fact, that he believes he was short-changed in the gongs area last week, as the following documentation demonstrates:’ Then followed Adams’ email to Henderson: ‘As well as two Orders of Australia, I’ve got not one but FOUR hon. doctorates. And you’ll have to add FAHA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities) to the honorifics. Let’s gloss over my being (along with Don Bradman and John Howard) an official National Treasure, a Walkley, the Human Rights Medal, a pile of AFI Awards, the Longford, Humanist of the Year and even an ancient Logie … etc. etc. Don’t forget to take your pills.’ Henderson replied the same day to say he had in his Media Watch Dog a few days earlier referred to Adams as: Phillip Adams AO (1992), AM (1987), Hon Duniv (Griffith), Hon Dlitt (ECU), Hon DUniv (SA), FRSA.’
I have chosen a few examples of these rather silly spats between Adams and Henderson to help reveal their personalities. But they should avoid boring their readers and insult
ing each other in print and either choose genuinely funny jokes or (better still) worthwhile subjects.
Local shock jocks are pale imitations of American ones and on his worst day, Alan Jones is about ten per cent as fierce as Rush Limbaugh, who has 13.5 million listeners in the US. Adams told me American right-wing radio commentators are raving monsters and Rush is said to be now more or less running the Republican Party. In The Weekend Australian on May 26, 2007, Adams wrote: ‘I loathe shock jocks and I detest the way locals mimic and plagiarise the bigotries and production tricks of Rush Limbaugh — the US source of such John Laws phrases as “femi-nazis” and the “keeping the dream alive” twaddle.’
Adams has been back and forth to and from The Australian three times and is now its longest contributor. After being a teenage freelance on the Victorian Communist Party’s Guardian, he began writing part-time for the old pink-cover Bulletin, sometimes under established writers’ bylines when they were too sick, or too drunk, to write. The Bulletin, which had a rip-roaring, legendary background with J F Archibald as owner-editor and Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson as contributors, was well past its prime when in 1961 its owner, Samuel Prior, sold it to Frank Packer (Kerry’s father) and its new editor, Donald Horne, turned it into a glossy newsmagazine modelling it on Time. Kerry Packer kept it going despite losing circulation and money until the financiers who took control of his company after he died closed it in January 2008.
The cartoonist Bruce Petty persuaded Adrian Deamer, The Australian’s editor from 1966 to ’71, to hire Adams as a television critic, and as The Australian had no television investments, Adams could write as he pleased, which he did, usually not about television at all. The staff journalists had a whip-around to buy him a TV set and it was a standing joke around the office that he never saw television but wrote about it. He also wrote an Adams Rib column in The Weekend Australian and recalled to me: ‘I experimented with mumblings about things previously the province of novelists, poets or academic essayists, juxtaposing them with political satire. The response to my self-educated, indulgent outpourings was surprising — we got sugarbags full of letters, often in response to such non-newspaper topics as death, dying and the deity.’ He began the trend towards irreverence, which was widely imitated both in The Australian and in Age columns like Pinkney’s Place. Adams Rib lent weight to the rebelliousness of the era, satirising institutions such as schools, religion and censorship. Adams later equated the spirit of censorship with ‘the great hush up’ and Western taboo about death. Former High Court Judge Michael Kirby, in Murdoch’s Flagship by Denis Cryle (Melbourne University Press), subsequently characterised Adams’ distinctive journalism as a ‘jumble of history, philosophy and whimsy, humorous anecdotes about his past and musings on popular culture, a combination of self-confession and nostalgia, more burlesque than macabre.’
But the first blow struck Adams’ career after Rupert Murdoch, The Australian’s owner, bombed in a 1969 British television interview with another satirist, David Frost. Murdoch had published, in his muck-raking News of the World, the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the call girl who six years earlier was at the centre of Britain’s biggest postwar sex scandal, the Profumo Affair. Frost’s show had been running for only three weeks when it caught fire over the way he poured scorn and dislike over Murdoch. Murdoch himself had only recently arrived as a London publisher but in Frost’s interview defiantly defended the story in spite of the fact that the disgraced ex-Cabinet minister John Profumo had devoted his post-scandal life to charitable works and the story had already been thrashed to death. Murdoch arrived in Australia, asked Adrian Deamer whether he had any satirists on his staff and told him to sack them. Adams switched to Gordon Barton’s Nation Review but was reinstated by The Australian when Deamer pointed out to Murdoch and Adams himself that The Australian received more letters about Adams’ columns than about the Vietnam War, although for almost 12 months Adams’ column was buried in The Australian’s marketing section before returning to the weekend issue.
Adams had another row with The Australian and accepted Age editor Graham Perkin’s invitation to join it with two columns a week after Perkin arranged for the column to be syndicated also to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Brisbane Courier Mail, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Launceston Examiner. He didn’t last long in The Advertiser or The Examiner and the Courier Mail and Sydney Morning Herald worried about what he wrote and censored some of it. But he stayed with The Age until the fierce battle over Fairfax control of it. This was described by the author and journalist Les Carlyon in Paper Chase: The Press Under Examination (Herald & Weekly Times) as the most important battle in Australian media history.
Carlyon’s description of Adams’ character and his part in that battle are pertinent. Under the will of David Syme, The Age’s original owner, control was to pass to the family’s third generation when his last son Oswald died. The family, management, staff and supporters were worried that the third generation would cash in their shares to get their hands on the money. Already, the Herald & Weekly Times, which Rupert Murdoch much desired but had not yet bought, and Sir Frank Packer (Kerry’s father) had shown interest in buying The Age. The board arranged a marriage with Fairfax under which The Age became a 53 per cent Fairfax subsidiary but the Syme family retained editorial control. Les Carlyon said in his book: ‘The marriage to Fairfax was consummated amid bizarre diversions. While the documents were being finalised on the fifth floor of The Age, an emissary from Rupert Murdoch was wandering around with a piece of paper which amounted to a counter offer. Sir Frank Packer of Consolidated Press sent a counter offer over the reporters’ room telex.’ Adams, perhaps Australia’s best-known columnist, film maker, advertising man and wit convened the Friends of The Age and arranged a public meeting for December 17, 1979.
Adams told the meeting his column had been ‘torn to shreds’ by Fairfax and eventually disappeared from The Sydney Morning Herald. He ended what was a typical Adams production — lively, witty, highly personal and a touch exaggerated — with the rhetorical: ‘God, we’ve already lost David Williamson and Graham Kennedy to Sydney. I’d hate us to lose the paper as well.’
In 1981 the Victorian Government set up the Norris inquiry by Sir John Norris QC into the ownership and control of newspapers in Victoria. It revealed that between 1923 and 1981 Australian capital city and national daily newspaper companies fell from 21 to three. Les Carlyon’s book described Adams, then in his early forties, as ‘something of a cult figure. To some, he is a hero in what they see as a world of journalistic sameness. To others, he is a deep pool of contradictions. He is a frantic worker: he used to write his Age columns as a sort of Sunday purgatory. For years he has worn black skivvies, which presumably save him the bother of shirts and ties; equally, the beard saves the bother of the razor. What no-one denies are Adams’ gifts. He is a rare person: someone who writes the way he speaks. In conversation, as in print, he is witty, inventive, fluent and gently mocking. His voice is modulated and his speech, like his writing, is a mixture of whimsy and the best, the freshest, of Australian idiom. He was never an ambulance-chasing cadet reporter. He is rarely in The Age building and doesn’t waste his time drinking with journalists.
‘His columns are usually free of conventional journalistic ploys and forms that can become boring. They are free-ranging in style, anything from dialogue to question and answer, plays, essays, ribaldry, send-ups, pieces from the heart and jabs into other people’s viscera. Adams strides eagerly into areas like religion, death and sexuality, which often seem to threaten more conventional columnists. And he takes as his agenda not necessarily the headlines of the week, which so many columnists do, but what interests him. For Adams loves ideas and the more outlandish the better. He loves to offend and he hates to bore. His writing is relaxed, witty, mordant and above all conversational. He writes with pathos about childhood and death, obviously subjects that attract and trouble him. He writes with bitterness, almost like a defrauded customer, about orthodox relig
ion. His satire can be savage, yet many of his victims seem grateful. There are many reasons why Adams has become a cult figure but one is obvious: he is a sparklingly good writer who refuses to be dull or to take himself too seriously.’
A key to the Friends of The Age members’ concern lay in Adams’ statement to the inquiry: ‘An organisation like ours is essentially a naïve one and an idealistic one. All that we could see was that the Fairfaxes might wish to relinquish their ownership of The Age.’ As it happened, the inquiry found that Victorian newspaper ownership was concentrated; so far there had been no noticeable side effects, partly because of the proprietors’ goodwill; but there was a potential danger if they acted without it. In any event, Fairfax steadily bought more and more of The Age; and in 1987 Murdoch succeeded in buying its only rival, the Herald & Weekly Times, reducing metropolitan and national newspaper companies in the Australian eastern states to two: News Ltd and Fairfax. Like many government inquiries, the Norris Inquiry achieved nothing except acres of words.
The only way to prevent increasing media concentration in Australia is by legislation. But bodies like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Foreign Investment Review Board listen far more to business lobbyists and merchant bankers intent on gaining huge takeover fees than to the idea that the public benefits from maintaining as much competition as possible.
Adams claims his nine Penguin joke books with Patrice Newell have sold more than a million copies since the first, The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, was launched in 1994. This would be a phenomenal, hardly-believable average of more than 100,000 copies per book, well over ten times average Australian book sales. They were a magnificent money-spinner for Adams, Patrice Newell and Penguin. Adams likes cracking jokes on his programs and in person but says the books were Penguin’s idea, not his. He had to find the jokes and rewrite thousands of them into a house style. He thinks they found almost every joke in history. He said in his National Library oral history: ‘It was an appalling experience and deeply depressing. But that’s what jokes are. Jokes are little acts of exorcism where people deal with things they dislike or fear, whether it’s sexual intercourse, impotence, nuns or politicians. So to fill a book which is a record of what people are laughing at — an oral history really — is crazy. Penguin panicked and took out some of the more lurid jokes, a wonderful one about the Queen which I really miss, and some of the more objectionable jokes about Aborigines which would not shock the Aborigines. Censorship in any form is dangerous.’