by Philip Luker
***
‘On Yarralumla’ (Uncensored Adams): ‘The Bulletin has, as you know, a proud tradition of anti-monarchism. There was a time when the Bully’s Republican rhetoric was so savage that Queen Victoria must have considered sending a gunboat to blast editor Archibald out of his quayside pub. So I cannot understand why my gentle gibes at the Windsors have provoked such an apoplectic mail. I am, after all, perfectly willing to let our Royals linger on as a Tussaud-like tourist attraction. For no matter what you say, Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh are remarkably lifelike, albeit in a rather waxen way. So let the Queen be ‘heads’ to our democratic tails. Let ageing knights wear their decorations on proud bosoms, just as Twinings flash their ‘Royal Appointment’ crest on their tea chests.
‘The Royal Family deserves the same consideration as other beleaguered species, such as the Crest-Fallen Kingaroy Cockatoo and the Splay-Toed Aardvark. Royal breeding stock is at an all-time low and, of course, haemophilia could break out at any moment. You may remember my recent complaint that people of leftish political persuasions rarely receive a gilt-edged invitation to Yarralumla. Well, to my astonishment, one of the crisp, elegantly-embossed cards arrived. Gilt-edged, it suggested that if I presented myself and the child bride at the front door, in dinner jacket and long dress respectively, we’d be given some nosh. Anxious to bury the hatchet, to negotiate a truce, to build a little bridge of understanding, I decided to accept — on condition that I was given special dispensation from the dinner jacket and permitted to front up in my skivvy. This, the aide-de-camp suggested, would be fine.
‘Once inside, while I did a quick calculation on the value of the McCubbins and Nolans, the wives piled their pelts on a table in the hall and the husbands were given their marching orders. That is, we each received a little card showing Who Sat Where and Whose Wife we’d be taking into dinner. I cracked it for the beaut Mrs Brissendon, who’s wedded to old RF, the chairman of the Literature Board. Later I learned that a Mr Baillieu had won my missus in the raffle. But first, we formed ourselves into two-by-twos so we could be Announced, whereupon I found myself grinning sheepishly at His and Her Excellencies, the very charming Cowans. Sir Zelman, you might have noticed, closely resembles the late Sir Charles Chaplin. The same piano-key smile below the same scrunched-up eyes.
‘Having run the Vice-Regal gauntlet, we had a glass of sherry by the fire. Then we promenaded into the dining room, an intimate little chamber for 40 guests and, it seemed, almost as many servants. I found myself between the resplendent wife of a Rear Admiral (a beaut lady with a naughty sense of humour) and an absolutely enormous bloke who turned out to be the token trade unionist.
‘“I could have danced all night,” Mrs A sang in the back of the cab on our way home, looking curiously dishevelled. She’d also collected a bag full of business cards, two American Expresses and one Diners, not to mention two medals, an Order of Australia and a Royal Darby saucer. As for me, I paid dearly for a good feed — I have sacrificed my last shred of credibility with the left.’
***
Gough Whitlam said in the introduction to Uncensored Adams: ‘It is a fortunate coincidence that Australia’s leading comic writer is also her most perceptive social critic. In no-one else do we find that irrepressible and conquering blend of wit and seriousness that mark Phillip Adams’ writings: a worried amusement at the eccentricities of our society, allied to an unerring instinct for the absurd and a Nabokovian fondness for verbal ingenuity.’
***
In The Inflamable Adams (1983, reproduced with permission by Penguin Group Australia), Adams wrote: ‘As an ardent monarchist, my heart goes out to Her Royal Maj. I think it’s awful the way we’ve been allowed to invade her privacy, to read the innermost details of her private life. Why can’t the poor Queen be left in peace to have a squalid love affair, if that’s what she wants? And why not? After all, it’s a palace tradition. Ever since that princess had it off with a frog, your royals have been drawn to the virility of the lower orders. In Henry V111, Shakespeare makes mention of the king’s promiscuity with ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’ while a few coronations later we had Charles 11 lusting after Nell Gwyn. There was Louis X1V and Madame Pompadour, Edward V11 and Lilly Langtree, Hamlet and Ophelia, the Prince of Wales and Mrs Fitzherbert — even Prince Charming and Cinderella. You’ll recall the nursery rhyme about the king in his counting house counting out his money while the poor queen was in the parlour, consoling herself with bread and honey.
‘No-one complains when Prince Andrew, known far and wide as Randy Andy, goes slumming in the least salubrious of night spots. No-one objected when Prince Charles went out on the tiles. Even Princess Margaret was allowed to marry a member of the paparazzi, Tony ‘Flash Bulb’ Snowdon. If anyone deserves the solace of romance, it’s Elizabeth 11. Yet the only declaration of love she’s had in the past 20 years was that “I did but see her passing by” line from an old age pensioner who happened to be prime minister of Australia.’
***
Former High Court Judge Michael Kirby said in a Foreword to The Inflammable Adams: ‘Temperence, restraint and decorum are not the strong points of our author. Indeed, I doubt that these sterling but boring qualities are to be found in these pages at all. The infuriating thing is that Adams offers the most telling commentary on our country, our world and our times, almost without our noticing it. So complete is Adams’ command of the language that he can instruct us with humour, apparently irrelevant facts and an assortment of ideas. And the whole powerful mixture is utterly painless as it does its devilish work.’
***
‘Two-Up’ was the story of a kangaroo joey which chose Adams as its new mother in Adam’s Ark (Viking, 2004, reproduced with permission by Penguin Group Australia). Adams wrote: ‘At Elmswood, most animals make a lot of noise, which is why we’re woken around dawn by the crow of roosters, the braying of donkeys, the barking of dogs, the whinnying of horses and the bellowing of cattle. Almost every animal, wild or domestic, has its characteristic sound, if not a variety of them. Except for the kangaroo. As the world knows from Skippy, kangaroos are immensely talented animals that can not only box but can also defeat evildoers and play the piano. But they have no identifying cry, no mating call, no vocal signal of danger or distress. All you hear from kangaroos, and you have to be very close, is that little Skippy-style chirrup. Even when kangaroos are being culled, they’re silent.
‘Finding that some paddock gates had been left open by uninvited shooters, I went off on the four-wheel bike to check others and found a female kangaroo dying from a rifle bullet. She made no noise at all but her eyes were huge and reproachful. I hurried back to the homestead, returned with a rifle and gave the poor animal a coup de grâce. At which point I heard a noise, the angry chirrup of a joey. It slowly approached and, as I stepped back a few yards, wriggled into its dead mother’s pouch.
‘Once again I went back to the homestead and this time returned with an old black skivvy. I knotted the arms and closed the neck with some bailing wire and then eased the joey from the pouch. The chirruping became much louder, yet it didn’t put up much of a fight when I popped it into the skivvy. Back at the homestead I dangled the substitute pouch from a doorknob in the laundry. Patrice rang a local vet, who said yes, he had some suitable powdered milk and an appropriate teat that we could stick on an empty Coke bottle, so I made a mercy dash into Scone. We mixed up the milk, popped on the teat and to my astonishment, the joey took the teat instantly, hungrily, and lay curled up in my lap while it drank a good half-bottle. And that was it. Joey decided I was Mum. And from that moment we were inseparable. Everywhere I walked, it would hop behind me. And if I crouched and unbuttoned my shirt, it would stick its head and front paws inside and do a complete roll until it was lying quite happily against my bare chest, its hind legs sticking out near my collar. When I went to the bathroom, it hopped in, too. If I had a shower, it would hop into the shower. Extraordinarily, it would also jump into the swimming
pool with me.
‘An examination of its ambiguous genitalia hinted that it was a female but, to be on the safe side, we gave it an ambidextrous name: Two-Up. Two-Up and I began a whole series of adventures. At night, she would roll happily into the skivvy and I’d dangle it from the door. While still devoted to her rubber nipple, Two-Up was starting to pick at grass and grow very quickly. She became too heavy for skivvies and increasingly curious about the world around her. Sometimes she’d disappear for ten minutes or an hour. Just when I was getting worried, I would see her hopping back from an inspection of the chicken coops or the hay shed. Two-Up was entirely feminine. She had lustrous eyes, long eyelashes and delicate hands that were almost human in their dexterity. She remained entirely friendly and utterly charming.
‘Nonetheless she went AWOL more and more. Soon she was disappearing for a day or a night or a couple of days. Nature was calling; Two-Up was responding to the pangs of puberty. So, sadly, I accepted the inevitable. Two-Up would leave home. And she did.’
***
In ‘Dogs Are Weird’ in Adam’s Ark, Adams showed his astute understanding of animals of all breeds, particularly dogs: ‘The dog is busy. Very, very busy. It is a particularly busy little dog. It has, in rapid succession, gone yelping after a rabbit, had a pee in the garden and followed its nose over a zigzag course across the lawn, as if propelled by its energetic sniffing. It has returned to have a long scratch, sniffed the battered boots lined up against the wall, snapped at a number of blowies orbiting its muzzle and managed to swallow one. It has gnawed at one of the osso buco bones from its considerable collection, run and barked at a passing cattle truck and growled at a couple of brown chooks free-ranging their way through a garden bed. It has run to the kitchen door wagging its tail in the hope of conjuring a pat, a snack, and a walk. It has chased a blue-tongue lizard off the path. It has gnawed the ear of an entirely unbusy, drowsing border collie, desisting when it provoked an angry growl. And it has rolled, cringing, on to its back at my approach, its body language saying something along the lines of “Have mercy upon me, oh mighty one.”
‘Contrasting with its frenetic behaviour are long periods when it simply switches itself off. It stops scurrying, burrowing, scratching, sniffing, chasing, barking, everything, and it sits, sphinx-like. Or sleeps. Which reminds you that dogs live in an eternal now, their consciousness shining in front of their muzzles like a hand-held torch. They have an area of brilliant illumination, and everything else is obscured, unseen, unconsidered. Dogs aren’t into abstract ideas or intellectualising and, consequently, are safe from boredom. And from time itself. Our dogs welcome us back as rapturously after an hour away as they do if we’ve been gone a month. Instantly alert, instantly gratified, instantly blank of mind, that’s a dog.
‘A long line of dogs have lived and died at Elmswood. Willy, the greatest boot-rooter of all time, died in a kamikaze attack on a passing truck. Willy, silly Willy. Then there was Annie, half Willy’s weight, delicate and deft, but still unmistakably a Jack Russell. No, not a Jill Russell, imbued with the feminine but a little butch bitch who, for all her ladylike appearance, liked to eat cow poo when she wasn’t rolling in it. Annie, who liked to chase rabbits down burrows risking permanent entombment in the middle of a honeycombed hillside, only to emerge as dusty as a four-wheel drive, often with a gob full of fur. Often she’d appear at the door muddier than a gumboot following an altercation with a ram in the shearing yards. Annie recalled the poem about the little girl who had a little curl in the middle of her forehead. When Annie was good, which was infrequent, she was excruciatingly good, mincingly good, Lady Fauntleroy good. But when she was bad, she was the Hound of the Baskervilles, a canine crim who you couldn’t train to do anything, not even respond obediently to such reasonable requests as, “Come here, you rotten little bastard, or I’ll drop-kick you halfway across the bloody paddock.”
‘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.’