by Philip Luker
The highlights of Adams’ European art collection are: 20 first edition Goya etchings from the Los Caprichos series; a group of marble statues from between the 17th and 19th Centuries (particularly the portrait bust of a nobleman that combines the artisan’s skill to mimic classical Roman portrait busts); a wooden-framed piano from England between 1800 and 1809; a 1634 oil portrait of Henry Daleebret, King of Navarre, Spain; and a 19th Century marble horse head that is a direct copy of the Horse of Selene, part of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.
Adams’ Near and Middle Eastern art collection dates from the Middle Ages to the present day. The item highlighted by Consulting Arts is a colossal figure of the seated Buddha made of painted wood and inlay in Burma between 1850 and 1949.
The pre-Columbian collection comes originally from North and South America between the onset of civilisation and the mid-16th Century. It is dominated by objects made from ceramic (the preferred material due to its abundance, malleability and durability) such as vessels and figures from Mexico, including fine small figures from Colima, Nayarit and Vera Cruz. The highlights are a Colima standing duck; a painted ceramic plate with legs shaped like open-mouthed dragons, from Costa Rica between 950 and 1150; a painted ceramic figure of a kneeling woman wearing a short skirt, decorated cap and ear discs and holding a small child on her lap, from Mexico between 100 BCE and 250CE; and a ceramic standing figure of a nobleman Mexican ball player made between 350 and 950.
Adams’ 46 prehistoric artifacts from around the world before civilisation include stone and animal bone tools produced in Africa or Europe from the Neolithic period to the start of agrarian culture in mainland Europe, especially a European stone axe head dated about 240,000 years BP (Before Present); a stone triangular United Kingdom hand axe or knife from 250,000 BP; and a stone Egyptian axe head from 240,000 BP.
The Tribal Art collection highlights, according to Consulting Arts, are: a selection of 20th Century musical instruments ranging from a leather and bamboo drum from Indonesia to an African xylophone; a Nigerian wooden throne carved with figures of men, women and leopards; and an African xylophone made of wood, rope and gourd.
One oddball item in Adams’ collection is a postcard written by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) to the Australian cooking author Edna Walling, of Mooroolbark in Melbourne, on which Shaw says in handwriting: ‘Don’t ask me to read anything. I have more writing on my shelves than I can hope to get through in the few days (perhaps hours) left to me.’ He died not days or hours but three years later and his sentiments are similar to Adams’ when he is sent manuscripts that the authors ask him to read and criticise.
Adams bought items that particularly appealed to him, mostly years ago. He said in the oral history that the National Library recorded in 1994 the collection was ‘a metaphor for loneliness, for needing, something quiet I could do at home.’ Now, his unique and valuable collection seems to have faded into the background of his life, although it gives him many memories as he sees the artifacts all around him at his Sydney office and in secure places elsewhere. Asked by the National Library whether he had any plans for it, he said he tried to give it to the National Gallery ‘but I had a very strange run-in with the then director. It will finish up being disbanded and probably handed out to a dozen different galleries.’ The collection is now so large that if Uriah Heap came to his door with a priceless item going cheap, he would probably bid him goodbye.
Chapter Twenty-Two:
What Drives Phillip Adams
Phillip Adams has left his mark on many people. He has his own touch. His imperative is to do things continuously. He responds to enthusiastic people and he is driven by ideas, and by his justifiable ego, although he denies he has an ego, which shows he doesn’t fully understand himself. He also does not accept criticism, and that is a fault. He cares a great deal about society and he has a genuine love of people, although he is prone to fall out with some of them. The Australians who scare him are those who never have a moment of intellectual engagement and who do nothing much with their time — most of them.
Adams sincerely wants to improve people’s lives, either personally or through his column and program. He says he is driven by an awareness of mortality, which he has had since he was very young. It gives him a great sense of urgency to do all he can in his remaining years: ‘You want to do all you possibly can in the miserable time you’re allotted.’ Using Adams’ figures, we have 175,000 hours to do anything in our lives, or 4,375 forty-hour weeks. In the total lifetime of humans on this planet, the life of Adams or anyone else is like a bird flying across a room, and Adams is aware of this more than most people.
He often talks about his unpleasant childhood — perhaps too often, as it is now so long ago. And he does admit that many other people had a much more unpleasant childhood than he did. As he says, people don’t choose their childhood or their DNA. It chooses you. When he says he is still working very long days, he doesn’t by any means have to do so; he chooses to, and many of the things he does are not work at all. I phoned him at his Paddington pad one weeknight at 7.30 p.m. When he answered, he’d obviously been asleep, and having catnaps is one way he makes up for being an insomniac.
Adams’ days are largely unplanned except for the imperative of fronting his microphone at 10.05 p.m. four nights a week, fronting the few remaining organisations he gives his time to and meetings and conferences he agrees to chair. He’s just as scared of falling off the media landscape as falling off the planet. He says he’s amazed how many people waste so much time in their lives. He doesn’t seem to understand that most people just live day to day or even hour to hour. It’s a pity they do, but that’s people. Adams claimed to me, ‘I’m amazed how little I’ve done,’ but this is in reality a scene of a play — the humble front he puts to people. He has achieved many, many times more than most people and more than most pillars of society, business or industry achieve. Some of his weeks are much busier than almost any other 71-year-old could handle.
‘You need stamina to do it,’ he told me. ‘It’s not a moral venture; it’s predetermined by your genes. These days I’m not chairing seven organisations like I used to. I’m still in half a dozen organisations but I used to be in twenty. That was a sort of madness.’ He used to endure hundreds of boring meetings but hardly ever goes to meetings now. He avoids the company of bigots, racists and bores — often the same people. He has no real complaints about life, except sometimes about his ageing body.
Adams would be devastated if he lost Late Night Live or his Weekend Australian Magazine column. The program standard is as good as ever, partly because, in spite of his ageing voice, he is as good as ever at presenting it and also because its producers put a lot of effort into preparing the background material and arranging interviews around the world. The column is sometimes as good as it was years ago, often not. Adams seems to think he can just bash it out at weekends year after year at his farm — he says it takes him hardly any time at all — and still maintain the quality. To maintain an even quality it needs more research and thought, more new topics and fewer revived ones.
Adams overstates most things, which works well when he exaggerates the importance of a person he’s interviewing. But although his contribution to society has been huge, it has a dubious effect on politicians. They might listen to some of his broadcasts and read some of his columns, but politicians usually have strong opinions about what should be done, so they do what they, rather than he, believe. Adams’ views would be more likely to change the thoughts of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, uninfluential people who read or listen to him every week.
It is paradoxical that he believes in his own importance but (his friends say) he does not take himself too seriously. His self-deprecation on-air wins him many listeners. It is also paradoxical that he helps many people, both in what he says and also personally. Some of his friends worry about his health and lack of exercise, just walking to and from his car. Like his friends, I tell him he should look after
himself better. He doesn’t take any notice.
Adams is passionate about people but a self-proclaimed anti-social who likes to say he hasn’t been to a dinner party for years. But if he is in a group of people, he likes to be the centre of attention, which he usually is. He has ‘presence’. There is no-one like him, certainly in Australia and perhaps in the world. He gets his own way, as do most influential or powerful people. And if he doesn’t get his own way with someone, he is likely to cross them off his list. In the tussle with the ABC over it wanting him to identify himself with every broadcast, he won. On the other hand, he does not, in print or on-air, criticise Rupert Murdoch, who pays him for his Weekend Australian Magazine column, although when the magazine editor reduced its size, he protested loudly and got others to do so, but in the end put up with less space than he had previously, but a more prominent position. He certainly enjoys his work and the attention he gets when, for example, chairing functions. He has an attractive voice both in person and on-air. Few people have a brain like his. The other side of the coin is that he is abrupt when he doesn’t want to continue a conversation and he sometimes agrees or offers to arrange things and never gets around to it.
He can match word for word the people he interviews, including professors from around the world. When he has a Late Night Live conversation with an enthusiastic person he knows and likes about a subject he also likes, it is great radio. When he reads what his producers have given him and the person on the other end of the phone in Quito or Addis Ababa is not good at being interviewed, the result is naturally less gripping. But he never sounds bored, and he sounds as if he is talking just to you. He admits he is sometimes already exhausted when he arrives at the ABC studios, but when he faces the microphone, his adrenalin takes over and he’s off and away with another program, spoken in correct but colloquial English, showing warmth to his guests and his listeners, enjoying his own whimsy and jokes but sometimes, as he grows older, rambling a bit too much.
Adams is always on the go and thinking of the next thing to do. Now that he has passed 70, this puts a strain on his body, which he fears is falling apart. He should not keep saying on-air that he’s old; it’s obvious anyway, and saying so doesn’t impress anyone. None of us can help getting old. He enjoys having two places to live, Paddington and Elmswood; if he didn’t have Patrice Newell to care for and feed him over his long weekends at Elmswood, his health would suffer, and he admits he and she would tear each other apart if they lived together all the time. Some of his friends believe he has never quite forgiven himself for leaving Rosemary, although he would say it was what he had to do after he met Patrice and was charmed by her when both their marriages were already on the rocks.
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 (A
M) 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.