Phillip Adams, 84, ends his 33-year residency as host of the ABC’s beloved Late Night Live program on Radio National next week. I spoke to him on Thursday.
Fitz: Before we get to your completion of this part of your journey, Phillip, let’s look at so many other peripatetic journeys you’ve been on in your life that gave you the wide reference points for Late Night Live to be so successful.
PA: Go on ...
Fitz: Born the son of a chaplain, you became one of Australia’s most famous atheists.
Philip Adams: “I can talk to anyone, anywhere, on any subject.”Credit: ABC
PA: Yes. I had that in common with Bob Hawke. When I was very young, my father was away in New Guinea as a chaplain to the army during the Second World War, and I came to the conclusion that God and I didn’t get on very well. We don’t believe in each other. I was five when I became convinced there is no God.
Fitz: Another journey from one end of the spectrum to the other is being born as poor as a church mouse – with your mum gathering some of the loose change from the Sunday offering plate to buy a few groceries – to now doing very well indeed?
PA: Oh, absolutely. But most of the wealth that I have came out of running my advertising agency. When I was responsible for campaigns like “Life be in it” and “Slip, Slop Slap”. I started off with a couple of partners in one room in Melbourne. And we finished having offices all over Australia, all over the region, and then finally, all over the world before we sold it off to some mad Americans, and we all made a big quid out of it.
Fitz: Early on, though, that impoverished background led you to being a godless communist at the age of 16?
Adams with wife Patrice Newell and daughter Aurora in 2010.
PA: I had been radicalised by the local public library. When the librarian said, “You’ve read all the Biggles and Just William books, here, read this one by John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath – about extreme poverty in the Depression”. And a year later, I was literally tugging on the hem of a communist speaker at Yarra Bank, asking, “Where do I sign up?” And a year later, Peter, I had an ASIO file, and I’m very proud of the fact that I was the youngest-ever Australian to have his own ASIO file.
Fitz: What on earth had you done to merit the honour beyond being a Godless nark going to red-devil commie meetings?
PA: Nothing more than being a member of the Communist Party at the height of the Cold War!
Fitz: Under freedom-of-information laws, or whatever, were you able to get that ASIO file?
PA: They denied having one for decades. But when I was getting a gong at Yarralumla many years ago, I found myself in the same queue as a Mr Spry, who was a heavy hitter at ASIO, and I said, “Isn’t this a wonderful country? A few years ago, you had a file on me, and now here we are, getting a gong together.” He conceded I had one, and I finally got a heavily redacted copy of it from the National Archives. I was pleased to see that you weren’t in it, Peter. You bloody well should be!
Fitz: We radical bomb-throwers must stick together … So what made you then, at 19, look at the Communist Party and go, “This is not me.” What happened?
Gough Whitlam, right, with, Jim Cairns in 1975. “Gough always referred to me as ‘Cairns’ campaign manager’“.
PA: Well, a lot of things happened. The Khrushchev denunciation of Stalin happened. We’d had the Hungarian horror stretch – with Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest in 1956 – and communism revealed itself to be a monumental and tragic failure. And we knew that........