Over the last 33 years, Phillip Adams has spoken to everyone. So what's it like to interview him? (2024)

A year before Phillip Adams interviewed me about my first novel, I interviewed him.

It was late September 2000, the waning days of the Sydney Olympics. I was writing for The Wall Street Journal, and I'd come to his home in Paddington to ask the famous sports phobe to reflect on what the success of the games might be doing to the Australian psyche.

We met in his study, watched over by a marble sculpture of Bucephalus and a writhing torso of Hercules. Despite the Greek decor, he had kept an Olympian distance from games fervour, making RN's Late Night Live the rare program safe from minute dissections of points, pikes, pins, or planches.

He admitted that he was intrigued by the un-Australian sense of self-congratulation wafting over the populace. We'd shocked ourselves, it seemed, by getting everything so right. "Australia rhymes with failure," he observed, in a typical Adams flourish, coupling erudition with an ad-man's ear for a slogan.

He was the perfect interview subject for that article, which aimed to explain to Americans the very different national mythology that shaped our Australian character: defeat at Gallipoli, not victory at Yorktown; convicts and bushrangers rather than Puritan goody-goodies.

Phillip pointed out that even our national song, Waltzing Matilda, eulogised despair: "He's not a jolly swagman. He's a depressed bloke who drowns himself rather than go to jail for stealing a sheep."

I am not sure if I let my journalistic detachment slip at that meeting to confide that I had been a long-time admirer. Phillip Adams' column in The Australian had been required reading in my childhood home in Sydney.

My parents would read it aloud or pass it hand to hand. In many ways, they were like Phillip — bright, curious, engaged people without much formal education, autodidacts who had richly furnished their own minds like bowerbirds, lefties who were passionate about many issues, but always up for a laugh.

I recall how chuffed they were when Phillip replied to a fan letter my dad had written him. I can't recall what it said, but I remember the friendly, hand-written salutation: Cheers, Phil.

(In his book, Bedtime Stories, he disclosed that he always answered letters — even anonymous ones, if they'd absent-mindedly put a return address on the envelope — and that he appreciated a well-expressed death threat.)

The interview in his study was the kind of discussion that Anthony Blanche extols in Evelyn Waugh's novel, Brideshead Revisited: "Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them."

We might have started with the Olympic flame.

"We should leave it burning for large-scale barbecues," he opined, "so that huge, genetically modified shrimp can be thrown upon it."

But we ended up on his biodynamic farm in the Hunter Valley and his melancholy over the recent loss of his favourite bull.

"My wife put him on the truck for the sale yard," he confided sadly. I remember wondering how the marriage could possibly have survived such a thing.

And then, just a year later, the tables were turned and I was being interviewed by him about my first novel, Year of Wonders.

I re-listened to that interview before I sat down to write this, and what strikes me is how relaxed I am. It's not my public voice, that slightly over-bright, trying-slightly-too-hard voice that I hear sometimes with a cringe. It's just me, talking to a friend.

That, and other conversations with Phillip on Late Night Live, were real conversations, with flexible parameters and unpredictable twists and turns. It was always so for me and also for my late husband Tony Horwitz, whenever we were fortunate enough to be on Phillip's show.

There are a dozen ways to do an interview. It can be an ambush, a gotcha. A harangue or a session of unctuous flackery. But most often, it's a predictable exchange where an obvious question elicits a well-practised answer.

Being interviewed by Phillip Adams was not like that at all.

His own boundless curiosity could never be contained by the putative subject at hand. Wherever you started, you'd end up on the equivalent of that sale yard truck, talking about something with a deep emotional resonance, something that you'd never expected to be delving into.

I realise now, at this distance of almost a quarter century, that interviewing Phillip and being interviewed by Phillip were the same experience. They were true conversations.

Balls and plates, up and over, glittering in the footlights.

Phillip Adams' final Late Night Live episode, in which he'll be interviewed by Laura Tingle, will be on June 27, 2024. Listen or catch up on the ABC Listen app.

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