’I have never, ever been censored in The Australian’: Phillip Adams on his years as a columnist

I remain free to write whatever I like. The question – perhaps you could call it a mystery – remains: Why do they keep me on? Perhaps it’s just that they haven’t noticed I’m still here.

‘You may have noticed, I’ve rarely agreed with the paper’s evolving editorial policy. Yet I remain free to write whatever I like.’

As you may have noticed, The Australian is celebrating its 60th birthday and, given the way my journalistic life is intertwined with the now venerable masthead, it seems timely to recall how Rupert Murdoch and I became, and currently remain, unlikely bedfellows.

My first involvement with the media was as a paperboy in Melbourne, jumping on and off moving trams – an activity that would in these enlightened times be seen as akin to sending children down coal mines or up chimneys. Having narrowly survived this experience, and joined the Communist Party at 16, my first writing job was as the film critic of The Guardian. Not the posh pommy newspaper that originated in Manchester, but the Communist rag of the same name. At the same time I inveigled my way into the conservative pages of The Bulletin, writing theatre reviews – until I asked for an increase in my miserable salary and the then editor, some obscure figure named Donald Horne, sacked me.

But this is a lucky country. And in 1964 a young bloke named Rupert Murdoch – who’d once boasted of having a bust of Lenin in his Oxford digs – started The Australian. He was still quite a leftie in those day.

At the time Rupert owned zero telly stations, and the TV critic was Kit Denton (the father of Andrew Denton), who wrote under the pseudonym of Janus, the two-faced Roman god. For reasons I don’t recall Kit resigned and Bruce Petty, the genius cartoonist, persuaded editor Adrian Deamer to take me on. I was only in my mid-twenties at the time. It was a role I kept on and off for years.

As I once observed to another legendary editor, Graham Perkin, “newspapers are becoming views-papers”, and with that in mind Deamer promoted me to the rank of an Oz columnist, with thousands of words to file twice a week, on any topic I chose. I shared a page with Max “Ern Malley” Harris. Until Rupert sacked me.

In his autobiography John Menadue, then Rupert’s second-in-command, said I was the first person Rupert had personally sacked. He’d had a nasty experience in the UK with a famous satirist (David Frost, as I recall) and asked Deamer if the Oz had one. A satirist. It did. It had me. So I was the blood sacrifice.

But while I was skulking and sulking in the radical Nation Review, letters of protest from readers came pouring in. So the Oz had to rehire me, at twice the salary.

To cut a long story, apart from a stint with Fairfax I’ve been here ever since. And as you may have noticed, I’ve rarely agreed with the paper’s evolving editorial policy. Yet I remain free to write whatever I like. Let the record show I’ve never, ever been censored in The Australian, or in this magazine. (Surprisingly, the only masthead of the baker’s dozen I’ve written for that did censor my copy was The Sydney Morning Herald.)

The question – perhaps you could call it a mystery – remains: Why do they keep me on? Out of pity? Out of solidarity with another golden oldie? Or perhaps it’s just that they haven’t noticed I’m still here. Rear gunner Phillip Adams, in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

So happy birthday. And shhhh.