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that, simply by using nursery rhymes and stringing them together, they could make a feature film. It opened with a voiceover, Phillip’s then wife Rosemary, saying ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary’, and you saw a statue of the Virgin Mary. Then with ‘How does your garden grow?’ the camera zoomed out to reveal a cemetery. Every nursery rhyme told part of the story. Adams told me, ‘Bugger me, the film won the Grand Prix at an international film festival, a modest one, the Adelaide-Auckland Film Festival, but ­nevertheless a kosher film festival.’
    Jack and Jill was the first feature film to win the Australian Film Institute Best Film award. Years later, in his oral history for the National Library, Adams called Jack and Jill ‘an abysmal thing, greatly embarrassing to look at in retrospect but with a lot of innovations, both in the way it was put together and the narrative style of using nursery rhymes.’
    It was the first of fifteen feature films that Adams made or helped make in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, mostly as executive producer or producer. Amongst these films were The Naked Bunyip, Hearts and Minds, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (released in 1972, directed by Bruce Beresford and the most successful Australian film up to that time), Don’s Party (1976); The Getting of Wisdom (1978); Lonely Hearts as executive producer (1982); We of the Never Never as executive producer; Grendel Grendel Grendel as producer (1981); and Fighting Back as executive producer (1982).
    Many other people had tried in vain to revive the Australian film industry after its succession of booms and slumps since the 1906 Story of the Kelly Gang became the world’s first feature film. Adams saw a great opportunity when John Gorton became Liberal prime minister in 1968; Gorton was also the minister for the arts. Adams didn’t know Gorton, but his friend the quiz champion and then schoolteacher Barry Jones did, for the oddest reason. Jones had the first open-line radio program in Australia and also a low-rating program on Channel Seven called Encounter. He managed to have Gorton appear on both programs and it gave Gorton’s role as prime minister a degree of credibility. One thing led to another: Gorton smiled on Barry Jones as his lucky rabbit’s foot and Jones’ reward was to be invited to The Lodge. Gorton loved American westerns, but he was also worried about foreign ownership and selling the farm, and Jones and Adams saw this as their way in.
    So they pedalled John Gorton an argument that America was gobbling up Australia’s national identity, which indeed it was. Gorton bought it and also bought Jones’ and Adams’ idea that the government should forget financing opera houses or art galleries and instead help create an Australian film industry.
    Gorton agreed to send Jones and Adams off on a six-week world trip in December 1969 to study film industries, with the Liberal MP Peter Coleman accompanying to keep an eye on them.
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    It was Adams’ first overseas trip. He and Jones went to Tokyo then Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin and Prague and met Peter Coleman in Stockholm. Peter had refused to visit any communist country as he thought his editorials in the right-wing magazine Quadrant had made him personal enemies with communists, although (Adams said in the oral history) it was actually because Coleman thought he might catch communism like a virus.
    In Moscow they visited film schools accompanied by a Soviet-provided interpreter, Vladimir Schmidt, who spoke English with a US mid-western twang. He had learnt English from a mid-western woman who had developed an unrequited passion for Lenin in the 1920s; he said his ambition was to visit Minneapolis or Kansas City and ask, ‘Where’s the john, Mac?’ and not be detected as a foreigner. Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, who had challenged Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination