Dear Reader, you may recall that recently I wrote a piece about Chris’ short-lived ‘fame’.  Chris was the chap who asked me to write an article about closing the Captain Cook Highway between Port Douglas and Palm Cove to cyclists. I wrote a piece about that, and haven’t heard from or seen Chris since.

Coincidentally, on the same weekend as that article was published, Phillip Adams – a long-term journo from New South Wales and who has been writing Opinion Pieces in The Weekend Australian for as long as I remember – wrote a piece titled “Celebrity Triumphs”. It’s a brilliant piece in which Adams seeks to remind the reader that real ‘fame’ is much more – and longer-lasting – than ‘celebrity’.  So it gave me food for thought; what does differentiate the two? What ‘brushes with fame’ have I had that have had positive – or negative – impacts on me?

Years ago, probably twenty or more, I was sitting in the bar of a 3.5 Star hotel on South Terrace, Adelaide, enjoying a quiet drink after friends had left. I saw, out of the corner of my left eye, a tall, long-haired chap sit down next to me and order a drink. I looked around and saw that it was the lead singer from the (NZ) rock band Dragon. I apologised for interrupting before engaging him in conversation, and found Marc Hunter to be an intelligent, well-spoken, moderate human being with opinions on everything from rock music, Australian and New Zealand politics, and a plethora of other subjects. Given my past in the SA Police, and the general belief that Dragon was an importer of serious amounts of drugs into Australia from New Zealand, I was disabused of my belief that this guy was a drug-addled rockstar, and instead was a very fine and gifted human. I was thus devastated some years later when Marc had a battle with throat cancer which led to his untimely and early death.

Sometime, a few years later, I was invited into the Geelong rooms at Adelaide’s AAMI Stadium; having been a Geelong fan since I was ten years old, this was my chance to see some of my heroes up close. Malcolm Blight had taken key players into a private room, one by one, to ‘gee them up’ before the game. I remember leaning against a wall when the great, the mercurial Gary Ablett (snr – though he wasn’t known as that then) walked out of that room, thumping his shoulders with the opposite fist, and some of his perspiration struck my face. I’d never been prouder of the exchange of someone else’s bodily DNA since I was kissed by my Grade 3 Teacher! Sadly, Gary’s fall from grace was even quicker than his speed on the football field, and he disappeared from the limelight after he had been connected in some distant way with the death of a young woman in an hotel room in Melbourne.

But they were two ‘famous’ people – famous for what they achieved, not for how they looked, how they dressed, what they had to say. Marc Hunter let his songs do the talking and was a member of a high-successful rock band; Gary Ablett let his football ability do the talking, and, to this day, is mentioned in hushed tones anywhere AFL is played.

What of ‘celebrity’? The Kardashians – famous for being famous. I saw an article recently where an American woman had undergone plastic surgery to have her posterior remodelled look like one of the females of that family. Now, the Kardashians, as it happens, first came to attention during the tribulations, and subsequent trial, of OJ Simpson who was charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her (probable) lover.

They fortunately disappeared thereafter until famously their rather large butts started to fill TV screens and the covers of second-rate magazines.

There’s a bloke on Australian TV who’s become famous as a ‘cravat wearing celebrity chef’ or at least of being a food judge. I can’t even recall his name, so little impact has he had on my life directly as I don’t generally watch trash commercial TV. He’s become famous for being famous; nothing to add to the good or bad in the world, no lasting impact apart from a wardrobe full of used cravats when he passes.

Phillip Adams asserted that Charles Manson – read ‘Helter Skelter’ if you’re too young to remember – is more famous than the people he murdered, including Director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. That, despite the fact that Manson was – and still is – clearly mad, and will never be set free from prison, he’s famous for the murders of nine people! That ISIS/ISIL/Daesh terrorists and bombers are more famous than the people they wilfully, and willingly, murder. It was Maggie Thatcher – often termed The Iron Lady during her Prime Ministership of Great Britain, that used the term “deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity”.

So, what really marks the difference between Fame and Celebrity? Well, a decent history of goodness, or at least of protagonising so that the populace sit up, take notice and question the  normal standards; people – think Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, and more recently Christopher Hitchens and Robert Hughes - who invented, wrote and hypothesised about health, intelligence and the truth, and whose mark on mankind will last the generations. Not a celebrity chef or a chick with a big-ass.

Let me know who your ‘famous’ people are, and why they’re more than a celebrity.