One of Phil’s great friends in motorsport and life was Bob Watson. Bob’s obituary presented at the private celebration of Phil’s life follows:

Philip’s grandfather A.W. Bernadou was a prominent member of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria in the 1920s and the first President of the Victorian Light Car Club, later to become the Light Car Club of Australia.
Philip inherited this aristocracy and had a certain air of nobility about him. Always well dressed and well spoken: he even carried this trait through to his cars which were always immaculate. On occasions when we were loaned a car for rally surveys, he would spend hours cleaning the vehicle before returning it. It once took him half an hour to clean a windscreen.
I first met Phil In the 1970s when he was rallying a Datsun 1600 with the late Phil Rainer. They were great friends, both members of the RACV Young Motorists organisation and they eventually combined their talents to organise the ground breaking Holden Dealers rallies held in the forests around Moe and Traralgon in Gippsland in the mid 1960s. These rallies were the first true closed road special stage events in Victoria with timing to the second.
Phil branched off to go track racing in Porsche Cup events in the early days of the Porsche Club. He bought the ex Edgar Herrmann London to Sydney marathon Porsche and the shelf full of trophies at Surrey Hills shows that he did very well.
My association and subsequent friendship with Philip became closer when I asked him to organisethe Challenge category in the 1995 Mobil 1 Round Australia Trial. He did a great job and working with him was a pleasure. Unfortunately his job did not start well. A local club official checking the first Challenge special stage out of Brisbane ran off the road and died in the crash, so we had a fatality before the event had even started.
Our association grew even closer when Philip was my deputy Clerk of Course for the Red Centre to Gold Coast Trial in 2008. We did many survey trips together and although things can be frustrating and do not always work out as planned, there was never a cross word. Well, not from Phil anyway!
We spent a lot of time driving in the outback looking for rally roads. When we were writing the road book he was always more inclined to be kind to competitors, suggesting caution signs on rough bits or hazards. I would say, bugger them, they are rally drivers, let them sort it out.
Outback surveys are always accompanied by adventures. We were in the gulf country heading for the Heartbreak Hotel at Cape Crawford when Phil attacked a creek crossing a tad too aggressively, resulting in three flat tyres at once. We only had two spares, so we weren’t going anywhere, and it was a remote road so the prospect of help was minimal. Stupidly, we did not even have any food or water. We were there for a few hours, then joy, along came two camper vans with fishermen and their wives. In no time the blokes repaired our flat tyres well enough to allow us to get to Borrooloola to buy some new ones while the lovely ladies made us a nice cup of tea.
Heartbreak Hotel is an experience in itself. The toilets are labelled Mangoes and No Mangoes. The accommodation is dongas, basically two beds and nothing else. On Friday night the pub is flooded with workers from a nearby pipeline project who were dropped off by a bus. Their objective was to drink as many cans of beer as possible before the bus picked them up again. It was a drinking frenzy.
Phil and I had a few beers and went to bed. At around 2am something cold and heavy landed on my head. I thought I was being attacked so I jumped out of bed, which woke Phil up. There was much commotion and dancing around until eventually we discovered a green tree frog had done a giant leap and landed on me.
We had many funny nights in country pubs during the surveys. At Wanaaring west of Bourke, the barman was a born showman. Funny hats, the whole show. We were there on Friday night when he gave his performance and he was hilarious, we could not stop laughing. You had to be there to really appreciate it. If you lived in Wanaaring you certainly needed to get a laugh from somewhere.
We called into a property named Doongmabulla north east of Longreach. The owner was a multi millionaire. He owned a vast cattle property and his children owned all of the surrounding properties. There was a bore near the house that delivered water at the rate of 40,000 gallons per hour non stop, so he had a great setup. The problem was, he had the worst teeth you could imagine: stumpy, yellow, rotten. His teeth made George Shepheard look like a model for Colgate. When we left after getting permission to use his farm roads, Phil and I got back in the car, turned to each other and said simultaneously, word for word, why the …. doesn’t he get his teeth fixed?
En route to Birdsville on another survey trip we stopped at Windorah to have a flat tyre repaired. An old codger took the wheel into the workshop, where he stripped the tyre off the rim, located ahd patched the puncture and refitted the tyre to the wheel. Then he called his daughter over to set the pressure. We thought that was odd until we learned the old bloke was totally blind due to years spent in desert dust storms. They make ’em tough in the bush.
I could go on, but suffice to say the time I spent with Phil has been a highlight of my life. The bonus was the many hours Jenny and I spent with Phil and Louise watching Bathurst or Grand Prix and having many Japanese meals together at Okami in Camberwell.
Some things in life can never be replaced and my precious friendship with Philip Bernadou is one. Thanks for the ride and companionship, mate.
Bob Watson