Aussie slang
“You mustn’t judge Australia by the Australians” (Dame Edna Everage)
This scholarly two-volume work contains a generous entry under the word “chunder”, a word unknown in my youth outside the Geelong and Ballarat Grammar Schools, until I relentlessly promulgated it in the comic strip of Barry McKenzie in Private Eye. There the eponymous hero regularly and compulsively regurgitated. This expressive, even onomatopoeic, term took off in trendy London circles and is now in universal, colloquial use.
Of course, this work has not confined itself to the vernacular, but there is an arresting definition on every page. I am delighted, for example, to see that the “mallee root” merits a learned entry. Mallee roots were familiar objects in my Melbourne childhood, regularly delivered by our local woodman. They were the heavy, nodular roots of various eucalypts, deracinated from the red soil of the Mallee district in Victoria which subsequently became a dustbowl.
For the middle classes, they were a popular, slow-burning fuel, and I often watched my father heave one onto the grate. I am reminded of an anecdote once related by the comedian Dick Bentley. During the London Blitz there was a small subterranean bar near Piccadilly Circus. One evening during a heavy air raid, which jangled the crème de menthe and Kummel bottles behind the bar, an expatriate Australian ballet dancer (Robert Helpmann?), always lightly rouged, staggered down the stairs covered with dust. “Did you hear that?” he cried. “It blew a chip off me mallee-root pendant!” A brave jest which only a Melbourne or Adelaide person would really appreciate.
The editors of the new Australian National Dictionary have magnificently recorded what must surely be the richest vernacular in the history of human utterance, and if you don’t believe me you can stick your head up a wombat’s freckle.
Taken from Up a wombat’s freckle, Times Literary Supplement, 23 June 2017 (BH's review of the 2nd edition of THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL DICTIONARY, Australian words and their origins, Oxford, two volumes, 1,600pp.)
Dadaist
Barry Humphries was such a celebrity that it’s hard to imagine him as the underground figure that haunted the precincts of the University of Melbourne in the early 1950s.
I first saw him there in the library, hard at his books like everyone else — except that his back and that of his chair rested on the floor, with his long legs up in the air. He resembled a corduroyed stick insect, but such was his imperturbability it seemed his posture was the normal one and that of the rest of us eccentric.
Humphries was already more subversive than the humourless ideologues of the Labour Club, his heroes not Marx or Lenin but the Dadaists of Zurich and Paris, Tzara and Picabia. For them and for him, the sicker the joke the better — anything to destabilise the established order.
Barry Oakley
The Blue Lamington
I've searched in vain for the novel "The Blue Lamington", apparently written by Barry Humphries. I am told the lamington is to Australia what the Bakewell tart is to England, but I've never found the novel. Dame Edna Everage has, however, described her manager's work as "rare & unprocurable, not to say indigestible".
Traditional cream teas
The British call it a Cornish cream tea there. Australians call it a "Devonshire", and Barry Humphries himself said he'd overheard a couple of ladies hoping to have "a Devo in Dandy " (Dandenong being a southeastern suburb of Melbourne).
Valmai wasn't Edna's only daughter...
Another daughter, Lois, was abducted as an infant by a “rogue koala,” a subject Dame Edna could bring herself to discuss with interviewers only rarely. Though the child was never seen again, to the end of her life Dame Edna never gave up hope she would be found. “I’m looking,” she told NPR in 2015. “Every time I pass a eucalyptus tree I look up.”
Margalit Fox, The New York Times
In Handling Edna, the Unauthorised Biography, Humphries absolves the koala of any role in the affair and reveals the true fate of Lois, who in fact survived abduction to become a Catholic nun.
Kathy Lette
To me, he will always be a mischievous maverick, with a Puckish, impish sensibility, who became one of my most cherished, beloved friends.
I always felt that Barry invented me; Dame Edna has a daughter named Valmai who married Mervyn and built a blond brick veneer in the suburbs. My mum’s name is Valmai and she married Mervyn and they built a blond brick suburban home. When I first met Barry in my late teens and told him this, he laughed, then went straight into Edna mode – “How spooky, possum!” And a friendship was struck.
More Please (1992)
Barry Humphries' volume of autobiography is extremely readable even if, as some have noted, he flaunts his book learning and has the less erudite among us reaching for dictionaries to discover the meaning of obscure words.
In her review for The Independent on Sunday, Lynn Barber cites “opsimath”, “flocculus”, “reboant”, “pilose”, “grumous” and “stercoraceous”. “Like many Antipodean intellectuals, he does not wear his learning lightly,” she says.
Larry Schwarz, The Age, April 1992
As well as writing his own scripts, Humphries was a prolific author, notably of his memoirs Barry Humphries: An Autobiography, and My Life As Me, from which some of the material in this obituary has been taken. Both are irresistibly entertaining, but their mannered syntax and languid ironies disguise as well as reveal. We have to peer through the persona to discern what we can of the elusive subject.
Brian Oakley, Obituaries Australian, 22 April 2023
Diary 2014
Occasionally waggish members of exclusively male clubs suggest, “Wouldn’t it be a hoot if you turned up at the annual dinner dressed up as Dame Edna?” Their laughter soon evaporates when I mention my customary fee.
(By the bye, it was Barry Humphries who put me on to a bookshop in Sydney - via an occasional diary column he wrote in the Financial Times - when I first visited that marvellous city in 2015)
In a backstreet of Bondi is a beautiful book shop called Gertrude and Alice, after Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, heroines of the Sapphic clientele. I didn’t have the heart to tell the nice girl behind the counter how those two Jewish ladies managed to live through the entire Nazi occupation of France unmolested. Gertrude Stein was protected by an academic collaborator who got her a commission to translate into English speeches by the Vichy prime minister, Marshal Petain, but artfully she remembered to embrace an American GI on liberation day.
Christmas in Sydney, and terror in the chocolate shop just around the corner from me. Any one of us could have popped in for a coffee. So now Australia is really in the Big League: we’ve got great sportsmen, opera houses, marsupials, Booker Prize winners and, now, Terrorism!
19 December, 2014
[The Lindt Café siege was a terrorist attack that occurred on 15–16 December 2014 when a lone gunman held hostage ten customers and eight employees of a Lindt Chocolate Café in the APA Building in Martin Place, Sydney.]
Fish & soup
On my day off last week I went to Dorset, which I’d only previously visited in the summer, and stayed in a hotel overlooking Weymouth Bay, with charming Portuguese staff. Sitting in the dining room with its expansive view of the sea, teeming, one presumed, with scrumptious marine life, I asked one of those questions to which one glumly knows the answer: “What is your fresh fish today?” There was much consultation with the chef and I was told that all the fish was fresh; it all came from landlocked Brixton. How different it is in beautiful Portugal where the fisherman practically takes it off the hook and slaps it on your plate. Once, in Darwin, the Australian city no Australian ever visits, while dining in a hotel restaurant I asked for soup and was told there was only “soup du jour”. “What is it?” I asked, and the waiter went away for a very long time. At length he returned, diffusing a faint aura of cigarette smoke, and consulted some scribbled words on a scrap of kitchen roll. “Soup of the day,” he said.
20 December, 2013
Germanica
He talks about an interview he did many years ago with a newspaper at the Savoy Hotel.
“I could order whatever I wanted. So I ordered Oysters Tsarina. Oysters that you dip in sour cream, chopped onions and caviar. You slurp those down. And the chef came out, quite an elderly man, and he said, “I just wanted to say you’re the first person to have ordered Oysters Tsarina since von Ribbentrop.” He beams at this outrageous association with the Nazi foreign minister. Humphries is a connoisseur of provocation.
“I’ve always felt that I was a bit central European,” he goes on to say, fork fishing for more salmon. As a student in Melbourne he went to Greek and Czechoslovakian restaurants, full
of Balkan smoke and refugees.
His lunch break is over. “I wonder if the chef is going to come out and say, the last person to order that Brazilian slice was Martin Bormann,” he says as we stand up. The joke triggers a remarkable anecdote. “I had a friend in Salzburg who was in the German embassy in the late 1930s working with von Ribbentrop, whom he despised, as everyone did,” Humphries says. “He was an old SS man, he died last year. I called his widow and expressed my sympathy and she said [he adopts a German accent]: ‘It’s so funny you should have called, Barry, because Reinhardt and I vere talking about you just before he died.’ And I said, ‘Oh what did he say?’ And she said, ‘“It’s extraordinary,” he said, “you know zat Barry Humphries, ze Führer would have adored him.”’”
Humphries laughs. “‘The Führer would have adored him.’ And I thought, that’s something to be put in a little strap along the next book isn’t it? The fact that it’s a sort of fictitious accolade.”
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, Lunch with the FT, 9 December, 2011
Christmas 2022
Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve startedwith books; I’ll end up with people and finish with me.
My shelf of the works of Philip Thicknesse, that querulous 18th-century gentleman, contains nearly all of his 24 books, and if I were forced to sell them I could never sacrifice The Valetudinarians Bath Guide, which contains valuable information on the exorcism of gallstones, and an account of Mrs Mary Toft of Godalming who claimed that she gave birth to 15 rabbits; an assertion Thicknesse plausibly supports.
Off to Australia for Christmas. I will avoid church on the big day. Last year at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, the bishop called the hymns ‘songs’, invited applause, and addressed the congregation as ‘boys and girls’ as if he were making the announcements on a Virgin aeroplane. The prayers and the order of service were unrecognisable and had been tweaked so they could offend no one – except God.
Barry's last column for The Spectator 17 December 2022
Bohuslav Martinů
Barry mentioned the great Czech composer Martinů - a favourite composer of mine and not a name on everyone's lips - more than once in his autobiography. Bravo!
Bohuslav Jan Martinů (December 8, 1890 – August 28, 1959) was a Czech composer of modern classical music.
He wrote 6 symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. Among his operas, Juliette and The Greek Passion are considered the finest. He has been compared to Prokofiev and Bartók in his innovative incorporation of Czech folk elements into his music.
His symphonic career began when he emigrated to the United States in 1941, fleeing the German invasion of France. His six symphonies were performed by all the major US orchestras. Eventually Martinů returned to live in Europe for two years starting in 1953, then was back in New York until returning to Europe in May 1956. He died in Switzerland in August 1959.
The setting of Martinů's birth was unusual. He was born in the tower of the St. Jakub Church in Polička, a town in Bohemia, close to the Moravian border. His father, Ferdinand, a shoemaker, also worked as the church sexton and town fire watchman. For this, he and his family were allowed to live in the tower apartment.
Melbourne Comedy Festival
It is not the place of this website to discuss or take sides regarding the controversy over Barry Humphries being "cancelled" by the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2019, but it was memorably said of one stand-up who did not approve of him: "[X] identifies as being funny, whereas Barry actually WAS funny". (Peter Ford)
Tasmania
In the winter of 1959, aged 25, he made his London stage debut in a musical version of Sweeney Todd at the Lyric Hammersmith. The show's programme states that Humphries was "born in Van Dieman's Land at the turn of the century, with Van Diemen himself helping with the delivery."
"I offend, therefore I am"
Comedians prize the ability to read the rooms they perform in. To lose that knack would indeed be a calamity.
But unless they’re abject hacks, comedians don’t read a room so they can overhaul their entire act on the spot, and tell the room exactly what it wants to hear. All good performers give audiences part of what they want, but push back against them too.
Humphries did not at any point “lose his ability” to echo orthodox opinion. He never wasted a minute of his adult life trying to do that. His whole career was based on being a minority of one.
Born into an age of stifling conformity (sound familiar?), Humphries spent his career bridling against Australian groupthink and complacency.
In the 1970s he created a dodgy union official named Lance Boyle. “While performing him,” Humphries recalled, “it was amusing to scan the stalls” for scandalised left-wingers. “Their poor little pinched faces always fell most entertainingly when they realised that the odious operator on the boards was one of their own.”
That’s how Humphries read a room. He actively devoted himself to making people’s faces fall. And this was an audience that had paid good money to come and see him! But it’s crucial to note that his audience didn’t respond by walking out, or ceasing to attend his shows. Audiences were less brittle in those days. They wanted to feel the frisson that comes when an artist irritates and amuses you simultaneously.
Humphries was a kamikaze contrarian. He rigged things so that no fan, however devoted, could possibly endorse everything he ever said or did.
David Free, The Sydney Morning Herald (2 May, 2023)
Spanish
Edna's new-found success in America led to many media opportunities, including a cameo appearance in the hit TV series Ally McBeal. Vanity Fair magazine invited her write an advice column but she created a storm of controversy with her advice in the February 2003 issue, when she told a reader who asked if she should learn Spanish:
"Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that ... Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower?"
Predictably, Edna's comments (which satirised the attitudes of many wealthy Americans, who routinely hire low-waged Hispanic domestic workers) went over the heads of a lot of readers. Many seemed unaware of the fact that Dame Edna is a character and some don't even seem to know that 'she' is not really a woman. Members of the Hispanic community took joke totally out of context and complaints flooded in. Hollywood actress Selma Hayek responded angrily, penning a furious letter to the magazine. Death threats were received and Vanity Fair was forced to publish a full-page apology to the Hispanic community. "If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up," Humphries commented later.
From website: Milesago 2002
Oysters Tsarina
In the mid-1960s the food editor of The Daily Express took Barry to the Savoy Grill, London, for lunch.
I love oysters, and I had read somewhere of an exotic combination called Oysters Tsarina: oysters, smothered with beluga, caviar, dipped in cream, with a dash of shallots, and chopped parsley. The waiter had never heard of this delicacy, but after a short delay, the elderly head chef of the Savoy appeared at a table with a magnificent plateful of Oysters Tsarina. He looked at me gravely. "I wish to tell you, sir, that you are the first gentleman to have ordered this dish since Ambassador Ribbentrop."
My life as me, p.18