British Life
Where the Wild Roses Grow: Australian Impact on English Culture
Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer; all came to England from Australia in the 60’s and immediately tore up the rule book.
In Britain they had found a country receptive to challenge and change, ready to fully embrace their subversive talents. With a particularly Australian brand of ‘can do’ spirit, they transformed broadcasting, academia, feminism, writing and performance. They were a counter-cultural force that helped re-shape their adoptive home.
As the writer Howard Jacobson put it: ‘Once here, there was never a sense they were anywhere but where they should be’.
Bibliophile
My first memories of my father are of books. I remember sitting in his lap as he let me leaf through a collection of Japanese fairy tales collected by Lacfadio Hearn. The woodcut illustrations of goblin spiders, ghosts and samurai, the rough texture of crepe paper and gossamer rice paper overslips challenging my childish mind. How could rice be paper? Wasn’t that food? The exoticism of the stories, their content and presentation, has stuck with me ever since. It was intoxicating.
Dad’s library felt exotic, not a room you would expect to discover on the first floor of a house in South Hampstead. Thick curtains were shut to keep out natural light, and deep purple, red, black and yellow spines lined the sagging shelves with books stacked two, sometimes three layers deep. Many in Morocco leather boxes with ornate gilt designs that he had commissioned and took great care over. Amongst the books were strange curios - an Indonesian puppet, a bat and a funnel-web spider preserved in glass, various masks and erotic statues. The warm glow of iridescent glass lamps and a heavy art-deco chandelier, the smell of incense in the air. It was like a setting from one of the decadent stories he loved so much, maybe Prince Zalesky’s dilapidated abbey in Wales.
When I got into detective fiction, he showed me how it was rooted in Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and M.P. Shiel.
Rupert Humphries, son (2025)
Footnote:
M.P. Shiel, Prince Zaleski. Arguably the most decadent of all fictional sleuths, Prince Zaleski relies upon the methods of ratiocination so beloved of Sherlock Holmes. But unlike his deer-stalkered colleague, Zaleski rarely needs even to leave his divan to solve the perplexing mysteries that Shiel brings before him. Rather than give crude chase to the perpetrators of these sophisticated crimes, Zaleski reclines elegantly in his semi-ruined abbey, ‘a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom,’ smoking hashish and fashioning solutions from his encyclopaedic knowledge of the esoteric. Although he is in this respect akin to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, Zaleski is primarily an up-to-the-minute 1890s aesthete, prompting one critic to suggest that he is based on that tragically extravagant poet of death, Count Eric Stenbock.
Matthew Phipps Shiell (21 July 1865 – 17 February 1947), known as M. P. Shiel, was a British writer, remembered mainly for supernatural horror and scientific romances. His work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories. The Purple Cloud (1901, revised 1929) remains his most often reprinted novel.
Library sale
The Library of Barry Humphries to be sold on March 26th 2025
- by Bruce E. McKinney
On 26th March, Forum Auctions will offer the library of Barry Humphries. The sale will feature a remarkable array of books, manuscripts, works on paper and objects from the extensive library of the legendary comedian, actor, author, and satirist Barry Humphries (1934-2023), who delighted audiences for several decades with his eccentric stage and television characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson.
Ben Macintyre, a long-time friend of Humphries, once noted that while most people knew ‘Humphries as Dame Edna Everage or Sir Les Patterson […] another of his characters, and a defining one, [was] an old-fashioned, self-proclaimed bibliomaniac’. Born and raised in a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, the renowned entertainer was in his personal life an ardent literary enthusiast, who purchased rare books from a very early age and ultimately became one of Australia’s foremost collectors in the field. One of just 40 members of the exclusive Roxburghe Club – a society for bibliophiles – his house in south Hampstead, London, contained 7,000 books, many of them first editions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The sale at Forum comprises highlights from the remarkable library, a testament to Humphries’ taste for the beautiful and the unusual. The 1890s and the Decadent Movement are an undoubted focal point of the collection. While this certainly includes plenty of works by or relating to the better-known figures from the period such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, Humphries’ love of the obscure drove him to unearth rare titles by lesser known figures: Lionel Johnson, Andre Raffalovich and Ernest Dowson, to name a few. Even when collecting standard works by Wilde, Humphries could not resist to bring his unique sense of humour to the fore – a first edition of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, published in Lippincott’s magazine, is here found bound in purple cane toad.
Bindings were another passion for Humphries and again, while he owned many sumptuous bindings that you might expect to find in other great libraries, including richly gilt morocco bindings by Cretté and Paul Kersten, his unique eye and style is evident here. A large number of the books are housed in boxes designed by Humphries himself and these can range from replications of pictorial cloth (the eponymous mist of M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud is recreated with inlayed purple morocco) to more abstract decorations and even the odd sly joke (his native cane toad again makes an appearance here).
The Gothic and macabre are also a running theme, from the likes of Ann Radcliffe and Beckford (including his own copy of his gothic masterpiece Vathek and several books owned and annotated by him) to later masters of supernatural and weird fiction such as Sheridan Le Fanu, M. P. Shiel and M. R. James. Aleister Crowley was clearly another favourite, appealing both to the bibliomaniac with the extraordinary rarity of some of his works (Humphries owned one of only two copies on vellum of Ahab and other poems, the only copy that remains in private hands) and seemingly also to Humphries’ humour and his love of the bohemian and transgressive; an aspect of his character that is evident in so many items in this extraordinary collection.
The Road to West Hampstead
Barry Humphries lived in West Hampstead, London, with his home in Greencroft Gardens during the 2000s, and he was involved in a significant legal dispute with his neighbours in 2015 over basement excavation work that he claimed threatened his Victorian house. [Flat 3, 57 Greencroft Gardens, London, NW6 3LL]
'Something of a local star when he left Australia in 1959, he and his then-wife arrived in London with only tuppence between them and rented a basement flat in Pembridge Gardens, Notting Hill. At night Humphries worked in the raspberry ripple section of the Wall's ice-cream factory in Acton and during the day did auditions.
'Later he was alone in a small private hotel in Westbourne Terrace. According to the late, great John Wells, Humphries was "like a mad child" in those days and "certain to make a scene in every restaurant". Was it at this stage or later that he dropped his trousers in Chez Moi in Holland Park Avenue in front of Lord Snowdon?
'
And, of course, he was a drunk, a terrible early-morning drinker whose off-stage life was plagued by homesickness, a sense of alienation and rage. He was, he tells us, a dissolute, guilt-ridden, self-pitying boozer. Looking back, he cheerfully presents himself as "a genius out of luck", but he in fact came close to death and had several spells in psychiatric hospitals in London and Australia where he felt "really isolated from the human race".
But he finally emerged sober. In My Life as Me, he names 31 December 1971 as the day he finally discovered that "life was more stimulating without stimulants".
Andrew Barrow, The Independent 15 August 2004