Timeline of the early years in Australia
Chronology (Barry's Australian Years)
John Barry Humphries AC CBE
(17 February 1934 – 22 April 2023)
Born on 17 February 1934 in the suburb of Kew in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of Eric Humphries (1905–1972) and his wife Louisa Agnes (née Brown) (1907–1984).
His grandfather John George Humphries was an emigrant to Australia from Manchester, England, in the late 1800s.
His father was well-to-do, and Barry grew up in a "clean, tasteful, and modern suburban home" on Christowel Street (at No.36), Camberwell, then one of Melbourne's new "garden suburbs".
A key event took place when he was nine – his mother gave all of his books to the Salvation Army, cheerfully explaining: "But you've read them, Barry."
Education
Educated first at Camberwell Grammar School, Barry was sent to Melbourne Grammar School (founded on 7 April 1858).
He described this schooling, in a Who's Who entry, as "self-educated, attended Melbourne Grammar School".
"In time, Barry found a way to survive Melbourne Grammar – through provocation. When he was reprimanded for failing to cut his hair to regulation length, he stared coolly at the headmaster and said, 'There’s one man in the chapel with hair that is longer than mine. His name is Jesus'. Humphries’ comment was not punished. Before long everyone had heard of his audacious retort.
"On icy winter afternoons at the MCG – compelled to watch the titans of the school wrestle in the mud – Humphries found an ingenious way of expressing his view of proceedings. He positioned himself in a chair with his back to the football field, facing the spectators. Slowly he drew out of his specially made Gladstone bag a set of large knitting needles and ball of wool; he would sit for the duration of the match calmly knitting a cardigan."
Ann Pender, The Conversation, April 2023
Humphries spent two years studying at the University of Melbourne, where he studied law, philosophy and fine arts. He did not graduate from university (although he would receive an honorary doctorate almost 50 years later).
During this time he became a follower of the deconstructive and absurdist art movement, Dada.
The Dadaist pranks and performances that he mounted in Melbourne were experiments in anarchy and visual satire that have become part of Australian folklore. An exhibit entitled "Pus in Boots" consisted of a pair of Wellington boots filled with custard; a mock pesticide product called "Platytox" claimed on its box to be effective against the platypus, a beloved and protected species in Australia.
"His street performances around Melbourne in the early 1950s foreshadowed performance art in Australia. He was the most daring student prankster Melbourne University had ever known."
Melbourne
1953: Barry made his theatrical debut at the Union Theatre in Melbourne.
"The young man secured his first paid acting role after a number of complaints from various women about a Dadaist event called Call Me Madman!, staged at the University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre in 1953.
"Call Me Madman! opened with a single musical phrase played on a violin over and over again, then a pianist sitting out of view of the audience sounded the same chords and notes in repetition, and ended in a ferocious food fight, with Humphries hiding in a cupboard from the outraged students who stormed the stage.
"This parody taught him how to provoke his audience, securing their complicit and violent participation in his act. It also gave him his first taste of the power of an audience to determine what happens in the theatre. It was both risky and intoxicating.
'When John Sumner, founder of the burgeoning Union Theatre Repertory Company (which would go on to become Melbourne Theatre Company), heard the complaints about the revue, he offered the young man a job."
Ann Pender, The Conversation, April 2023
Edna
After leaving university he joined the newly formed Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC). It was at this point that he created the first incarnation of what became his best-known character, Edna Everage.
The first stage sketch to feature Mrs. Norm Everage, called "Olympic Hostess", premiered at Melbourne University's Union Theatre on 13 December 1955.
In his autobiography, More Please (1992), Barry related that he had created a character similar to Edna in the back of a bus while touring country Victoria with Twelfth Night with the MTC at the age of 20. He credited his then mentor, Peter O'Shaughnessy, stating that, without his "nurturing and promotion, the character of Edna Everage would have been nipped in the bud after 1956 and never come to flower, while the character of Sandy Stone would never have taken shape as a presence on the stage".[pp.176-177]
1956: Debuted Edna Everage to a wider audience on Australian television during the Melbourne Olympic Games.
"This Mrs Average took on a life of her own and shone as the centrepiece of Humphries’ theatrical world for the next 60 years, becoming Dame Edna Everage – elevated by the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam himself – in Barry McKenzie Holds His Own in 1974."
Peter Coleman writes:
"The character was thought amusing enough to try out on stage in a Christmas revue in Melbourne. So it came about, on 13 December 1955, that Mrs (as she then was) Edna Everage made her stage debut – a volunteer hostess for the Melbourne Olympics, six feet tall, with brown basilisk eyes and a large chartreuse cabbage rose pinned on her charcoal suit. Her family – husband Norm, son Kenny, daughter Valmai, and mother (in a twilight home) – were given honourable mention, although their miserable fates in Edna’s triumphal backwash were not yet evident. Humphries, then as always, wrote the script.
"The sketch was only a moderate success, but enough to point Humphries away from dramatic acting and towards the revue, music hall or cabaret."
Sydney 1957
In 1957, Humphries moved to Sydney and joined Sydney's Phillip Street Theatre, which became Australia's leading venue for revue and satirical comedy over the next decade.
His first appearance at Phillip Street was in the satirical revue Two to One, starring veteran Australian musical star Max Oldaker, with a cast including Humphries and future Number 96 star Wendy Blacklock.
Although he had originally assumed Edna's debut Melbourne appearance would be a one-off, Humphries decided to revive "Olympic Hostess" for Phillip Street.
During this period Humphries was living near Bondi and while out walking one day he had a chance meeting with an elderly man who had a high, scratchy voice and a pedantic manner of speech; this encounter inspired the creation of another of Humphries's most enduring characters, Sandy Stone.
Johnson, Rob/ Smiedt, David (1999). Boom-boom! p. 143.
In September 1957, Humphries appeared as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, in Australia's first production of the Samuel Beckett play at the Arrow Theatre in Melbourne directed by Peter O'Shaughnessy who played Vladimir.
In 1958, Humphries and O'Shaughnessy collaborated on and appeared in the Rock'n'Reel Revue at the New Theatre in Melbourne, where Humphries brought the characters of Mrs Everage and Sandy Stone into the psyche of Melbourne audiences.
In the same year, Humphries made his first commercial recording, the EP Wild Life in Suburbia, which featured liner notes by his friend, the Modernist architect and writer Robin Boyd.
In 1959, Humphries moved to London, where he lived and worked throughout the 1960s.
He made his West End debut in The Demon Barber and joined the satirical circle with Peter Cook.
"Australian theatre, however, remained in the doldrums. One critic said there was better theatre in a march-past of lifesavers on Bondi beach. In London, meanwhile, Beckett, Brecht, Osborne and Pinter were leading 'the great uprising' from Sloane Square to Stratford East. Humphries found it irresistible."
Peter Coleman
Return to Australia 1962
August 1962
A return to Australia. Barry (aged 28) hires a small theatre in Sydney to introduce a few of his characters. He flew to Melbourne from London, arriving 20 July, after an absence of three years.
"A Nice Night's Entertainment"
'A first-hand account of the historic confrontation of Mrs Edna Everage, [36, Humoresque Street], Moonee Ponds], Melbourne, and the world outside her small, cosy, fingered corner of Australia.
Melba Hall, (University Conservatorium, Royal Parade), Melbourne 1 September (for six nights)
Macquarie Auditorium, Phillip Street, Sydney, 8:15pm, 19 September until 1 October
"The most original entertainer at large in Australia"
The Sydney Morning Herald (16 August 1962)
Peter Coleman:
Humphries did two more Australian tours before testing the water in London again. The first – in 1965 – was the triumphant Excuse I, which filled huge Australian theatres for weeks on end. No one-man show had ever done such business in Australia. It was on this tour that Humphries introduced the gladioli-hurling finale.
The next tour – the 1968 Just a Show – introduced further variations. Edna now abandoned her dowdy appearance and came on stage smiling like a shark in a red Thai silk coat over a green dress. (“Am I overdressed?” she asked, looking around. “No, I don’t think so.”) She also began entering from the stalls chatting to her “possums”.
The enormous success of Just a Show encouraged him to try again in London – at the Fortune theatre. Once again the show was a flop. Harold Hobson dismissed it in one devastating sentence: “Most of Barry Humphries’ Just a Show will give pleasure to most Australians in London.”
1976
"Still he had not yet conquered London. His Australian shows of the early 1970s (A Load of Olde Stuffe, in 1971, and At Least You Can Say You’ve Seen It, in 1974) further refined Edna. She was now a name-dropping predator of radical views and treacly-trendy sentimentality, wearing glittering scarlet hotpants split to the groin. Soon critics were ransacking the dictionary for adjectives to describe her: psychotic, hysteric, Dionysiac, Amazonian, crypto-fascist, anally obsessed, a piranha, a hectoring Medusa, a blue-rinsed beast of Belsen, the Australian daughter of Torquemada.
"As her curtain raiser, and to incarnate his disgust with alcoholism, Humphries also created a new character, half Sir Toby Belch, half Apeneck Sweeney – exuberant clown and revolting drunk, the cultural attache Sir Les Patterson. Staggering down the aisle, whisky in hand, he would invite his audience to give Edna the clap she so richly deserved.
"In 1976 had come yet another assault on the West End, this time succeeding sensationally when Housewife-Superstar opened at the Apollo. It ran to packed houses for four months and almost 500,000 people saw it."
[Peter Coleman, The Guardian]
The play opened on March 16, 1976, running through mid-May at London's Apollo Theatre (Shaftesbury Avenue).
'Frocks' were designed by Jane Hamilton. The first half of the programme featured the sketch 'Excuse I - Dame Edna Everage (Housewife-Superstar)'.
The second half of the programme featured the sketches 'A Brief Word - Les Patterson', 'The Land of the Living - Sandy Stone', '?', and 'At Least You Can Say It's Over - Dame Edna'.
"Humphries’ extravaganza Housewife Superstar! charmed the West End. Wearing a massive hat sculpted to resemble the Sydney Opera House, Edna stopped the crowds at Royal Ascot that year. The image of her in that sumptuous creation (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) launched Edna and Humphries around the world."
Ann Pender, The Conversation, April 2023