“You might be devoured...”
Australia is home to the world’s most deadly creatures – the tiger snake, the funnel-web spider, the box jellyfish – and Dame Edna Everage. Edna’s wit was venomous. It was extremely hazardous to be dragged up on stage as you might be devoured alive.
Kathy Lette (2023)
“Hello possums,” was her signature greeting, an apex predator of Australian bonhomie.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (2023)
Origins
"A vulture in bird-of-paradise clothing," as the TV producer Julian Jebb put it, terrorising not just audiences, but celebrities foolish enough to appear in her TV shows.
The purple-rinsed Moonee Ponds housewife turned global megastar is undoubtedly Barry Humphries's most famous creation, and arguably one of Australia's most identifiable showbiz exports.
Dame Edna first appeared in a stage show sketch in 1955 as Mrs Norm Everage, looking very much like a suburban housewife and minus the bejewelled glamour and outlandish glasses we now associate with the TV icon.
“Nobody had talked about Australian houses before,” Humphries later recalled. “I found something I could write about — not by putting a telescope to my eye but by just looking through the venetian blinds on to my own front lawn.”
Humphries developed the character further in the 1960s and 1970s, transforming her from a timid, mousy housewife to the colourful, acid-tongued Edna we know today.
According to her autobiography, My Gorgeous Life, and to statements Edna made over the years, she was born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. Everage started her stage career in a sketch entitled "Olympic Hostess" in the revue Return Fare on 19 December 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, an "average Australian housewife" from Moonee Ponds, a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria. Her manager Barry Humphries had apparently first spotted her in a Nativity play, as Mary Magdalene.
She is latterly known for her lilac-coloured ("wisteria hue") hair and cat eye glasses ("face furniture")
Her graduation from "Aunt Edna" to "Dame Edna" came in a scene at the end of the film Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, when then-Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam confers the title on her.
"Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (Bruce Beresford, Australia, 1974) – the sequel to The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford, Australia, 1972) – is perhaps most famous for one of its final scenes where then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam makes a cameo appearance and apparently makes Edna Everage a Dame. The whole idea of Everage's supposed Damehood is an example of the rich backstory which has contributed to Everage's popularity and longevity as a character.
Outside of the film Everage really dines out on her supposed Damehood at every opportunity, saying that it was very kind of Queen Elizabeth II to recognise a Damehood conferred upon her by an Australian, 'and a socialist to boot'."
Beth Taylor
Origins
This photograph is associated with the Dame Edna Everage Coffee Table Book (1976) which contained recipes for culinary masterpieces such as 'snowball and apple sandwiches' and 'Norm's favourite sausage and pineapple patties'.
Satirist Barry Humphries exaggerated the house-proud characteristics of the women in his early life to create the character of Edna, who is obsessed with homes, cooking, childrearing, celebrity and gynaecological matters.
Here we can see that Everage has established her look of winged spectacles and wisteria bouffant; however this is before she started dressing in couture gowns and became a self-styled celebrity megastar in the 1980s.
The dressing of her surroundings is self-consciously Australian kitsch with a koala tea towel, floral wallpaper, Fab laundry powder and a bottle of Bex – the 1950s and 60s housewife's analgesic of choice – in the background.
This photograph is part of a collection of documentation relating to Barry Humphries from the NFSA collection.
Notes by Beth Taylor. NFSA website link
Origins 2
Barry Humphries was invited to join the fledgling Union Theatre Repertory Company early in 1955 and toured Victorian country towns performing Twelfth Night, directed by Ray Lawler (BH played the role of Duke Orsino). On tour, Humphries invented Edna gradually as part of the entertainment for the actors during commutes between country towns. Humphries gradually developed a falsetto impersonation of a Melbourne housewife, imitating the Country Women's Association representatives who welcomed the troupe in each town. At Lawler's suggestion, Mrs Everage (later named Edna after Humphries' nanny) made her first appearance in a Melbourne University's UTRC revue at the end of 1955, as the city prepared for the 1956 Olympic Games. The sketch involved a houseproud "average housewife" offering her Moonee Ponds home as an Olympic billet, spruiking her home as possessing "burgundy wall-to-wall carpets, lamington cakes and reindeers frosted on glass dining-room doors".
Graeme Blundell, "Barry Humphries, the clown prince of suburbia", The Australian, 7 February 2009.
(At 4:35, Humphries explains the origin of Mrs Norm Everage to Michael Parkinson on BBC Television, 30 January 1982)
Edna-ology
Ray Lawler, who was then writing an unpromising play called 'The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll', prevailed upon Humphries to grace a Christmas show with his impressions of Edna. Outrageously, Lawler suggested that the young actor not only do the voice, but actually dress up. So Edna first caught the limelight as a kind of panto dame. [The first stage sketch to feature Mrs. Norm Everage, called "Olympic Hostess", premiered at Melbourne University's Union Theatre on 13 December 1955.]
Edna, being an average sort of lady, was surnamed Average, which later modified to Everage. Her normal husband was dubbed Norm. And Moonie Ponds was a suburb with an improbable name where Humphries, Melbourne born and educated, had never set foot. So it all began in 1956, Melbourne's Olympic year, Edna being interviewed by Noel Ferrier, and later in the run when Ferrier became an Australian television pioneer, by Gordon Chater.
Making the most of the Olympic occasion, Edna was seen to advertise a spare room in her house to accommodate a visitor to the games. She favoured a Latvian shotputter, as long as he wasn't foreign. So occurred the first modern example of our humour in which urban Australians laughed at themselves rather than at something exotic.
Melbourne assured Barry that Edna would not be understood in Sydney. Between spasms of laugher, Sydney told him that Perth and Adelaide would never laugh at his east coast humour. In fact, so great was the power of provincial dissuasion that it was not until the late 60s that Edna finally appeared on a London stage. To decidedly mixed reviews.
Since that time the grating Dame has lead a public life of her own, quite separate from Barry Humphries.
She has become one of the few English-speaking comediennes of our time, and has towed the distant island of Australia to a real proximity with the motherland.
The Canberra Times, 19 September 1979
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. Although he had originally assumed Edna's debut Melbourne appearance would be a one-off, Humphries decided to revive "Olympic Hostess" for Phillip Street and its success helped to launch what became a fifty-year career for the self-proclaimed "Housewife Superstar" (later Megastar, then Gigastar).
My personal favourite [story] occurred when Barry Humphries travelled to Sydney (I think from London) "to make some commercials for the NSW Art Gallery only to be told on arrival that the (then) Premier, Marmaduke Trump,
had scuttled them. A somewhat miffed Humphries sent forth. Edna Everage to every Sydney radio station that would give her air-time (and who could refuse?) to deliver the most comprehensive bagging a maestro in the world of satire could muster. I heard the interview that Mike [Carlton] conducted with Dame Edna - and I'd kill for a copy of that program.
Royal Australian Navy News, 6 Mar 2008
He decides on his victims by the end of the first half, when Les, Sandy and Daryl Dalkeith (a shady new character from sunny Perth) have had a good gander at the first few rows of the stalls.
And out of the cupboard on a hanger, an extraordinary garment that bears an explosive resemblance to the object on the cover of The Female Eunuch, maybe sponsored by Tibaldi salami, Les's substantial and - shall we say? - lengthy
padding. "Some would say it's the Michelin man," Humphries says. "You're seeing as much that has ever been revealed to a gentleman of the press," he says, politely seeing me to the door. "Enjoy the show." I did. And so did the audience.
Humphries is, as ever, looking forward to playing Melbourne. "I see everything as a preamble to Melbourne. Melbourne is, of course, when your parents come; it's speech night; it's where the quality control comes in - aunts, cousins, nieces, the final judgment. They say, 'I hope you don't mind me saying this, Barry.' I did mind at one stage... I mind it most when it's true; when I know they're right."
The Canberra Times, Saturday 20 November 1993 (just before a show at Her Majesty's Theatre, Adelaide)
Sir Leslie Colin Patterson
Humphries' other satirical characters included the "priapic and inebriated cultural attaché" , the "revolting yet genial" Sir Les Patterson, who "continued to bring worldwide discredit upon Australian arts and culture, while contributing as much to the Australian vernacular as he has borrowed from it"; gentle, grandfatherly "returned gentleman" Sandy Stone; iconoclastic 1960s underground film-maker Martin Agrippa; Paddington socialist academic Neil Singleton; sleazy trade union official Lance Boyle; high-pressure art salesman Morrie O'Connor; failed tycoon Owen Steele; and archetypal Australian "bloke" Barry McKenzie.
Anne Pender, 'Men of the past?: Barry Humphries and Australian masculinity' (2006)
A year later (1973) I was with Barry at his first appearance as Les Patterson. Barry asked would I come with him to the Rooty Hill RSL Club in Sydney’s outer suburbs.
Shortly after we sat down in the auditorium, Barry got up and said: “I’ll be back soon.”
A little while later, a nondescript bloke in a crumpled suit stumbled on stage and said: “Gidday. Name’s Leslie Colin Patterson. Manager, Rooty Hill.” He then delivered a meandering monologue on the theme “Time Waits for No Man”. It took me a couple of minutes to realise it was Barry!
This was before he converted Les into Australia’s dribbling, randy, dipsomaniacal Minister for the Yartz.
Barry often told me that Les Patterson was the character he enjoyed playing the most. This was because, as a long-time sober person, he could channel all of his many negativities into the dreadful drunkard, Sir Les.
Ross Fitzgerald AM, emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University
(January 2026)
By Humphries' own account, the character of Patterson first appeared in a one-man show that he performed at the St. George leagues club in Sydney in January 1974.[Humphries, Barry. A Nice Night's Entertainment, pp. 178–83.]
Appearing in the guise of the boorish, loud-mouthed and uncultured Patterson, Humphries claimed to be that club's own entertainments officer as he introduced the next act, Dame Edna Everage. As Humphries recalled, "I understood later that many members of the audience thought Les was genuinely a club official, which says a lot for his charm and sincerity".
Later that same year, the character (by now identified as Australia's cultural attaché to the Far East) was revived in a two-week cabaret appearance that Humphries performed at the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong. In Humphries' words, "The English merchant bankers and commodity brokers and Australian accountants there all recognised Les as someone they knew in the Australian diplomatic corps, and took him to their hearts."
Sandy Stone
The sentimental old digger from "Kia Ora", 36 Gallipoli Crescent, Glen Iris, who survives as a ghost from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon and "innocent" Australia.
(Ross Fitzgerald)
He was already a character in Barry's repertoire by 1960
Martin Agrippa
Australian satirist Barry Humphries is to appear in London next month in his own revue, called 'Just A Show'.
The Times diarist wrote: "Humphries delights in provoking Australian suburbia and has recently returned from a four-month tour with 'Just A Show' in Australia, where one of the most successful sketches was a parody of an Australian underground movie. The sketch includes a. nine-minute example of the genre called The End' by — according to the
film's credits — Martin Agrippa. In fact Martin Agrippa is really the head of the British Film Institute's film production board, Bruce Beresford. Beresford, who is also Australian, is quoted by the diarist as saying, "It was made in my house in Brixton for £200 sterling. It's completely bogus". He used a Nigerian to play an Aborigine and filmed a scene of a girl rushing naked through a wood in a park in Highgate.
Canberra Times, 27 February 1969
Craig Steppenwolf
In 1975 Barry and I created another awful character – the radical schoolteacher, Craig Steppenwolf, who Barry performed throughout Australia in his show, At Least You Can Say You’ve Seen It.
Under the heading “Craig Steppenwolf: A monologue for the music-hall, by Barry Humphries and Ross Fitzgerald”, the November 1975 issue of Quadrant published our entire script. The front page featured a photo of Barry as this dreadful anarchist activist who promoted the “de-schooling” of students.
Ross Fitzgerald AM, emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University
(January 2026)
The Age Melbourne (19 January 1991) describes him as 'the vacuous radical Marxist school teacher".
Lance Boyle
The avarivious and deeply corrupt trades union leader.