You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to trace the source of Humphries’s outre comedy back to his repressive upbringing in 1930s Melbourne, and specifically his mother, who divided the world into things that were “nice” and things that were “uncalled for”. No one in mid-century Australia was calling for a mocking comedy that ridiculed suburban mores – and by association, narrow-minded, unsophisticated Australia itself. But that’s what Humphries gave them, first with “Mrs Norm Everage”, the surprisingly demure first incarnation of his greatest creation...
Brian Logan, Guardian, April 2023
Birth
‘My mother used to say, “We don’t know where Barry came from.”
Barry Humphries was born on 17 February 1934 in the suburb of Kew in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of Eric Humphries (1905–1972), a prosperous builder who put up smart new villas for Melbourne’s aspiring middle classes, and his wife Louisa Agnes (née Brown, 1907–1984).
"Like his irrepressible creation, Humphries was formed in the mock-Tudor villas and exquisitely calibrated social distinctions of Melbourne suburbia. Humphries’ mother claimed she could read her son like a book. In relating this in later life, he would waspishly point out that she never read any books."
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Early life in Melbourne
"Less than a year after Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, I was born in Melbourne. My birthplace was an ugly red-brick hospital in Kew."
"[My parents] both came from the working-class suburb of Thornbury and thanks to the growing success of my father's business they had moved to Camberwell on the fringes of the metropolitan area, from the heights of which could be seen the lavender blue parapet of the Dandenongs." The address was 36 Christowel Street.
"I used to bicycle to my prep school through those streets when cars were few and in the autumn, my favourite month, when the leaves were swept into Kellogg's-coloured pyramids. After a few applications of a Bryant May, the fragrant creamy smoke trickled out over the damp suburban gardens. The banning of incinerators and autumnal bonfires was a death blow to the aromatic Melbourne of my youth."
"When I was moved by my parents to an expensive school in South Yarra the transport arrangements were more complicated. Usually I took a suburban train to Flinders Street and a tram along St Kilda Road. The train ride into town in a first class non-smoker was always a good reading opportunity and the compartments with their green banquettes were embellished with faded sepia photographs of Victorian beauty spots under glass. Yarra Glenn, Warrnambool, the Grampians, Marysville, Sorrento. Figures curiously dressed in the attire of the past could occasionally be seen with parasols on sepia beaches or posing jauntily under huge tree ferns or by waterfalls at Sassafras. None of these railway murals made me ever wish to visit the beauty spots depicted thereon. I was more interested in going to England, a mythical place full of castles, thatched cottages, Beefeaters and Winston Churchill."
"Going into the city was always a ritual I enjoyed with my mother, for it meant hats, gloves, crumbed whiting at the Wattle Tea Rooms or creamed sweet corn (undoubtedly out of a tin) at Russell Collins. We would only shop in Collins Street. Bourke Street was mostly out of bounds except for Myers and Buckleys. The upper reaches of Bourke Street were thought common and there were second hand bookshops around the eastern market — a paradise for germs. The Melbourne Jewish artist Horace Brodsky, friend of Modigliani whom I knew in the '60s in London when he was in the ninth decade of his life, recalled the Melbourne of his youth when people promenading in Collins Street would never dream of setting foot in the raffish purlieus of Bourke Street two blocks away. There was, he told me, a discernible difference, not merely in the attire of the pedestrians in Melbourne's two parallel thoroughfares but also in their dialect."
The Age, 7 October 2005
Barry's 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, Camberwell, then one of Melbourne's new "garden suburbs". Barry has referred to Melbourne at this time as "Cheltenham in the jungle".
Education
Educated first at Camberwell Grammar School, Humphries was awarded a place in the school's gallery of achievement. As his father's building business prospered, Humphries was sent to Melbourne Grammar School (‘a pathetic imitation of an English public school’) where he spurned sport, detested mathematics, shirked cadets "on the basis of conscientious objection" and matriculated with strong results in English and art. Humphries described this schooling, in a Who's Who entry, as "self-educated, attended Melbourne Grammar School".
Humphries spent two years studying at the University of Melbourne, where he studied law, philosophy and fine arts. 'He dropped out to become an itinerant actor and an anarchic performance artist, playing grotesque practical jokes on unsuspecting members of the public (one of his favourite stunts involved eating vomit from Melbourne pavements – actually a tinned concoction called Russian salad).'
William Cook, The Oldie
Though he did not graduate from university, 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 he mounted in Melbourne were experiments in anarchy and visual satire which have become part of Australian folklore. An exhibit entitled "Puss 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.
Education 2
Australia is the most boring country in the world. That’s what we were taught at school. I attended the most expensive school in the southern hemisphere, and I was educated by the cheapest schoolmasters in Melbourne. They were a collection of dotards and ignoramuses, but the school’s academic reputation was rescued by its generous quota of bright scholarship boys.
During our Australian history period we all fell into a deep post-prandial torpor. Bleak tales of bearded explorers dying of thirst and being speared by Aborigines convinced us to never, ever venture into that place far away, called the ‘Outback’. The Outback seemed a lot further away than Winnipeg, a place we learnt a great deal about. We also learnt a lot about Huddersfield and Wolverhampton, and we could pinpoint them on a map of England and tell you their populations and their principal products.
We had a house on 30 acres of bush at Healesville, 41 miles from Melbourne, which my parents thought safe in the event of a Japanese invasion, but the wildlife was considered to be the principal danger. Snakes lurked under every log, and the old albums are full of snaps of my grandfather proudly displaying a decapitated serpent (usually a harmless one) writhing on his shovel or pitchfork.
Redback spiders were another venomous hazard, enjoying their traditional habitat under the wooden seats of all Australian outdoor privies. Perhaps the reason why so many of my contemporaries were constipated.
The Telegraph, 15 November 2021