In 1959 Barry Humphries moved to London, where he lived and worked throughout the 1960s. 

 

"He belonged to a batch of Australian wunderkinds who took Britain by storm in the 1960s. They included art critic and historian Robert Hughes, feminist writer Germaine Greer, and poet, critic, entertainer, and all-round polymath Clive James.

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"If you grew up in this atmosphere (as I did), it was equally natural, when you reached your later teenage years, to throw a pack on your back, make your way up South-East Asia, and then fly to London, where you were entitled to work (Earls Court in West London was so packed with young Australian travellers that it was called “Kangaroo Court”). This was the cultural environment that shaped an Australian national pride in the success of its brilliant sons and daughters in the “mother country” (a term then not quite archaic) as well as British receptivity to their exotic antipodean-ness.

 

"All this became a subject of joking as well as recrimination, but it is important to the story of Barry Humphries because, while no less cosmopolitan and learned than his peers, he made the most of his Australian-ness. He was born in Melbourne, after all, a city of free settlers known (in those days) as staid and conservative. Sydney, on the other hand, was the convict settlement with a reputation for larrikinism and loose morals (in the ’60s it was home to “the push,” a loose collection of hard-drinking, free-loving artists and anarchists). Humphries grew up in a respectable family in the seemly middle-class suburb of Camberwell, attending a posh private school and then Melbourne University. Nothing in this lineage would have suggested his outrageous career and eccentric persona, but it provided him with the raw material for all his characters, including his most well-known and beloved, Dame Edna Everage.

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"Edna was a combination of matriarchal dowager, uncouth philistine, and celebrity narcissist. She combined the social snobbery and rudeness of Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh with the ambition and vulgarity of Madonna and the self-obsession of Dylan Mulvaney.

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"Humphries’s third [ after Sir Les] enduring character was...was arguably his most important. Alexander Horace “Sandy” Stone lived at 36 Gallipoli Crescent, Glen Iris, Melbourne with his wife Beryl. (It is hard to imagine a more Australian address. The Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey was where Australian troops were blooded in the First World War and the event is still commemorated as the nation’s day of mourning for its war dead.) In contrast to the brash, bombastic Edna and Les, Sandy was an elderly and infirm but dignified and self-effacing gentleman, who would sit in his pyjamas and dressing gown clutching a water bottle and intone, in a diffident murmur, recollections and reveries about his earlier life.
Stone was a vestige of a vanished world—the Australia of Humphries’s own childhood in the 1930s and ’40s, to which he now gave voice.

"In later performances, Sandy—who never seemed far removed from dementia and death, even at his most vigorous—appeared as a ghost, lamenting this lost era. On one occasion, he described the transfer of his old Gallipoli Crescent home to a family of “New Australians” from Vietnam. Though lampoonery of that lacklustre suburban universe remained the chief theme, the tone was more appreciative and sometimes as much tribute as satire. Sandy became not just a counterpoint to Edna and Les, but also a kind of apology for them to the Sandys of that lost world.

"This was an expression, at a personal level, of Humphries’s own somewhat patrician and dandy-esque social conservatism, which courted the bohemian but also acknowledged the indispensable role of those solid, hard-working, un-glamorous citizens like Humphries’s own parents, who keep society going—those Australians whom the long-serving prime minister of the 1950s and ’60s, Sir Robert Menzies, called “the forgotten people.” It may be that Sandy’s humility will outlast the stridency of Edna and Les to become Humphries’s most enduring contribution to comedy. And with his passing, the last brilliant flare illuminating that world has been extinguished.

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Andrew Gleeson, Quilette, April 2023