The Astor, 123 Macquarie Street
This is one of the places where Barry Humphries stayed in Sydney,
a beautiful location overlooking the Botanical Gardens. He lived there for much of the late 1970s and 1980s and seems to have sold it in 1987.
"A unique apartment in the famed Astor in Macquarie Street, first configured from 3 apartments (apartments 82 & 91 were incorporated) by Barry Humphries some 30 years ago. With two levels of uncompromising luxury, this superb apartment provides unparalleled sweeping views of the Botanic Gardens, Opera House, main harbour and the eastern suburbs."
(My photo above: Sydney, April 2018)
He then lived in Villa Florida, "a stunning mansion in Sydney's Rose Bay," having purchased the home in 1986 for $1.75million and then selling it five years later for $2.52million.
Completed in 1923, The Astor represented an entirely new concept in Australian residential living; private ownership of individual apartments. Located at 123 Macquarie Street the building was thirteen storeys high, Sydney’s first ‘skyscraper’. The 52 ultra-modern flats provided expansive views of the harbour.
Some of the flats have been amalgamated to form much larger properties. Barry Humphries cheekily installed illegal stairs to connect with the flat he had purchased on the floor above. (Pauline Conolly)
The fact that the flat roof is on a level with Killara, the North Sydney suburb which boasts of a most salubrious altitude, makes it the most desirable dwelling place in Sydney, for it provides a town home which obviates the necessity of jaunts to the Blue Mountains in search of ozone that city folk so frequently need.
(Table Talk November 8 1923)
Despite his and Dame Edna's Melbourne roots, Humphries's Sydney association is significant and enduring. He first came as a child, holidaying with his parents, Eric and Louisa, and returned in 1956 as a young adult to act at the influential Phillip Street Theatre. He lived in Tamarama with the first of his four wives, in a disliked house haunted by a former tenant who committed suicide by "putting her head in the oven".
Nowadays, when in town, he lives in a modern apartment building in The Rocks overlooking the harbour where his late friend Margaret Olley painted her last work from the balcony. "I love looking at the water," he says. "I'm an Aquarian. If you're living in Sydney you might as well live by the water."
Anthony Dennis, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 2012
Bondi Beach, early (?) 1970s
Notes from some theatrical programmes
held in the National Library of Australia
1956 14 December; Phillip Street Theatre (Sydney, New South Wales)
Alice in Wonderland; pantomime
Barry Humphries as ‘Caterpillar’, ‘Mad Hatter’ and ‘7 of Spades’.
1968 19 August; Tivoli Theatre, Sydney, New South Wales
J.C. Williamson Theatres Ltd. with Clifford Hocking
Just a show
Barry Humphries as ‘Dame Edna’, ‘Sandy Stone’, ‘Rex Lear’, ‘Lionel Stephen’,
‘Denis Hunter’, ‘Big Sonia’, ‘Martin Agrippa’ and ‘Brian Graham’
‘Accompaniste’ Marnie Hall; stage management, Donald Harris
New characters
Humphries created an underground art-film-maker called Martin Agripa for one of his live shows. Along with Bruce Beresford he made a Martin Agripa film, which Beresford later showed at genuine screenings of art films, where it was hailed as a masterpiece of the genre! (unchecked)
It was time to give up alcohol (at least for a while), rejoin his second wife Rosalind and his two daughters, and go home again, where he presented Excuse I at the old Theatre Royal in Sydney, in which a new character called Neil Singleton made his first appearance.
Neil was a bearded, turtle-necked, wine-buffing left-winger — and, in Humphries’ view at least, he turned the class he represented against him. The intelligentsia revelled in the mockery of characters they would never meet at their own parties, but Neil Singleton was something else, and it was then that attacks on Humphries began in what he called the “arty periodicals”.
The Edna in "Excuse I" had changed from a comical frump to a middle-class lady wearing the first of a series of increasingly preposterous diamante spectacles that made her look like a colour plate from Insect Wonders of Australia. The show was a huge success, and for the first time Edna rewarded her admirers with hurled gladioli, which rained down on them like arrows at Agincourt.
Just A Show, which followed three years later in 1968, introduced another character designed to irritate the arty community — Martin Agrippa, an avant-garde filmmaker, who presented a short movie of astonishing pretension (specially made for the show by Bruce Beresford).
Brian Oakley
