Barry Humphries condolence motion House of Representatives 10th May 2023

Barry Humphries was many things: a writer, an actor, a painter and a performer, but at his core he was a satirist.

Of his most famous creation, Dame Edna Everage, he said, 'In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne—a large provincial English city, paradoxically in far South-East Asia.' Humphries observed people, particularly Australians, with extraordinary acuity, and the acuteness of his observation led us to laugh with self-recognition.

Making Australians laugh at themselves was not necessarily an easy thing in the 1950s and sixties. Our national character has a significant streak of insecurity, but the fact that we are considerably better at laughing at ourselves today than perhaps we were when Humphries first started owes much to his extraordinary work and career.

In many ways, he helped to make us a more confident nation. His acute observation of human behaviour was one aspect of his comedy and his writing, but so too was his love of the English language and for the distinctive variety of the language we use in Australia. Of course, it turns out that some of our distinctive phrases did not start out as an authentic expression of feeling by ordinary Australians. Instead, phrases such as 'point Percy at the porcelain', 'technicolour yawn' and 'liquid laugh' were mischievously coined by Barry Humphries and later taken up to a greater or lesser extent by others.

Phrases used by Humphries's characters, such as Sandy Stone saying that he had had a bit of strife parking the vehicle, drew on his sharp observation of the way Australians use language. Humphries was born into a prosperous family, and attended private schools Camberwell Grammar and Melbourne Grammar—and Melbourne university, at a time when few Australians went to university.

As Humphries records in his autobiography, More Please: An Autobiography: 'Most of my contemporaries at school entered the world of business, the logical destiny of bores. No more than eight members of the entire sixth form went on to university. I remember that one of our masters proudly collected the names of old boys who had 'done well'. These he recorded in a small book. It was a very small book.'

Humphries enjoyed his time at university and threw himself into drama and comedy. He began to work with increasing success as an actor and performer. As a satirist, notwithstanding his establishment background, he poked fun at Melbourne society and its pretensions. As his career and life expanded beyond Melbourne, the range of his satirical targets widened, including, I'm sorry to say, the people of Sydney, with his autobiography containing this tart observation from the time in the late 1950s when he was a regular in the Phillip Street revues in Sydney, 'I was stranded amongst people who could not even muster the glottal energy to pronounce the 'd' in the name of their own city.'

By 1959 both Melbourne and Sydney were too small for Humphries, and he moved to London where he established himself as an actor and comedian—particularly developing his preferred format of solo stage revues, where his characters included Edna Everage, Sandy Stone and Sir Les Patterson. Of course, he ultimately became an extremely well-known figure in Britain and in Australia, indeed achieving success with stage shows and television in the US as well. Barry Humphries's career and life very much challenges stereotypes about Australians and what we value. He was an accomplished painter, he wrote a great deal and he was somebody deeply interested in culture and art.

Thankfully, today our notions of suitable areas of passion and interest for Australians, and particularly Australian men, are much less prescriptive than they appeared to be in 1940s and 1950s Melbourne.

All that said, Humphries was very much an Australian, with a considerable affection for this country and a fascination for its society, its values and its language. It was that fascination which helped him to be such a close observer of Australian life and, in turn, such a devastatingly effective satirist. Part of that was that he was prepared to say things which caused others offence. Indeed, it was part of his work as a satirist, and he spoke of the important function satire plays in a healthy society, saying, 'I'm a great believer in the power of satire to expose the follies and hypocrisies of our times. It's a way of holding up a mirror to society and saying, "Look how ridiculous you are."

Certainly, with his character Sir Les Patterson, he took ruthless aim at the pretentions and self-delusions of politicians. Describing his important role, Sir Les had this to say: 'I'm a diplomat, mate. I've got the highest credentials in the country. I'm the Australian minister for culture.' This can only be understood as making fun of anybody sufficiently pompous and self-important as to occupy the role of Minister for the Arts of the Commonwealth of Australia! I hope the current Minister for the Arts feels the same pang of self recognition as I do as the former holder of that office.

In effect, Barry Humphries is saying to us, 'You've been sprung; we're onto you.' In our national parliament it is appropriate that we mark the lives of Australians who have had an outsized impact on the life of our nation and the broader world. Barry Humphries was one such Australian. For many decades he amused us and provoked us. He was a mirror on our lives and practices and pretentions.

His life was long, rich and varied. He was married four times and is survived by his wife, Lizzie Spender, his daughters Tessa and Emily, and his sons Rupert and Oscar.

On behalf of the coalition, I express my deep gratitude for the life and work of Barry Humphries. Our condolences to his family.