The taxi trip to Her Majesty’s Theatre to see Barry Humphries in his Melbourne “farewell” show which stretched on and on, took me back to the time when taxi drivers had an opinion on virtually everything. Much like Sir Les Patterson and indeed Australian taxi drivers of yesteryear, my middle-aged Anglo-Australian cabbie (a rare sighting these days) was determined to speak his mind on all matters Australian and wasn’t going to be nobbled by politically prescribed nonsense.
I asked him why his availability light was off when he was clearly free.
“You’d have to be mad to advertise your availability on nights when dickheads roam the streets,” he said.
Going by the spew that ends up on our footpaths, I guess he had a point. It is this aspect of Australian culture that Barry Humphries captured so well through his perpetually chundering creations Bazza McKenzie and Sir Les Patterson. Humphries taps into a dark vein of bigotry that runs deep in Australian culture and transfuses it into characters like Sir Les, who blows it back, like a torched fart, into the faces of those who pine for a time when Australia was white, male-dominated and free of wogs, poofs and left-leaning sheilas.
As my taxi driver approached the theatre, he asked why an “ethnic” like me would be interested in Humphries.
“Because he’s our national treasure,” I said.
“Treasure? Who under the age of 25, let alone a wog like you value what Humphries has to say?” he replied.
“Look,” I said, “Humphries may not be as popular with wogs and kids, but I reckon he’s as culturally significant as, say, Phar Lap or Bradman.”
“You put a horse in the same league as The Don?” he asked. “Actually, I’d put the horse ahead of The Don,” I said. “After all, we have a place for Phar Lap’s heart in the National Museum of Australia for school kids, families and overseas guests to visit and admire.”
“The Don, as with test cricket, stood for all that was great about this country before your mob and university-educated wankers ruined the place.” As I paid my fare, my taxi driver suggested that I visit the Bradman Museum in Bowral where The Don’s baggy green sits like a religious relic in a display case as a reminder of how great this country once was.
Bowral is particularly renowned these days for its fancy retirement homes, boutique shops and cafes. It would suit empty nesters and retirees of Edna’s generation well, although I can’t imagine the Dame in a Bowral coffee shop discussing the literary merits of Fifty Shades of Grey over a cup of Earl Grey with senior residents.
As announced in the farewell show, Edna will be retiring to somewhere exotic. Why settle for Bowral, Byron or Noosa when you can shack up in the South Yarra of Bali, Ubud.
On a darker note, I can’t imagine Dame Edna living out her twilight years in an institution where imported Asian aged-care workers serve flavourless pap and give kerosene baths to senior citizens. This is essentially how Sandy Stone, Humphries’ most endearing character, described the aged-care facility where his wife lived out her years.
Although Sandy’s characterisation of our nursing homes brought nervous chuckles from the audience on the night, some of the Australian public weren’t as forgiving when Humphries declared late last year that his wife had the right-shaped eyes to become an Australian citizen.
He got into deeper strife after a series of satirical jibes about transgender people, which resulted in his name being stripped from The Melbourne International Comedy Festival festival’s biggest award.
The point often missed by those who are quick to criticise Humphries is that artful satirists of his calibre are full-time troublemakers unafraid to stir things up in or out of character. Apart from, say, Chris Lilley and, perhaps, Paul Fenech, these types are thin on the Australian comedy scene.
In the farewell show which I attended, Humphries came up with the slimiest character imaginable, Sir Les Patterson’s brother, Gerard, a Catholic priest who proudly claimed that he has “touched everyone he has ever met”. Gerard is a long way from Bazza, Sir Les, and Sandy, but he is frightfully fitting for our time. And it is quite spooky how Australia’s greatest iconoclast went the same way as the disgraced Cardinal Pell who also died after complication from hip surgery. I can imagine Humphries standing in line at “the celestial box office”, as he once put it, fashioning a deliciously decadent satirical piece on a weird end to a life dedicated to ‘fucking around’ with everything that we considered sacred.
So, who will be our next national treasure now that Humphries has buggered off? Perhaps it will be, as my cabbie insisted, an Australian cricketer. It may even be a racehorse. Whoever it is, they better be as brave as our shit-stirring Barry.
Chris Fotinopoulos is a Melbourne writer and teacher, whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Age, Neos Kosmos, Crikey, nd The Herald Sun.