Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Barry Humphries was many things: a satirist, a raconteur, an actor, a force of nature. His rise to fame in the 1960s came at a time when Australian cultural identity was changing on a fundamental level. There was a growing realisation that Britishness was no longer a viable basis for our identity and that there was an urgent need to reformulate our national image. It was the era of new nationalism and the cultural cringe. Many artists and creatives felt a kind of shame based on the cultural cringe, but Barry Humphries was unwilling to let a crisis of national cultural identity go to waste, so he doubled down on it. He gave the cultural cringe a human form in Bazza McKenzie, Sir Les Patterson and, of course, Dame Edna Everage. Dame Edna was the product of Australia's need to recast its place in the world and its image of itself. Barry himself said:

In Edna I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia.

Overseas, these characters acted as self-appointed envoys for the new Australia, while being unapologetic relics of the old. Barry and his alter egos endeared themselves to audiences in the UK and the United States, finding extraordinary success on stage and screen across several decades. In these settings his satire took on an Australian sensibility, often needling at classism, prudishness and the cult of celebrity. He never indulged the self-importance of others because who could be more important than Dame Edna? Gough Whitlam commented that the only Imperial honour he ever bestowed was upon Dame Edna, a moment immortalised in the final scenes of Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.

Barry's characters helped to create a distinctly Australian genre of satire based on self-deprecation and caricature that has enriched our culture for decades. Each of his characters is iconic in their own way, yet each is very different to the other. You felt that you'd met them all before because, in a sense, you had. They were the product of Barry's keen observations of human nature and mannerisms.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10 : 42 to 10 : 55

I'll pick up where I left off in celebrating Barry Humphries. We did love Bazza. All these characters and Barry Humphries's satire were an important part of the evolution of Australia's cultural identity, and their cultural impact will long outlast him. Rather than resile from ockerisms as an embarrassing relic of the past, Barry hammed them up. He repopularised outdated slang terms and coined new euphemisms. There was, of course, the liquid laugh and the technicolour yawn. Many of his contributions to the Australian lexicon could be considered unparliamentary, so I'll resist the temptation to provide a few further examples. He took great glee in repopularising Australian idioms and slang that had long fallen out of common usage. In doing so, he pioneered a kind of performative Australianness that I think many of us are familiar with and indulge in—the kind of humour that tends to emerge only when foreign audiences are watching.

Those who knew Barry Humphries privately talk of a charming, generous, witty and warm-hearted man. Their feeling of loss at this time must be profound, and I extend my deepest sympathies to his family and his many friends around the world. Notwithstanding his success across seven decades, and notwithstanding the position he held in the constellation of Australian fame, Barry Humphries believed that you should never exempt yourself from ridicule. He said:

I can laugh at myself, I think it's one of the precious things Dame Nature gave me … I think if you can't laugh at yourself you might be missing the joke of the century.

In the passing of one man we have lost a host of colourful and very often ridiculous characters. We've lost a mirror to ourselves, a reflection that we've cringed at and laughed at. More importantly, we've lost one of the finest satirists of a generation, a national treasure and a cultural icon. It's very appropriate that there will be a state memorial for Barry Humphries AO CBE held at the Sydney Opera House in December. His family have accepted the offer, and it will be co-hosted by the Australian and New South Wales governments. We hope that Barry Humphries rests in peace, and we also hope that his legendary words and mannerisms long live on.

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