Barry, Edna & us

The death of Dame Edna Everage creator Barry Humphries has been marked by tributes examining his place in Australian popular culture. He had a lasting impact in New Zealand, too. 

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

In his long, brilliant and Technicolor career, the late great Barry Humphries sometimes had a bit of a funny time in New Zealand. In the first of his two memoirs, More Please, the Australian polymath wrote about one tour that had to cancel its Christchurch season. A local paper didn’t like the sound of his show, “An Evening’s Intercourse with Barry Humphries”. It refused any ad with the word “intercourse”. Without the Garden City dates, the tour suffered financially.

He also had a bit of a funny time with some New Zealanders. Humphries was inspirational in creative lives from this side of the Tasman, including those of CK Stead and John Clarke, and he collaborated with many other Kiwis along the way.

Humphries came here early in a theatre career which he’d begun as a dandy Dadaist provocateur in his student days at the University of Melbourne. Edna Everage first appeared on an Auckland stage in 1962 when she was still the shrill, dowdy housewife from Moonee Ponds and a work in progress.

Humphries brought Edna and other characters like doleful widower Sandy Stone and permanently soused cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson here for the last time 50 years later.

NZ had been a Humphries early adopter, even before Edna’s television mega-stardom.

“We’re on the same laughter fault line,” he told the Listener in 1984 as Edna prepared to present that year’s Feltex Television Awards.

Edna made fun of us. As Max Cryer wrote in this magazine in 1988: “Her comments about New Zealand are fairly frequent with a kind of acidic affection – though often leaning more heavily on the acid than the affection.”