Working with  Barry Humphries

ROSS FITZGERALD

Barry Humphries and I were friends for more than 60 years.

We drank together, got sober together, and also worked with each other.

In 1972, when we were two years sober, I played a small role in Barry’s raucous Australian comedy, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.  In this path-breaking Australian film (or “fillum” as my father used to say), Barry not only played Edna Everage but a number of other characters as well, including the mad psychiatrist, Dr Humphrey de Lamphrey. I was one of Bazza’s mates farewelling him at Sydney airport on his first visit to England.

It was Barry Humphries who on Guy Fawkes Day (5 November )1974, introduced me to my future wife and friend of 45 years, the model and actor Lyndal Moor, who was then living with one of Australia’s richest men, Clyde Packer. At the time he was also Barry’s manager. 

This occurred at a very strong AA meeting at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, near Sydney’s Kings Cross – after which Lyndal never drank alcohol again. 

When she ditched Clyde Packer (who fled to America never to return) to marry me, Barry quipped: “Lyndal went from diamonds to boiled lollies!” 

On Guy Fawkes Day, 1976 Barry attended our wedding ceremony. His present was The Complete Oxford Dictionary, compressed into two large volumes, and accompanied by a magnifying glass to enable us to read the small print. In the front, Barry wrote: “For darling Lyndal and Ross. In case you ever have ‘words’.”

A year before, Barry and I  created one of his truly dreadful characters. This was the radical, fervently anti-capitalist schoolteacher, Craig Steppenwolf.  Barry & I also co-wrote the script.

In November 1975, Quadrant Magazine featured a front-page photograph of Barry as Craig. Inside that issue was our script, which began:

Barry Humphries and Ross Fitzgerald,

Craig Steppenwolf:
A monologue for the music-hall.

“This is the text of one of the new characters in Barry Humphries’ latest show, At Least You Can Say You’ve Seen It, now in Melbourne.

Scene: An Australian suburban classroom. A large blackboard has been defaced with crude and ill-spelt slogans. “HANS OFF AMIN”, ‘FUG TEECHER’ etc. On a table rests a plastic bucket full of human excrement.

Attired in quasi-military gear. CRAIG STEPPENWOLF enters.

Music: “Schooldays. Schooldays, Dear old golden rule days.”

Craig sits, and “class” commences.

“As you were. Good morning class. My name is Craig Steppenwolf. B.A., DIP. ED, under the old bullshit elitist system.

Now since we grooved together last term. I myself, and thousands of other committed ex-schoolteachers like me have spent two weeks up at the government’s new intensive re-training centre at Puckapunyal. I’m here to tell you that from now on the Education Department’s new across-the-board grassroots de-educational strategy will be fully operational throughout the state. Do you read me?

Most of you will have noticed a few radical changes in what used to be called “the classroom”, or as the State now suggests we designate it: The DE-LEARNING LABORATORY.

First up, inhibiting desks and chairs have been abolished in favour of these new BLACK POLYESTER MATTRESSES, and I want all of you kids, or rather “participators” to feel entirely free to do whatever you want with whoever you want, whenever you want, and however you want to do it. Do you read me?”

It seems to me that the character of “Craig Steppenwolf, radical schoolteacher” is as timely today, as he was in the 1970s.

    As it happens, I was with Barry at his very first appearance as Les Patterson. When I was living in an upstairs flat in Crown St, in Sydney’s Surry Hills , Barry asked would I come with him to the Rooty Hill RSL club in the outer suburbs. It was 1973.

Shortly after we sat down in the auditorium, Barry got up and said: “I’ll be back soon.” A little while later, a nondescript bloke in a crumpled suit stumbled on stage and said: “Gidday. Name’s Leslie Colin Patterson. Manager, Rooty Hill.” He then delivered a meandering monologue on the theme “Time waits for no man”. It took me couple of minutes to realise it was Barry! 

This was before Barry converted Les into Australia’s dribbling dipsomaniacal Minister for the Yartz, with his super-huge appendage.

Barry often told me that Les Patterson was the character he enjoyed playing the most . This was because, as a long-time sober person he could channel all of his many negativities into the dreadful, 24/7 drunkard, Sir Les. 

Barry chose the surname Patterson after I told him that Australia’s only Communist Party Member of Parliament was the Queensland MLA for Bowen from 1944 to 1950 Fred Paterson, whose biography I later wrote, titled  The People’s Champion.

Barry and I often bounced ideas off each other about introducing possible new characters, including someone with a face like a fish. 

Barry told me that, indirectly this resulted in the following extremely politically incorrect scene and interchange in the 1987 movie  Les Patterson Saves The World :

Sir Les walks into a house, looks at a portrait and says: “Last time I saw a mouth like that it had a hook in it.” 

When the other man says, “ It is my daughter”, Sir Les responds. “ Oh, she’s so beautiful!” 

This dialogue was typical of the gross Sir Les in the 1980s

In fact, Les Patterson Saves The World bombed at the box office. Co-written by Humphries and his third wife Diane Millstead, co-starring Pamela Anderson and directed by George Miller, this utterly anti-woke, over- the-top movie was a very funny comedy, for its time. 

In it Australia’s uncouth  Ambassador to the United Nations and President of the Australian Cheese Board  joins forces with Dame Edna Everage to foil a bio-terror attack ordered by Colonel Richard Godowni of the Gulf State of Abu Niveah.

One of my favourite scenes is when, stopped at international customs because she was carrying masses of Valium in her handbag, Edna proclaimed, “Valium’s not a drug. It’s a food!”

Barry and my mother, Edna Fitzgerald, were friends. When she was invited to a performance in Melbourne Dame Edna once said, pointing at my Mum,  “There’s a real Edna here tonight. She’s going to be so cross I mentioned her!”

Although on the surface they were utterly different, our respective fathers were also close to each other.

When Barry and I were still on the booze, Eric Humphries, a conservative builder from Camberwell, said to my dad, Bill Fitzgerald, who in the early 1930s had captained Collingwood Football Club seconds: “I was so worried about Barry, Bill, I couldn’t play golf on Tuesday.” 

These poignant words remind me so much of Barry’s most endearing character, Sandy Stone, who like Eric Humphries always spoke with a sibilant.

My mother and  father would have been so pleased by the fact that, when I still working at Griffith University in Brisbane, I was instrumental in enabling Barry Humphries  to be awarded an honorary doctorate there, for his many services to the arts in Australia.

Ross Fitzgerald is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University. His recent books, all published by Hybrid in Melbourne, include a memoir, Fifty Years Sober: An Alcoholic’s Journey, and the Grafton Everest political satires, co-authored with Ian McFadyen, The Lowest Depths, in which Russia’s dictatorial Vladimir Putrid is assassinated; and Pandemonium, in which the hapless Dr Professor Grafton Everest is now Secretary-General of the shambolic United Nations.  

Rowan Dean (ed)  The Many lives of Barry Humphries: A treasury of reminiscences – Wilkinson Publishing: Melbourne 2023 pp 76-82.