A Letter from Paris by Louisa Deasey

Author:Louisa Deasey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, TRV010000, BIO006000, HIS037070
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Barry Humphries was one of the first to make light of this sense of Australian complacency and insularity in his comedy sketches. Dad was thrilled when he discovered Humphries’ work, feeling an affinity with Humphries’ entertaining theatrics and digs at Australian inertia: both had played similar surrealist pranks on Melbourne trams.

In 1958, when Humphries brought his comic characters to a wider audience on the Wild Life in Suburbia EP (a collaboration with Arthur Boyd’s cousin, Robin Boyd), dad played the record to all who would listen. Geoff Dutton, returned to Australia by then and editing the literary magazine Australian Letters, listened to the recording with dad and Gisèle over dinner, and commissioned dad to interview Humphries. Dad’s interview with Humphries about Dame Edna was published in 1959, the first article to explore this unique act. Until then, most Australians had seen Humphries as someone who ‘dressed in drag’.

When I took a break from the Dutton and Aldington letters to make my way across from the library to the National Portrait Gallery for lunch, I caught sight of a giant portrait of Humphries in the gallery’s main area. That same portrait, by Clifton Pugh, had run alongside dad’s article.

I already knew about dad’s connection with Barry Humphries. I’d discovered it while travelling around Australia in 2006. I had just seen his show in Perth, and I’d been so awestruck I pitched an interview to Sunday Life magazine, not knowing how or if I could even get to talk to him. But within forty-eight hours I was on the phone to him, and the first thing he asked was if I was any relation to Denison Deasey.

Aware that we had limited phone time, I didn’t want to press him, but the question gave me a surge of emotion. I told him that dad had died when I was very young, so I didn’t know much about him.

‘You must look into it,’ he said, emphatic. ‘It’s your history.’

I was living in Fremantle at the time, far from dad’s boxes in the library, and it was only a year or so after that awful first attempt to read his papers. Humphries talked about dad for another few minutes, about how he’d made some introductions in his life that had proved important, before giving me what I needed for the magazine story in our remaining ten minutes: his impressions of arriving back in Australia after three years in England.

‘My assaults on suburbia were my only defence against the creeping boredom that Melbourne in the fifties seemed to exude,’ he said, echoing reams of dad’s diary entries.

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