The Barry McKenzie Movies by Tony Moore

Author:Tony Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency Press

But it’s not just unsophisticated politicians and cynical bureaucrats who are in Humphries’ and Beresford’s sights. Every crank idea and trendy cause of the ’70s cops a spray of the always-foaming Fosters. As Bazza puts it in the ‘Ratbag Song’:

A ratbag is a sheila or a bloke

Who’s kind of funny,

But who never sees the joke.

The song salutes a galaxy of ratbags, including ‘anonymous phoners’, ‘sperm-bank donors’, ‘poofta liberators’, scientologists and ‘everyone in Ireland’. Humphries was building on his mid-’60s character Neil Singleton, a beatnik-bearded, left-wing pseudo-academic described by Craig McGregor as Humphries’ ‘most savage and most perceptive stage satire so far’.38 We know we’re taking no prisoners when Bazza bumps into Rhonda Cutforth-Jones (Merdelle Jordine), the black, posh-accented, feminist editor of Jet Set. Rhonda asks Edna if she’s ever ‘balled a chick’ and Edna replies with a crooked smile that ‘I may be old fashioned, young lady, but lesbianism has always left a nasty taste in my mouth’.

And what of the colourful racist invective thrown around with such redneck abandon, beginning with the continuous disparagement of the English? At a time when Australia was busily apologising for the recently ended White Australia Policy, Holds His Own shows a bunch of white blokes terribly anxious about other races. Old prejudices were clearly dying hard if its Australian ambassador can say to a Transylvanian who wants to immigrate:

We don’t want types like you undermining our wonderful institutions and unique lifestyle, crawlin’ like termites through the fabric of our nationhood. We got too many chink lovers as it is.

Despite having come from a country in the throes of a massive immigration program and a government pledged to land rights and a racial-discrimination act, Bazza and his mates don’t care much for ‘abos’, ‘heathen chinee’, ‘yellerens’, ‘frogs’, ‘wogs’ and ‘dagos’. Bazza does not mince words when he stumbles upon an expensively couturied Rhonda Cutforth-Jones emerging from an airline toilet with Dr de Lamphrey:

How come a clean-living Australian bloke like me cops so many knockbacks, when a dirty, Ikey Mo type bastard like you cracks it for a knee trembler with an Abo in an airborne dunny?’

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