Barry Humphries was from Camberwell but Melbourne’s Dame Edna was from Moonee Ponds

Barry Humphries was born in Kew and it was in Melbourne that his greatest creation, Dame Edna, was conceived. It was a city he both loved, and loved to mock.

Dame Edna Everage was conceived in Melbourne, the city Barry Humphries grew up in and attended school and university. Picture: Rohan Kelly.

Barry Humphries loved Melbourne, he just didn’t like the reimagining of the city’s historic facade by developers.

John Barry Humphries was born in Kew in 1934 and it was in Melbourne that his greatest creation Dame Edna was conceived.

The son of a construction manager and a homemaker, Humphries, 89, grew up in Camberwell, attended Camberwell Grammar School, then Melbourne

Grammar before being accepted into Melbourne University where he spent two years studying law, philosophy and fine arts.

While he did not finish his degree, he received an honorary doctorate of law from the University almost 50 years later.

It was at Melbourne University where he held his first exhibition of his absurdist Dada art, and wrote and performed songs and sketches in university revues, before joining the newly formed Melbourne Theatre Company.

During this fertile period of writing and performing his best-known character, a caricature of a conservative Australian suburban housewife, Edna Everage emerged.

Australian performer Barry Humphries has died. Picture: Britta Campion

A sketch featuring Mrs Norm Everage, called ‘Olympic Hostess’ premiered at Melbourne University’s Union Theatre in December 1955.

Humphries placed Everage as a proud resident of Moonee Ponds, one of Melbourne’s inner north west suburbs.

“I love Camberwell so much that I made Dame Edna come from Moonee Ponds instead,” the actor quipped in 2004.

Everage, an eccentrically dressed, sharp-tongued, often inappropriate, egomaniac, became the perfect satirical vehicle for Humphries - Edna could say and do almost anything in the name of comedy and get away with it, and did so for the best part of six decades.

Humphries wrote in his 1993 memoir, More Please, that he had created a character similar to Edna in the back of a bus while touring country Victoria with the MTC at the age of 20.

He gave thanks to his mentor, Peter O’Shaughnessy, for supporting and encouraging his development of the Edna character, rather than letting him discard her.

Humphries moved to Sydney in 1957, but in September of that year appeared in Waiting for Godot for the Arrow Theatre in Melbourne.

In 1958, Humphries appeared in the Rock’n’Reel Revue at the New Theatre in Melbourne as Edna and another of his emerging characters, Sandy Stone.

By 1959 he had spread his wings and moved to London in 1959. It was in 1970 that Humphries returned to Australia and Edna made her movie debut in The Naked Bunyip.

In 1971–72 he co-wrote the script for The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, based on the comic strip character he had created, with writer-director Bruce Beresford.

Humphries appeared in the film alongside Geelong’s Barry Crocker. Hated by critics, it was loved by audiences and is often credited for creating the broad, ocker, Aussie stereotype that Australians are often assumed to be by their international peers.

A man of the world, Humphries often found projects and opportunities, in between his TV and stage life, in Melbourne that interested him.

A fan of the Kath & Kim series, and the work of Melbourne actors and writers Gina Riley and Jane Turner, Humphries starred in the telemovie Da Kath & Kim Code in 2005.

He appeared in the Melbourne-made Jack Irish telemovie, Dead Point, playing a judge alongside Guy Pearce 2014.

Humphries as Dame Edna Everage “hosting Opera For the People”. Picture: David Caird

Humphries, as Dame Edna, was named the Queen Mother of Moomba in 1983, overshadowing Daryl Somers as monarch.

Bizarrely, Humphries, again as Dame Edna, performed Up There Cazaly at the 2005 AFL Grand Final at the MCG while assistants chucked thousands of gladioli into the crowd.

In 2006 he received the Key to the City of Melbourne, which he accepted in the guise of Dame Edna. After the ceremony Edna rained gladioli down onto the crowd from the balcony of the Melbourne Town Hall.

In 1997 Humphries was one of the first recipients of the City of Melbourne’s Honoured Artists Award.

And in 2010 Humphries took Dame Edna to Flemington for the Victoria Derby. In a moment of absurdist reality Edna appeared on the Fashions On The Field catwalk and skewered the fashion snobs.

Controversy caught up with Humphries in 2018 when in an interview with The Spectator he called “transgenderism” a “fashion” and described activists’ calls to have transphobia “treated in law as a form of assault” as “terrible ratbaggery”.

That came after his comments in January 2016 where he described gender-reassignment surgery as “self-mutilation” while commenting about Caitlyn Jenner.

A backlash to the comments saw the Melbourne International Comedy Festival strip his name from the Barry Award, rebranding it as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award.

A passionate advocate of Melbourne’s architectural heritage, Humphries was a regular and loud critic of the bulldozing of history for commercial development.

He was an outspoken and angry opponent of the redevelopment of the Camberwell railway station in 2004.

He never hid his distaste of the design of Melbourne’s Federation Square.

In 2010 he slammed the proposed Federation Square East development as “frog spawn” and called for Federation Square itself to be bulldozed.

“Getting used to it is like getting used to leprosy,” he told the Herald Sun.

In a 2018 interview he branded the Visitors’ Centre in Federation Square as “the ugliest building in Australia.”

Humphries in Melbourne performing The Man Behind the Mask, where he played himself. Picture: David Caird

His frustration at the architectural modernisation of the city he grew up in was laid bare in a 2014 interview with The Age where he blasted the “destruction of Melbourne.”

“Collins Street, you won’t believe this, was once a beautiful street, a monument to Melbourne’s prosperity, and now it’s a monument to Melbourne’s greed,” he said in the interview.

He said the Docklands was “my idea of hell” and suggested it should be a “red-light area, it should be all brothels, make it more interesting.” Of Federation Square he said: “(I) can’t even look at it. I go a special, long way around the city to avoid even a sight of it.”

In 2013 Humphries penned an ode to Flinders Street Station, noting his love of the Melbourne of his dreams, as it was, yet again, the focus of revamp plans.

The Paris End‛ is nondescript, like any street in town,

And even Federation Square looks a teeny bit run down.

But our city fathers have decreed if we want to catch a train,

The docile Melbourne populace need a huge industrial drain.

‘It ticks all the right boxes,‛ said a bureaucratic bore,

‘Who wants a relic that‛s been standing there since 1854?‛

‘Progress and functionality is what the people need.‛

But when a government shouts ‘progress‛, I hear a quiet voice whisper ‘greed‛.

Will they treat it like our famous trams and plaster it with signs?

Will they build another Ferris wheel that melts when the sun shines?

‘Look what we‛ve done in Docklands!‛ the pollies proudly boast,

‘With a casino in the Shrine, we‛d be an international toast!

‘Then cementing in the Yarra would win the progress race.

‘And the Royal Botanic Gardens are a shameful waste of space.‛

So three cheers for functionality, it‛s one of our proud slogans,

With Melbourne‛s history in the hands of bureaucratic bogans.

A genial former Premier and the developers‛ best mate

Will accuse me of elitism and knocking my home state:

‘He only comes to make a quid then rubbishes our schemes.‛

But I will always love our city, if only in my dreams.

Originally published as Barry Humphries was from Camberwell but Melbourne’s Dame Edna was from Moonee Ponds