Dame Edna’s Melbourne arts blast: ‘Teeming with riff-raff’

Retirement, what retirement? Dame Edna Everage is back and waxing lyrical about Brisbane which, thankfully, doesn’t have the ‘riff-raff’ that Melbourne does.

Away from the riff-raff: Dame Edna Everage can’t wait to get back to Brisbane.

Is Dame Edna Everage trying to emulate the woman who was previously Australia’s most famous dame? After all it was Dame Nellie Melba, who grew up and started singing in Queensland, who had the expression “doing a Melba” named after her, which refers to her numerous “final” concerts. Now Dame Edna, the current most famous living Australian dame (with apologies to the other one, Dame Quentin Bryce) is coming back to Brisbane after having supposedly retired.

I was lucky enough to have a phone audience with Dame Edna recently and, on his last visit to Brisbane, I also spent an hour with her manager, comedian Barry Humphries, 85, a man described by Dame Edna as “a failed actor and attention seeker”. The last time Humphries was here, he presented a warm, funny, edifying show called Barry Humphries: The Man Behind The Mask, which looked back at his amazing career. Now the bloke with multiple personalities is returning as his alter ego, Dame Edna, although talking to her is not at all the same as talking to Humphries. He maintains strict demarcation between personas.

When I spoke to Dame Edna she was waxing lyrical about Brisbane. She says she used to love to come to town and go to the tea rooms in the Brisbane Arcade to have her fortune told. Having performed here many times, the dame is looking forward to her two shows at QPAC’s Concert Hall on October 1 and 2, and says she loves QPAC and our South Bank cultural precinct.

“Melbourne has, rather pathetically, tried to copy you. But Melbourne’s Southbank is teeming with riff-raff. Yours is beautiful.”

She expects to be welcomed with open arms, again, but says that would be a far cry from her first visit. “That was in the early 1960s and it was a dismal failure. Brisbane didn’t get the point. But the city has moved ahead since then.”

She insists rumours of her retirement are greatly exaggerated and blames her manager, Humphries, whom she also accuses of embezzlement. “My team of advisers said I should close down all my companies, even my charitable foundation Friends of the Prostate, and restart my career on a clean page.” She is touring other cities as well but says Brisbane will be her cultural highlight, and mentions she might pop in to Philip Bacon Galleries while here.

Humphries had an exhibition there some years ago and the gallery still has paintings of his for sale although, according to Dame Edna, they will probably be in the deepest recesses of the stockroom. “They’d be going for next to nothing now,” she says.

Humphries likes to daub when he travels and has done so often in Brisbane. He is quite a respectable painter, despite Dame Edna’s dismissiveness and Philip Bacon, his friend and Brisbane art dealer, certainly does have a few and they are not half bad. My favourite is a landscape entitled Flinders – painted, I’m guessing, on one of his outback expeditions.

Dame Edna might not think much of Humphries as a painter but the man is an artist in more ways than one. Now, his most famous client is treading the boards again, doing her very own Melba. What a treat!

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