Barry Humphries: Provocateur’s poetic tribute to Adelaide, a city on the fritz

Melbourne’s greatest artistic son, Barry Humphries, has declared that Adelaide is his favourite Aussie city.

‘Adelaide has been the least vandalised Australian city. Melbourne has destroyed itself completely,’ says Barry Humphries, whose Ode to Adelaide celebrates the city’s icons. Picture: Bob Barker

Melbourne’s greatest artistic son, Barry Humphries, has declared that Adelaide is his favourite Australian city and says he never visits the Melbourne CBD any more because he is too saddened by the soulless metropolis it has become.

London-based Humphries, who turns 87 next February, also has revealed his fear that he may never see Australia again on account of the pandemic.

Humphries says he has been reflecting on his mortality after a visit to Cornwall last month with chef Rick Stein where he returned to the cliff face where he fell and almost died in 1962 at the age of 27, sparking what was one of the biggest rescues in Cornish history.

He says he yearns to return to Australia but worries the travel ban and toughening London lockdown mean he will be forced to remain in the UK indefinitely.

Humphries spoke exclusively with The Australian after launching his poem Ode to Adelaide at London’s South Australia House, where he paid tribute to the City of Churches for its old-world charms and credited it with being the first place he heard the word chunder, which he subsequently popularised in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

“I really do seem very disloyal to Melbourne,” Humphries says.

“I suppose I should say Melbourne is my first love in the same way you have to say that you love your parents more than anyone else on this earth. But as any married man knows you can occasionally stray, or at least think about straying. And when I stray, I stray to Adelaide.

“I am rather absurdly fond of it. Adelaide has been the least vandalised Australian city. Melbourne has destroyed itself completely. The churches survive — they can’t pull down St Patrick’s — but I don’t go into the city any more because it is too depressing. It’s lost its identity.”

Humphries’s self-described “doggerel” is an eclectic celebration of Adelaide icons including the Glenelg tram, Haigh’s Chocolates, Ditters’ nuts and a delicacy known as fritz, a lightly-seasoned German smallgood rumoured to be made from the sweepings from butcher’s shop floors.

It also recounts an early low-level sexual encounter aboard The Overland train between Melbourne and Adelaide, which he first visited in the 1950s while performing on tour with the Melbourne University Dramatic Society in the play The Wind of Heaven by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams. “My first little frisson of awakening manhood occurred on a train journey to Adelaide where a very pretty girl fell asleep on my shoulder,” Humphries recalls.

“When we arrived I said without knowing its significance: ‘How was it for you?’, even though she slept most of the time. Goodness knows where she is now.

“On that Adelaide visit there were endless parties with huge consumption of liquor, Turkish cigarettes, Wynn Vale flagons, Barossa Pearl and a poisonous beverage called Brandivino which was absolutely lethal. It was where I first heard the evocative verb to chunder and it described so well the experiences I had with Brandivino in Adelaide.” Since then Humphries has been a frequent visitor to South Australia and tries to come at least twice a year to visit his great friend, artist David Dridan, who lives in the Adelaide Hills picture-book town of Strathalbyn, famous for its antique shops.

“I know Strathalbyn so well that I have campaigned against those terrible corellas that have destroyed the Norfolk Island pines in the town park,” Humphries says.

Cooped up in his London home with no end to lockdown in sight, Humphries says he misses his life beating the boards and that while he is in good health, he is profoundly homesick.

“My doctor tells me that I am at the height of my powers, but I won’t be eating any bat burgers,” he says. “It really is catastrophic here. I haven’t been in Australia since March. It’s the longest I have ever been away.

“I have never before been so desperate to get back to Australia but I really can’t see it happening due to this ghastly virus. In ancient times I used to do theatre shows. I hate not having a chance to be politically incorrect. I have always offended people and I hate not offending people. It’s very upsetting that I am not currently annoying some group or another.”

Humphries says he even made a sly attempt to cause outrage with the original version of his Adelaide poem, sneaking in a reference to the city’s reputation as a haven for serial killers, as a place that produced “very good wine and wonderful crime”, only to acquiesce uncharacteristically to a request from SA’s Agent General in London Bill Muirhead for the line to be shed on taste grounds.