I couldn’t have wished for a better send-off for Dad, Bill Leak, than the one Barry Humphries gave him

Cartoonist Bill Leak and Les Patterson at the 2017 book launch.

Even if I’d known my dad had one day to live I couldn’t have wished for a better send-off than the one Barry Humphries gave him.

It was March 8, 2017, and the evening of the launch of my dad’s book Trigger Warning: Deplorable Cartoons by Bill Leak. The mood was festive as friends gathered to celebrate Dad and his work at a time when he was under considerable stress following prolonged persecution by the Australian Human Rights Commission. The AHRC was gunning for him over a cartoon that allegedly breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

But on this evening, in a room full of familiar faces and with wife Goong by his side, Dad felt rightly triumphant. Dad’s good mate Nick Cater opened the event, hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, followed by barrister Tony Morris QC, who represented Dad. Then it was Dad’s turn.

After an acknowledgment of International Women’s Day, including an apology for not actually being a woman, he tore into the sanctimony and censoriousness of our age and the new wowserism of political correctness – the enemy of free expression and of humour itself. Dad was about halfway through his speech and only just getting into his stride when he was gatecrashed by none other than Minister for the Yartz and chairman of the Australian Cheese Board Sir Leslie Colin Patterson.

Leak was halfway through his speech when he was gatecrashed by Les Patterson.

Then followed a vintage Sir Les performance culminating in a poem, a “cultural landmark”, confirming Dad as “Australia’s Rembrandt … our Warhol, our Jeff Koons”. For those of us lucky enough to be in the room that night, and seeing Dad on such a high, laughing and smiling less than 48 hours away from what would be a massive and fatal heart attack, it will endure as one of the most vivid memories we have of him. This precious moment was a gift from Barry Humphries. Solidarity, support and recognition from one of Dad’s biggest heroes, from one piss-taker to another, delivered in a meandering stream of material so artfully appalling and offensive that it brought the house down.

Les’s appearance that evening was a gesture of true friendship, writes Johannes Leak.

Les’s appearance that evening was a gesture of true friendship. Barry was prepared to defend and support a mate when it would have been much safer and easier not to do so. But in defending my dad he was also defending art itself, and the right of all artists, especially satirists, to be subversive, to shock and offend and, above all, to make people laugh.

Just one week later, Barry spoke again at a Bill Leak event, this time his memorial service at Sydney’s Town Hall. “Now, on the eve of further persecutions of Bill Leak, he’s been snatched from the jaws of the PC jackals,” Barry said.

Humphries speaking at the public memorial service for Bill Leak, in 2017. Picture: Jane Dempster

“I saw him last week only a few hours really before his tragic and sudden death. And he was laughing. How his laughter would have really enraged his enemies. That laughter would have so disappointed the humourless rabble who attacked him so viciously, so vindictively.”

No one could have honoured my dad more lyrically and elegantly than Barry. Last week, searching through old emails after news of Barry’s death, I found an exchange forwarded to me by Dad in the lead-up to the book launch mentioned above. Barry graciously accepted his invitation to appear and in reply sent this extract from Oscar Wilde’s Beautiful and Impossible Things:

Leak, pictured in 2013.

“On the whole, (the) artist … gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect.

“Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. They are subjects for study, like everything else.”

Like so many Australians, I am grateful for the magic Barry Humphries sprinkled into our lives. And I am especially grateful for the thoughtful and sincere support he gave my dad at a time when it was desperately needed.