Rarely Everage: The Lives of Barry Humphries. National Portrait Gallery at Old Parliament House, until February 16, 2003.
Dame Edna Everage, wife of Norm Everage (deceased), first took to the stage in high dudgeon. According to her own autobiography My Gorgeous Life, when callow 1950's university student, Barry Humphries, invited her to watch a rehearsal, his portrayal of a housewife was "cynically promoted by a man 'en travestie' who mocks and denigrates all that we stand for and hold sacred". She had no hesitation in showing him how to do it properly, as she has continued to do ever since.
I seem to pry improperly if I write about Humphries separately from Dame Edna, the megastar I know so well on stage and television. But this excellent exhibition gives us permission to know the man whose remarkable artistic creation she is. If she is "rarely everage", Humphries has never been average.
His mother seems to have been very average, giving away his collection of books on the arts, when he was still in his mid-teens, to the Salvation Army, with the justification in the face of his complaints "But you've already read them!" And how could young Barry not develop a satirical view of life when his parents got him a job with a record company - to prevent him from becoming an actor - just as 78s were being replaced by LPs. Every day he was ordered to destroy - literally smash with a hammer - beautiful but now commercially out-of-date recordings of the classical music he had come to love. With friends like his parents ....
Rather than give you mere highlights of the exhibition - after all if you haven't seen it you surely will by February 16 - there is a story behind the display that people should know. Despite Humphries being mentioned in Hansard back in the 1980s as an unacceptable representative of Australia overseas, the public servants who staff the National Portrait Gallery had no hesitation in selecting him to be the first in a projected series of exhibitions that "explore the biography and the achievements of significant Australians".
Assistant Director Simon Elliott, who took the lead role in negotiating, collecting and designing the exhibition deserves our accolades for showing us not a "still life" portrait but a moving picture of Humphries as a child growing into a theatrical artist of stature.
In creating Bazza McKenzie, Sir Les Paterson, Dame Edna, and many others, but especially the gentle spirit of Alexander Horace 'Sandy' Stone, Humphries has placed Australians in a universal context. The display of paintings, sculpture, photos, costumes, scripts, letters, posters and video elicits Humphries' humanity and intellect. His honorary doctorates from Melbourne and Griffith Universities are thoroughly justified; his Order of Australia makes obvious sense; his Special Tony Award and Critics Award just go without saying.
In his commitment to his art, to the integrity of his characters and the stand they represent in the face of shallow morality, we see Humphries' human understanding. We discover, too, his struggle with the inevitable thoughts of failure, perhaps represented in his battle with alcoholism, and with just the sheer hard work needed to make his creations successful, against all advice: first in home-town Melbourne, then in brash Sydney, then in uncomprehending London, then in absolutely impossible New York, and finally even in conservative middle America. In the US Dame Edna is now well recognised and returns shortly for a second mega-tour.
His work is in the Australian tradition of poets like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, comic performers and writers like Roy Rene ('Mo'), C.J.Dennis, and Steele Rudd before him; while Gary Macdonald and Reg Livermore have followed Humphries's court shoes. Norman Gunston is the closest to Dame Edna, but Macdonald's brushes with depression - and his need to divorce himself from a role played out off the conventional stage - have shown how demanding this work is.
We can now recognise Humphries' standing among serious Australian artists with international reputations. His creative work on stage is parallel to that of icons like Sydney Nolan and Patrick White, or Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, representing quite different aspects of Australian culture over his lifetime. Barry Humphries continues the ratbag tradition. At the age of 68, he describes his hobby as "baiting humourless and self-seeking republicans".
Sandy Stone has been compared with Samuel Beckett's characters who forever are Waiting for Godot. Humphries himself played Estragon in his early days in London. Simon Elliott has displayed Humphries' search: he was never one to just wait. But now I wonder who we must wait for to follow Dame Edna when she at last slips away into Sandy Stone's armchair?
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Monday, 16 December 2002
Friday, 13 December 2002
2002: Indigenous Youth Access Project at Australian Museum, Sydney. Feature article.
"Indigenous youth are the future leaders of their community but often miss out because they are a [small] group of Australians. The more we listen, however, the more we learn just how interested and motivated a group they are."
This is how the director of the Australian Museum, Professor Mike Archer, introduces a first-of-its-kind research study Indigenous Youth and Museums, a report of the Museum's Indigenous Youth Access Project, supported by the Commonwealth Government's arts funding body the Australia Council through its Audience and Market Development Division.
The report, by Lynda Kelly, Allison Bartlett and Phil Gordon, found that "Youth and, specifically, Indigenous youth, expressed a desire for inclusion and involvement to both stimulate their learning and test their skills in a peer and adult arena."
But the question has to be asked, do the museums have the will and the leadership in place to make the required "major shift in attitude ... to provide broad access to resources and collections, while taking a mentoring role and allowing Indigenous youth to control their own experiences through exhibition curation and progam management, as well as reflecting contemporary issues in their collection policies and acquisition programs?"
In the light of the recent High Court decision against the Yorta Yorta people, and the concerns about the renewal of Dawn Casey's contract at the National Museum of Australia, it is ironic that the NMA reports that "the use of Indigenous curators and community consultation about how communities were profiled at the NMA had helped draw Indigenous visitors to the Museum. The Gallery of First Australians is the largest and most popular of the Museum's five permanent exhibitions."
The NMA's emphasis on consultation with and involvement of the communities seen in the exhibitions is not restricted to Indigenous communities. The NMA represents the modern end of the museum spectrum for all Australian communities. At the other end, the Australian Museum writers asked of the general run of institutions "Will they change practices embedded in tradition?" and noted that "strategic decisions about audience focus are often made at managerial level and are usually resource-dependent", and they were "not sure that the will is there" for change even though operational staff showed a "keen interest and enthusiasm".
To bring the stories home, the report describes "Holly", a 15-year-old Aboriginal girl from inner Sydney and 13-year-old "Paul" of Western Sydney. Paul, despite juvenile detention experience and a lack of educational and family support structures, found the CD-ROM Keeping Culture extremely interesting, recognised names of people he may have been related to, and became keen to research animals and the natural world at the Museum. Holly's major interests were "being with friends, music and dance", but the focus group experience after visits to the Australian Museum and the Powerhouse Museum led her to express a desire to work at the Reception Desk of a museum or gallery, where she would "take great pride in talking to visitors about her people and culture". She wanted to see black faces at the front desk and among the floor staff and felt more comfortable at places that accepted her for what she was - "a young, proud, black woman".
As a comparison for Australia, again another irony, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council gave a large grant to Indigenous people in Alaska for the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository on Kodiak Island. Governed by the Alutiiq Heritage Foundation, representing 8 tribal organisations, the museum promotes awareness of Alutiiq history, language and arts. It enriches communities through innovative educational programs, including revitalising the Alutiiq language. (www.alutiiqmuseum.com).
Australia, without such generosity from guilty multinational corporations, has its own examples of locally focussed institutions such as the Koori Gardening Team at Melbourne's Living Museum of the West (www.livingmuseum.org.au) and the Minjungbal Resource Museum and Study Centre, Tweed Heads, NSW (www.amonline.net.au/ahu/keep/keep09.htm). Maybe the Australian Museum's research will bring old and new traditions together, in both Indigenous culture and Museum culture.
Indigenous Youth and Museums: A Report on the Indigenous Youth Access Project is available from the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre (www.amonline.net.au/amarc/).
© Frank McKone, Canberra
This is how the director of the Australian Museum, Professor Mike Archer, introduces a first-of-its-kind research study Indigenous Youth and Museums, a report of the Museum's Indigenous Youth Access Project, supported by the Commonwealth Government's arts funding body the Australia Council through its Audience and Market Development Division.
The report, by Lynda Kelly, Allison Bartlett and Phil Gordon, found that "Youth and, specifically, Indigenous youth, expressed a desire for inclusion and involvement to both stimulate their learning and test their skills in a peer and adult arena."
But the question has to be asked, do the museums have the will and the leadership in place to make the required "major shift in attitude ... to provide broad access to resources and collections, while taking a mentoring role and allowing Indigenous youth to control their own experiences through exhibition curation and progam management, as well as reflecting contemporary issues in their collection policies and acquisition programs?"
In the light of the recent High Court decision against the Yorta Yorta people, and the concerns about the renewal of Dawn Casey's contract at the National Museum of Australia, it is ironic that the NMA reports that "the use of Indigenous curators and community consultation about how communities were profiled at the NMA had helped draw Indigenous visitors to the Museum. The Gallery of First Australians is the largest and most popular of the Museum's five permanent exhibitions."
The NMA's emphasis on consultation with and involvement of the communities seen in the exhibitions is not restricted to Indigenous communities. The NMA represents the modern end of the museum spectrum for all Australian communities. At the other end, the Australian Museum writers asked of the general run of institutions "Will they change practices embedded in tradition?" and noted that "strategic decisions about audience focus are often made at managerial level and are usually resource-dependent", and they were "not sure that the will is there" for change even though operational staff showed a "keen interest and enthusiasm".
To bring the stories home, the report describes "Holly", a 15-year-old Aboriginal girl from inner Sydney and 13-year-old "Paul" of Western Sydney. Paul, despite juvenile detention experience and a lack of educational and family support structures, found the CD-ROM Keeping Culture extremely interesting, recognised names of people he may have been related to, and became keen to research animals and the natural world at the Museum. Holly's major interests were "being with friends, music and dance", but the focus group experience after visits to the Australian Museum and the Powerhouse Museum led her to express a desire to work at the Reception Desk of a museum or gallery, where she would "take great pride in talking to visitors about her people and culture". She wanted to see black faces at the front desk and among the floor staff and felt more comfortable at places that accepted her for what she was - "a young, proud, black woman".
As a comparison for Australia, again another irony, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council gave a large grant to Indigenous people in Alaska for the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository on Kodiak Island. Governed by the Alutiiq Heritage Foundation, representing 8 tribal organisations, the museum promotes awareness of Alutiiq history, language and arts. It enriches communities through innovative educational programs, including revitalising the Alutiiq language. (www.alutiiqmuseum.com).
Australia, without such generosity from guilty multinational corporations, has its own examples of locally focussed institutions such as the Koori Gardening Team at Melbourne's Living Museum of the West (www.livingmuseum.org.au) and the Minjungbal Resource Museum and Study Centre, Tweed Heads, NSW (www.amonline.net.au/ahu/keep/keep09.htm). Maybe the Australian Museum's research will bring old and new traditions together, in both Indigenous culture and Museum culture.
Indigenous Youth and Museums: A Report on the Indigenous Youth Access Project is available from the Australian Museum Audience Research Centre (www.amonline.net.au/amarc/).
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday, 11 December 2002
2002: Shakespeare a la Carte. Canberra Youth Theatre / Warehouse Circus. Feature article.
Shakespeare a la Carte. A Canberra Youth Theatre / Warehouse Circus workshop production directed by Iain Sinclair. Musical director, Pip Branson. Circus director, Karen Yeldon. In Western Courtyard, Gorman House. December 11-14 and 18-21, 6.30-8.30pm.
Linda McHugh, CYT artistic director, announced at last Wednesday's opening, the establishment of a fund - the Branson Gift - for an annual award to a young theatrical artist working in the tradition of the late David Branson. Takings that night, and from the Viva Branson event at Toast on the same evening, have been donated to start the fund rolling.
The Branson's Gift Fund will be administered by Canberra Community Arts Front. For information and to arrange donations, call Canberra Youth Theatre on 6248 5057.
Meanwhile, the cart, with a convenient arras for stabbing people through, rolled into the acting space which included not only the grassed area - with appropriate gymnastic mats - but also the verandah roof of the Bogong Restaurant and up the tree.
Probably out of the tree would be a better description of this eclectic mix of original Shakespeare with up-to-date parodies in television style. Buffy the Vampire Killer is star-crossed lover Hermia. Steven Irwin captures Caliban, probably the most endangered species in the world. Jamie Oliver shows Titus Andronicus how to cook children.
The a la carte menu includes soup, which audience members can jump into, after an exciting auction, by taking part in a scene. On first night a certain well-known theatrical personality bid, largely against herself, to a winning $25 and became Charlotte the Great Big Heifer who briefly played Polonius and got stabbed in the arras.
Somehow circus jugglers and gymnasts were incorporated, at one point successfully representing Romeo and Juliet on the balcony by tossing a spinning diabolo from one to the other. Some say the young people, ranging from age 8 to 18, directed Iain Sinclair at least as much as he directed them.
This is surely in the Branson celebratory tradition: both iconoclastic and a learning experience. The show's energy will build after first night into an enjoyable mad-cap communal village green entertainment. All that's missing is a bear - but they do have a lion.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Linda McHugh, CYT artistic director, announced at last Wednesday's opening, the establishment of a fund - the Branson Gift - for an annual award to a young theatrical artist working in the tradition of the late David Branson. Takings that night, and from the Viva Branson event at Toast on the same evening, have been donated to start the fund rolling.
The Branson's Gift Fund will be administered by Canberra Community Arts Front. For information and to arrange donations, call Canberra Youth Theatre on 6248 5057.
Meanwhile, the cart, with a convenient arras for stabbing people through, rolled into the acting space which included not only the grassed area - with appropriate gymnastic mats - but also the verandah roof of the Bogong Restaurant and up the tree.
Probably out of the tree would be a better description of this eclectic mix of original Shakespeare with up-to-date parodies in television style. Buffy the Vampire Killer is star-crossed lover Hermia. Steven Irwin captures Caliban, probably the most endangered species in the world. Jamie Oliver shows Titus Andronicus how to cook children.
The a la carte menu includes soup, which audience members can jump into, after an exciting auction, by taking part in a scene. On first night a certain well-known theatrical personality bid, largely against herself, to a winning $25 and became Charlotte the Great Big Heifer who briefly played Polonius and got stabbed in the arras.
Somehow circus jugglers and gymnasts were incorporated, at one point successfully representing Romeo and Juliet on the balcony by tossing a spinning diabolo from one to the other. Some say the young people, ranging from age 8 to 18, directed Iain Sinclair at least as much as he directed them.
This is surely in the Branson celebratory tradition: both iconoclastic and a learning experience. The show's energy will build after first night into an enjoyable mad-cap communal village green entertainment. All that's missing is a bear - but they do have a lion.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Sunday, 8 December 2002
2002: Cartoons 2002 Conference. Feature article.
Cartoons 2002 Conference, SAS Visions Theatre, National Museum of Australia December 7-8.
What does a Cartoon Conference look like? Raked blue seating. Black lectern and twin microphones. Overhead projector, laptop slide presentation, big screen. Just another board room. But in this case never a bored room.
Look, there's Little Johnny and Big Kim both trying to pretend to be Winston Churchill. Here's a photo of Maggie Thatcher's eyes, proving that Steve Bell's impression (in The Guardian) of her half-hooded malevolent right eye and her wild artificial-looking staring left eye was the truth, and not just his satirical warped view. Then wasn't it surprising to see how Tony Blair's eyes are just like Maggie Thatcher's. No wonder he goes for privatisation and war on whomever.
Starting with a UK perspective put the Aussie experiences of 2001 and 2002 in context. Where Bell's work draws so easily on Britain's long comic history from Hogarth and Gilray, producing complex absurdist fantasies, Australians drew so many spare and direct cartoons, about refugees especially. Here's a picture of lots of water, no land in sight. From the distant horizon to the foreground is a row of children's heads barely showing above the surface. A cheerful John Howard treads firmly along the "stepping stones". Only at this point do you notice that the heads behind him are sinking to their deaths, while those ahead await their destiny. Vale Siev X.
What's upsetting is to learn from academic Robert Phiddian that cartoons of "tough" politicians, meant to be satirical, serve only to immortalise the very image the politician seeks to impress us with. The polls prove it when large numbers want refugees turned back, despite sympathetic cartoons in every newspaper, tabloid and broadsheet, around Australia. The picture of Howard with regularly extended use-by dates will not make him retire at 64. After all isn't he proposing pushing the retirement age for everyone out to 70 or even 75?
As Fiona Katauskas put it in a neat little illustrated table: LIES Illegals, terrorists & queue jumpers (Ruddock); DAMNED LIES They throw their own children overboard (Howard); & STATISTICS 77%.
Political cartoons particularly rely on the use of irony - the contrast between what someone says, thinks or maybe even believes is the truth compared with reality. The problem is, despite what we like to think about Australians as against Americans, most people don't recognise irony when it stares them in the face. Dean Alston's 1997 cartoon in which Yagan's head yearns for "a warm beer in a quiet Pommy pub" rather than face the divided opinions regarding his return to Australia, is likely to be taken to the Full Bench of the Federal Court now that Justice Nicholson, while agreeing that this was a "demeaning portrait of Yagan", has found that it was published "in good faith" (Canberra Sunday Times, December 8). The irony is that the court case itself diverts attention from the real divisions among the Nyoongar community and possibly sours relations between the Aboriginal and white communities.
Cases like this are ripe for education, and perhaps the best way to set this up is by running a Schools Cartoon Competition. Lyn Beasley and David Arnold from NMA have done exactly that. Freelance cartoonist Fiona Katauskas, our own drive-time Rod Quinn, and NMA's Guy Hansen (who has organised the annual Cartoon Conferences since its inception in 1997) chose "Federal Politics" by Anderson Clarke of Willetton Senior High, WA (3rd Prize); "The Wizard of Aus" by Callum Padgham of Lyneham High, ACT (2nd Prize); while 1st Prize went to Pete Bramley of Scots School, Albury NSW for "God Bless America". Prizes are $1000, $750 and $500 to the schools and smaller cash amounts to the individual winners.
You can visit the Cartoons 2002 Exhibition at the National Museum for $7 Adult, $5 Concession, $3 Children. There you will not only see a large selection of the 250 Schools Competition entries, but also the best 100 cartoons of the year from newspapers across the nation covering the full range of political issues, videos of television satire and work by Peter Nicholson (of Ulysses fame), and the special exhibition Leunig Animated, opened last Friday by a favourite of cartoonists, Peter Costello, who complained that his ears are actually much higher up.
As a diversion to entertain myself, I surveyed 2 conference attendees. 100% supported keeping the old name for the exhibition, Bringing the House Down. 50% supported returning to the original venue at Old Parliament House. Like me, some people had not realised that the Cartoons each year are collected and exhibited by the National Museum, so I suppose they've come home now.
My conclusion from the Conference was in tune with Sydney Morning Herald's Mike Bowers who saw cartoonists as rather like court jesters: the only people with the licence to criticise the king. But then I remember King Lear's Fool. He died for his art, and the King learned the lesson - but too late to save the world.
But Sean Leahy (Courier-Mail) gave me hope that cartoons and education, hand in hand, may lead us to a new dawn when he said of readers: "They want to be provoked, entertained and to think for themselves". At the NMA, of course, it's the Dawn that may lead us.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
What does a Cartoon Conference look like? Raked blue seating. Black lectern and twin microphones. Overhead projector, laptop slide presentation, big screen. Just another board room. But in this case never a bored room.
Look, there's Little Johnny and Big Kim both trying to pretend to be Winston Churchill. Here's a photo of Maggie Thatcher's eyes, proving that Steve Bell's impression (in The Guardian) of her half-hooded malevolent right eye and her wild artificial-looking staring left eye was the truth, and not just his satirical warped view. Then wasn't it surprising to see how Tony Blair's eyes are just like Maggie Thatcher's. No wonder he goes for privatisation and war on whomever.
Starting with a UK perspective put the Aussie experiences of 2001 and 2002 in context. Where Bell's work draws so easily on Britain's long comic history from Hogarth and Gilray, producing complex absurdist fantasies, Australians drew so many spare and direct cartoons, about refugees especially. Here's a picture of lots of water, no land in sight. From the distant horizon to the foreground is a row of children's heads barely showing above the surface. A cheerful John Howard treads firmly along the "stepping stones". Only at this point do you notice that the heads behind him are sinking to their deaths, while those ahead await their destiny. Vale Siev X.
What's upsetting is to learn from academic Robert Phiddian that cartoons of "tough" politicians, meant to be satirical, serve only to immortalise the very image the politician seeks to impress us with. The polls prove it when large numbers want refugees turned back, despite sympathetic cartoons in every newspaper, tabloid and broadsheet, around Australia. The picture of Howard with regularly extended use-by dates will not make him retire at 64. After all isn't he proposing pushing the retirement age for everyone out to 70 or even 75?
As Fiona Katauskas put it in a neat little illustrated table: LIES Illegals, terrorists & queue jumpers (Ruddock); DAMNED LIES They throw their own children overboard (Howard); & STATISTICS 77%.
Political cartoons particularly rely on the use of irony - the contrast between what someone says, thinks or maybe even believes is the truth compared with reality. The problem is, despite what we like to think about Australians as against Americans, most people don't recognise irony when it stares them in the face. Dean Alston's 1997 cartoon in which Yagan's head yearns for "a warm beer in a quiet Pommy pub" rather than face the divided opinions regarding his return to Australia, is likely to be taken to the Full Bench of the Federal Court now that Justice Nicholson, while agreeing that this was a "demeaning portrait of Yagan", has found that it was published "in good faith" (Canberra Sunday Times, December 8). The irony is that the court case itself diverts attention from the real divisions among the Nyoongar community and possibly sours relations between the Aboriginal and white communities.
Cases like this are ripe for education, and perhaps the best way to set this up is by running a Schools Cartoon Competition. Lyn Beasley and David Arnold from NMA have done exactly that. Freelance cartoonist Fiona Katauskas, our own drive-time Rod Quinn, and NMA's Guy Hansen (who has organised the annual Cartoon Conferences since its inception in 1997) chose "Federal Politics" by Anderson Clarke of Willetton Senior High, WA (3rd Prize); "The Wizard of Aus" by Callum Padgham of Lyneham High, ACT (2nd Prize); while 1st Prize went to Pete Bramley of Scots School, Albury NSW for "God Bless America". Prizes are $1000, $750 and $500 to the schools and smaller cash amounts to the individual winners.
You can visit the Cartoons 2002 Exhibition at the National Museum for $7 Adult, $5 Concession, $3 Children. There you will not only see a large selection of the 250 Schools Competition entries, but also the best 100 cartoons of the year from newspapers across the nation covering the full range of political issues, videos of television satire and work by Peter Nicholson (of Ulysses fame), and the special exhibition Leunig Animated, opened last Friday by a favourite of cartoonists, Peter Costello, who complained that his ears are actually much higher up.
As a diversion to entertain myself, I surveyed 2 conference attendees. 100% supported keeping the old name for the exhibition, Bringing the House Down. 50% supported returning to the original venue at Old Parliament House. Like me, some people had not realised that the Cartoons each year are collected and exhibited by the National Museum, so I suppose they've come home now.
My conclusion from the Conference was in tune with Sydney Morning Herald's Mike Bowers who saw cartoonists as rather like court jesters: the only people with the licence to criticise the king. But then I remember King Lear's Fool. He died for his art, and the King learned the lesson - but too late to save the world.
But Sean Leahy (Courier-Mail) gave me hope that cartoons and education, hand in hand, may lead us to a new dawn when he said of readers: "They want to be provoked, entertained and to think for themselves". At the NMA, of course, it's the Dawn that may lead us.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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