Episode 1 Rebels Of Oz: Germaine, Clive, Barry and Bob

This programme contains some strong language.

Robert Hughes, firebrand art critic.

Clive James memoirist, broadcaster, poet.

Barry Humphries, savage satirist.

Germaine Greer, feminist, libertarian.

Exiles from Australia, all of them.

GG: I wanted to go to a place where there was beauty.

I did believe in the great Australian ugliness.

You can tow Australia out to sea and sink it, for all I care.

I was a banned writer.

Part of you might have enjoyed that.

Most of me enjoyed it.

My name is Howard Jacobson and I have a personal interest in this.

The Australia they called a sleepy backwater

was my brave new world.

I'm here to meet Clive James off the Cambridge train.

I haven't seen him for three or four years

and I know he's been very ill.

Hey, Clive! Clive!

How fantastic to see you!

How good to see you!

And you look great! You look strong.

I was expecting a little...

A little old man hobbling...

That's the way I do look, but I'm acting for you.

Hello, possums!

So what explains their spectacular success?

Ladies and gentlemen, Clive James!

Was it because they were Australian...

that they were able to conquer London and New York?

And why does it all matter so much to me?

In the Australian summer of 1965

I sailed into Sydney Harbour

having put the frozen drabness of an English winter behind me.

It was as though I was seeing light

and feeling heat for the first time in my life.

I'd say it was like a resurrection,

except that Sydney made me feel

I'd never previously been alive.

This sense of Australia,

as an illumination of the spirits has never left me.

It's only the wildest fancy,

but earlier on the trip here

I passed a ship, going in the other direction.

Calling to me from the deck of this boat of my imagination, were

Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries,

Robert Hughes, Clive James -

"You're going the wrong way, mate!" they shouted.

They were wrong. For me, anyway.

But why were they sailing away?

Why would Australians ever choose to exile themselves

from such beauty and exhilaration?

What were they sailing away to find?

They hit London at a time when the egg was cracking open -

with rock'n'roll,

with people in the arts...

It was a new England that they could help to make,

and they did help to make it.

They were a kind of beacon of a new kind of freedom.

That kind of iconoclasm was the future

and class was on the way out.

The way Australians use humour...

We're sceptical about a lot of things, but we're not pessimistic.

And the humour is very dry,

very wry, and incredibly mischievous.

They could do actually what you were not supposed to do.

They had this incredible range -

encyclopaedic range - of learning.

But they were also...outlandish.

You know, they were...

They were hoodlums in the playground.

Germaine is one of the 20th century's landmarks.

She'll go down in history.

To have made this huge

splash in the sort of the sea of the zeitgeist

at 32 years old!

We felt then, if we didn't have an orgasm -

"Gee, we're frigid!"

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

But what I'm saying now is,

"Fuck that. I'm not frigid, you're boring!"

I am green with envy.

In England, a writer has to be dead 200 years

before he's remembered,

and even then the best he's likely to get

is a dark unvisited corner of Westminster Abbey.

But here in the busiest part of Sydney,

is a living Australian writer -

Germaine Greer -

and half the time, she disowns the place.

But Australia reveres its writers.

It's wonderful.

Barry Humphries' political incorrectness was very Australian.

He just had to use the phrase "Australian culture"

then throw in Sir Les Patterson,

and people were rolling in the aisles.

Joan Collins is a personal friend of mine.

She's a beautiful girl. Likes perfume, too.

You wouldn't guess what she puts behind her ears

to attract the men folk...

Her ankles.

And suddenly the door opened and there was an apparition -

and, lo, he was in a full-length white linen kaftan

with turquoise hippy beads

and shoulder-length blonde hair,

and I thought, "He looks like Jesus Christ Superstar".

It's really about turning people on.

With television, you can't see your audience

but with this one you can see them and they can see you,

and the whole thing is very instinctive.

He was able to communicate...

..the kind of meaning and sense

and excitement about visual language

in this way that absolutely was stirring.

I'm sure, had he walked into the room,

three nuns might actually have dropped their vows.

Great lines from Unreliable Memoirs -

"It would be churlish not to concede

"that the same abundance of natural blessings

"which gave us the energy to leave

"has every right to call us back."

I love Clive.

He's a wonderfully witty, funny man.

And for an academic and intellectual - which he indisputably is -

he really had wonderful comic roots and timing.

I used to think that the Opera House

didn't have what it took to be the symbol of Sydney.

I thought it looked like a portable typewriter

full of oyster shells after an office party.

Foolishly, I said so -

the main reason why I had to stay out of town so long.

There was no Opera House when I got to Sydney.

Yes, the suburbs sprawled, the beaches broiled

and Australians ran about in the sun,

but that didn't mean the country was uncultured.

Raw, hedonistic and bloody-minded it might have been,

but weren't these the very qualities that made our famous four famous?

Where do you think our four Australians

got their verbal virtuosity from?

I used to sometimes think

that just as the pressure on coal over millions of years

can produce diamonds,

the pressures of boredom

produced intellectual diamonds

in the likes of Humphries and his collaborators.

That they were so surrounded by stultification

that out of it came these little glittering jewels.

There was almost a willed torpor about Australia

which these brilliant children wanted to escape.

The world of the imagination seemed to be

the world of Northern Europe

and all the poetry we read at school

and all the novels we read didn't have any spiritual purchase

when applied to where we came from.

In the sense that the locales were different,

the flowers were different,

the seasons were inverted -

our world was not represented.

What do you observe, Clive, when you come back to Australia, like now?

-What changes do you see?

-First thing you'd notice, I think,

if you'd left Australia in the '50s, as I did,

is the silence of the cities.

This is to do with a change from beer drinking to wine drinking.

Now, in the early '50s, when beer was the national drink,

all the beer in Australia had to be consumed

between the hours of five and six in the evening.

And so three-quarters of the population of Australia

crowded into the pubs which were all covered in tiles

like a swimming pool - for reasons we will get to -

and the glasses were lined up on the bar

and they used to fill them with a gun under pressure -

like fuel into a Formula One car - they fired beer into the glasses.

Then the people would put the beer into themselves.

And the noise that came from a pub between five and six -

it was called the 6 o'clock swill.

The noise was like an entire Spanish bull fight going on in a bathroom.

And that was the sound of Australia in the '50s.

And now you don't hear it. It's a civilised country.

To ME it was a civilised country THEN.

Yes, they fired beer into glasses with guns, but to a visiting pom,

it was the noise of freedom -

convivial, funny, egalitarian and brave.

It was this freedom to run at life,

to come from nowhere and aim for everywhere

that enabled our four gifted Australians

to make the most of their gifts.

Of our four Australians, I think the easiest to like,

perhaps because he'd had the fewest social advantages,

or perhaps because he was the most eager to BE liked,

was Clive James.

Born here in Kogarah, you have to come here, I think,

to realise what a modest place Kogarah was.

It's touching to think of a man so widely loved for what he wrote -

speaking his first words in this unassuming house.

This is the conversation I've always wanted us to have

as long as I have known you -

the Australian/England conversation.

Let's talk about the blessings.

Those abundant natural blessings

that gave you the energy to leave.

I said that? That's not bad.

Can we, as they say, unpack that?

Yes.

The truth is, I think all of us had reason to think

that we came from a blessed land at a blessed time.

We were foolish if we didn't, because it was true.

Yes.

Don't forget we're talking about

not just a generation, but a whole nation

that had been privileged not to be obliterated,

or blasted by history.

Somehow we came through the Second World War relatively intact,

and there was a lot of reason to be grateful,

and I still feel it.

We had a chance to live.

The big adventure is to live.

I wonder if this explains

what I would love to - DEARLY love - to have explained,

how you've been able to do so much work.

How you've been able to read so much,

how you've been able to write so much - is it 40 books now?

I think it's... It obviously answers some psychological need -

the urge to get something done -

which probably goes back to the fact that my parents

were artificially deprived of the life -

the useful life - they might have lead together.

My father was killed coming back from the war,

my mother had to spend a lot of time just concentrating on

the difficulties of bringing me up.

I always felt, even when I was young,

that their lives had been -

just by fate - truncated,

and that I should do something with mine.

If the father was absent for Clive James, he was,

if anything, too present in the life of the young Robert Hughes,

who grew up conscious of his patrician lineage.

Like his family before him,

he was educated at Sydney's prestigious Riverview College.

It was here when he was 12 that he was informed that

the great hero of his life,

his father, had died.

His grandfather had been the first ever Lord Mayor of Sydney

and his father and his brothers had been here before him.

Hughes's family had a long connection with the school.

There's his father, who fought in

the First World War,

and had been a student at Riverview

before the First World War.

These are some of his relations,

so the Hughes family has

a 50-years connection with the school before Robert.

There is a film I saw recently of you and Robert Hughes

talking about the beatniks - wonderful, pedantic.

I know exactly the piece of film you used.

It's 1959, so you were babies.

I wouldn't call Beat a creative movement.

The thing about Beat is it's a quest for experience.

They just like to take in raw experience.

They like to "dig everything, man", you know.

There's Robert Hughes in a waistcoat and a bow tie - a dandy,

with soft, long, llama-like lashes.

You look good, too, but you don't have soft, long, llama-like lashes.

Dingo-like lashes.

He was... He was...

He was...elegant and urbane.

You, too, were urbane.

I can only read it in patches, it's that sort of book.

It has no overall structure.

< RH: A most irritating...thing.

A most irritating thing.

Because a novel is really an expanded poem -

in that it must have an overall structure.

You don't look as though you've got a lot to learn there.

The assurance of you!

I think Bob Hughes' sophistication was genuine.

It was a very cosmopolitan family he came from,

and mine was a bit put-on.

I'm not making any overt criticism of it,

I'd just like you to notice for one thing -

the superfluity of adjectives,

which seems to me to indicate a lack of discipline.

It seems to me to be innate in Beat culture, generally.

It's interesting to note that quite a number of people

are advertising executives by day and beatniks by night.

What interests me is - Robert Hughes is being a critic of the beatniks,

you're being a critic of Kerouac...

Criticism.

And think of Barry Humphries - a great critic of language, is he not?

Germaine, too. The four of you.

You were all literary critics.

You all have acumen, but you all have drive and have attack.

Was that one of the reasons you were able to take the British by storm?

I think it's true that we had fun expressing our opinions.

We're not a shy, retiring people.

Rather different from the British, in that way.

And, especially, the English.

The Australians were less mealy-mouthed.

They were sometimes horrifying to hear.

But they didn't mislead you

by choking back their opinions.

I've no memory of anyone choking back their opinions

at Sydney University when I got there,

not long after Clive had left.

Hughes, too, had been a student here,

and Germaine, a lecturer.

I'd come, I thought, to teach Australians to read,

but it was they who taught me how to scrap.

Don't be fooled by the air of academic calm

you see around you.

Intellectually, I don't recall a single quiet day

in the whole time I was here.

We argued about everything.

Lectures were war zones.

Seminars were like medieval jousts.

We fought each other over books,

we fought each other over ideas,

we fought each other to a standstill over Emily Bronte,

and she wasn't even a student here.

In this seething cauldron of belligerence,

I came of age.

And so did Clive and Robert.

In those days, Clive and Bob were the big stars of the university.

Bob especially used to hold court, he would, you know,

there'd be a party or something in a room

and Bob would be in the middle of the room

and people would be gathered around.

-To hear him talk?

-To hear him talk.

What do you do for a living, Bob?

Well, I'm a...

For a living, I work as art editor on a magazine downtown, fortnightly.

I'm a painter.

I didn't really play the role of acolyte particularly well.

I mean, I thought he was tremendously clever,

and he was enormously handsome.

He was big...and a big shock of blond hair.

Girls went crazy over him.

Of course, as with any movement, there are a lot of hangers-on.

Clive was editing the university newspaper

and wrote nearly everything in the university reviews -

which were screamingly funny.

He was a brilliant writer, I think, even at 18 and 19.

A tremendous amount of wit.

And with wit, went trouble.

A raffish group known as The Push,

that met in smoky bars around the university,

attracted Sydney's young bohemians.

I think the libertarian Push in Sydney is very significant

for the impact Clive, Germaine and, particularly, Robert Hughes had.

There was...a sharp edge of discontent and subversion.

There was a fringe of malcontents.

If you look at their work in the '50s

and particularly in the early '60s, in magazines like Oz,

you see an embrace of cosmopolitanism

and the great "out there".

Of those hankering for the "great out there",

few hankered with more impatience than a young convent-educated woman

who described herself as "a freak waiting to be born".

I'm in Sandringham, in Melbourne where Germaine Greer grew up.

I love it.

It exudes a dreamy melancholy

as though it's always Sunday morning.

Germaine Greer didn't love it -

"I regard the happiest day of my life

"as the day I ran away from home," she wrote.

But then she was by her own confession, a bolter.

And, boy, did she bolt.

I wanted to go to a place

where there was beauty.

I did believe in "the great Australian ugliness"

and even now, when I'm in the suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney

I feel this terrible, dead feeling.

This feeling that nothing will ever happen.

That I'll just drag through day after desperate day

and that things will be happening -

the world will be happening - somewhere.

It was like being under the bell jar.

It was a bit Sylvia Plath,

but in a different way.

I spoke three languages besides English by the time I was twelve.

I was preparing for Europe.

I have a theory about why you were so clever -

you'd had a fantastic education.

Those nuns, and then Melbourne University,

that was a very good preparation for the world, wasn't it?

Yes, I s'pose.

The nuns were Irish nuns.

They weren't terribly good at teaching anything.

And one of the things they were worst at teaching

happened to be religion.

And they completely blew it.

They tried to teach me the proofs of the existence of God.

And I started off believing in God,

and by the time they'd finished I knew that God was a ridiculous idea.

Well, there you are, you've got them to thank for that.

Yes, indeed, but I do agree that a teacher's inadequacies

are sometimes more important than the teacher's skills

with an intelligent kid who just thinks,

"Na-ah-ah! That can't be right. That CAN'T be right."

"Ever since I was a little girl,"

she said, "I wanted to escape from where I was".

Interesting that she describes it as escape.

This library in Melbourne was the place she would escape to,

and where, with the help of literature,

she would do battle with dullness and confinement.

In her own words from Daddy, We Hardly Knew You -

"When I was 14 years old, imprisoned in a bookless house,

"bored at school and double-bored at home,

"the public library of Victoria was my Valhalla.

"More of my waking life has been spent in libraries with a pen in my hand

"than anywhere else."

Well, my mother was a couple of years younger than Germaine

and I remember her talking about the extraordinary Germaine Greer,

she was dux of Star of the Sea in, I think, 1955.

That she was an extraordinary scholar,

she was an all-rounder.

Mum remembers her being fantastic in the school plays

and other performances, and everybody...

She said everybody knew this girl was fierce

and going to do great things.

When you left Melbourne, with all the frustrations of Melbourne,

for Sydney, was that a liberation for you?

Barry Humphries talks about the joy of meeting the raffishness of Sydney.

Did you encounter that?

Did you feel it was a liberation?

Yes, I did. I did. But it's interesting...

I think Barry is more contemptuous of the Melbourne intelligentsia

than I am.

Because for me, they were a liberation to start with.

But then they began to really annoy me.

But now you're in The Push in Sydney, are you having fun there?

Ummmm...

Not enough fun to keep you, obviously.

Well, the thing is The Push was committed

to a lifestyle of tremendous squalor, really.

You weren't allowed to have a nice house,

you weren't interested in art...

You were interested in folk singing,

but not in music, if you understand the distinction.

I do indeed.

But wasn't it all about just, sort of, free love and drinking a lot,

and swapping partners, and things.

One of the things about free love is all very well,

but possessiveness was absolutely not on.

And so you were always up against it.

That your partner would probably get off with other people,

and there was nothing you could do about it.

I got into the usual tangle because

the man in my life would do things like stay in the pub

if he felt like staying in the pub

and I would've gone home to cook him a meal

and he'd never come home to eat it

and I would cry and carry on

and then, finally, I thought

"This is rubbish. Absolute rubbish."

"I'm not doing this, I'm out of here."

Very hard to imagine you ever having done that.

The picture of you at the stove, crying for a man, I have to say's...

-Oh, well.

-Takes a bit of...imagination.

It wouldn't be the only time I'd done that, either.

But let's leave the young Germaine pining by the stove...

..while we catch up with another one of our brilliant Melburnians.

Moonee Ponds.

For Barry Humphries, too, growing up in the suburbs had been hell,

but he chose to quit Melbourne, paradoxically,

by plunging more deeply into it.

Not that those who knew him always got the joke.

My mother was a sardonic woman.

She used to say, quite often in public, in front of people,

at dinner - she'd say,

"We don't know where Barry came from."

Did you sometimes wonder where you came from?

I took it seriously.

I thought "Perhaps I'm like Valerie up the road - adopted.

"Perhaps if I stand outside the house long enough,

"my real parents might come past and pick me up".

But they didn't.

And my real parents would be much more interesting!

It's terrible, isn't it?

But then I decided early on, Howard,

when I began to write things for myself in the theatre

that the only place I really knew was Melbourne

and my shows are still about Melbourne.

It's my inspiration and when I say that it was very dull -

EXHILARATINGLY dull.

Heaven could live there, I would think.

But I don't, I just drift by like a ghost.

I love the idea of the exhilaration of dullness, that explains...

Well, that's the beginning of the explanation of Edna,

isn't it, really?

And also of another character of mine, Sandy Stone,

who's a ghostly figure in a dressing gown with a hot water bottle

who sits in a chair and ruminates.

I only hope and pray that when the time eventually does come...

..as it will...

..Beryl's the first to go.

I wanted to see how boring

I could make a monologue

with no jokes,

nothing even faintly amusing,

what would happen to an audience who had to listen to this?

It became popular.

Because people laughed at the fact that there were no laughs.

In a way I had liberated comedy

from the necessity to be funny.

You talk about always feeling out of place

and then you often describe - "now I felt alive".

When I first went to Australia

that was my moment for feeling alive.

It's interesting to trace yours.

It first happens, I think, when you're still in Melbourne

and you meet the people from Eltham and the Drift.

Oh, yes, I meet these so-called bohemians -

sort of middle class, wife-swappers really, is what they were.

As early as that? They were doing it? In Eltham?

They were doing it in a picturesque way,

up there in a hamlet outside of Melbourne.

Do you never wish you'd stayed up there, in that case?

Those of us who left, were looked at askance, you know -

"Why would you want to leave?"

Well, they knew very well that the reason they hadn't

was that they were too scared.

Or doing too well.

I started to do rather well.

That is to say, things appeared about me in the paper,

I got a few nice reviews.

Some of my self-conscious eccentricities

drew the attention of people I admired.

-Your Dadaist days.

-My Dadaist days.

GERMAINE: Barry doesn't remember this...

but I worked on his Dada exhibition.

He does remember it, he's talked to me about it.

Black stockings struck me, and a blue shift.

I wore a felt skirt in a dreadful shade of electric blue,

and a matching top.

Not a mini skirt then, but a dress that ended mid-thigh.

Blue.

French blue.

Black stockings, slightly laddered. Attractive.

And I was putting on this exhibition of effrontery

and she helped actually assemble it.

Hang it on the wall.

And I had to fill shoes with custard

- I mean, boots with custard -

and I had to take shoes to be made by a surgical bootmaker

that were joined at the toe.

Dada.

This was just part of the exotic life

that lay outside of my home suburb.

And then, of course, we all learnt -

as most Australians did -

that there was somewhere else outside of Australia,

and it was called "overseas".

Overseas.

You talk so often about needing to leave, and having to leave,

and being desperate to go,

and there's a phrase somewhere about

"without any trepidation or deliberation"

you just one day upped and left.

It even sounds almost callous in its briskness.

Oh, it is callous.

But you...

It IS callous.

I left my little sister and my little brother

to deal with their mad mother,

thinking that she would be less mad with them than she was with me

and I think she was probably worse.

There is a phrase at the end of Unreliable Memoirs,

you talk about the abundance of natural blessings

that gave you the courage to leave.

That's such a powerful paradox.

If those blessings existed in such an abundance,

why didn't you bloody stay?

Well, the language is self-conscious and rather grand,

and you've put the skewer right where it belongs.

Why didn't we stay?

Australia felt like a little place far away -

- it's actually huge, it's three million square miles -

but it felt like a little place.

It felt as if you were going to do anything in the kind of fields

which some of us were interested in - which is writing

and acting and movies, etc, painting -

then the action was abroad, and especially in Britain.

And you'd choose Britain especially because Britain was easy to get to.

And sometimes the more beautiful the place,

the more you have to leave it. The lotus-eater thing -

is it Ulysses and his sailors, find themselves on this island,

and they eat the lotus

and that's that.

All they want to do is lie around all day and...

enjoy the sunshine and not do anything

and I think many have felt that about Australia -

it's too good. It's too good, mate!

And if you're ever going to achieve anything

you just have to get away from it.

"When the moment came to leave Sydney, I hardly felt

"a twinge of misgiving." wrote Robert Hughes.

"Australia in the early '60s was a backwater."

Barry Humphries spoke even more contemptuously

of the country's "stifling intellectual torpor".

"You had to get away," he wrote later "and prove yourself

"where the competition was intense."

Those immediate post-war years were awful.

Drab, boring.

And it wasn't until the '60s that it seemed to me

that England was transformed.

That was the revolution.

When were you first aware of them?

I suspect about 12 hours after they got off the boat, really.

They all made for London.

I'd made for London from only 300 miles away in the north of England

for much of the same reason - because London was the place

where you could do what you really wanted to do,

which was anything at all to do with the arts, particularly.

And they were there - they made an impact almost right away.

Class was a huge force in those days

in the way that you shake your head

to think how much...how many interactions per day

were determined by class.

From below and from above,

you felt these pressures all the time.

And the Australians just weren't having that.

It wasn't part of their consciousness.

And so they were stepping on toes

and pushing with their elbows,

and establishing a new kind of freedom,

and a sort of...

er...

..disrespect.

A very healthy disrespect

for everything that was iconic.

This is where, in the 1960s,

new Australian arrivals made a little Australia for themselves.

Giving rise to the cliche of the uncouth, loud-mouthed,

drunken Aussie.

Of course, our Australians chose not to live here.

The valley of the Australians.

I used to come here when I was missing my Australian friends,

just to hear the accent.

AUSTRALIAN ACCENTED CHATTER

London was full of Australian girls

making up their minds about their boyfriends.

Sometimes they made up their minds

with the assistance of Austrian ski instructors.

So was this in Earl's Court?

Did you head straight for Earl's Court?

I decided never to go to Earl's Court.

Something... A very healthy instinct warned me against joining a huddle -

an Anglophobic huddle

in a basement -

and there were Australians who went to London

and burnt gum leaves and ate vegemite

and drank Foster's lager

and only thought about home.

Australia House had a reading room

and there they all went to read the Woman's Weekly...

The Australian Woman's Weekly -

to get the latest news about the royal family

because there wasn't really enough about the royal family

in the British newspapers.

They had to go to Australia House and read what we thought about them.

Well, you then started to hit this satire boom, as they say.

Well, yes, I kind of was a fringe member of that group of wags

led by Peter Cook.

Peter Cook had a club in Soho called The Establishment,

and Cook said "I'd like you to do something on stage in that show."

I said "It's not political, what I do,

"it's best described as regional monologue."

But he was persistent.

And I saw the person who was on at the club before

called Frost - David Frost - and I thought,

well, I can do certainly do better than that

because he was pretty well howled off the stage.

But I did my thing and it was a total disaster.

He did his Edna...

Excuse I?

..and people got on with drinking

and waited for the main act to come on.

John Betjeman walked in - John Betjeman, English poet laureate -

all those rollicking verses,

saw Barry Humphries and thought "Yes!"

And John Betjeman thought "Yes!" because he loved the language.

It's telling that it took a poet to hear what Humphries was up to.

Clive James heard it, too.

For him, Humphries was rediscovering and reordering

the Australian language,

making poetry out of its cultural detritus.

Britain was finally emerging from it's long post-war winter,

and if it was receptive to riskier music,

bolder art,

satire...

it was also receptive to the very things our Australians

had brought over in their luggage -

words.

Clive coined a term for the Australian writers'

love of verbal acrobatics -

Kangarococo.

There seemed to be a lot of people around in Australia

with a gift for writing the memorable sentence.

Which I think is probably the basis of the Australian culture,

and you'll still hear things from young Australians -

sometimes children that will transfix you

with the vividness of the expression.

It's in the culture or it's not. I imagine some languages are dull.

Australian English is not dull!

Quite the opposite.

They had a taste for

pushing the language of hyperbole

as far as it would go

while holding an intellectual argument.

And they relished it. Relished the language they were using.

I remember meeting Clive coming out of a shop in Charing Cross Road

reading a medical book,

and I'd say "What's that all about?"

And he said "The words. All these words, these wonderful words.

"Seeing if I can use any, yeah..."

And that was good.

And Germaine has this flair for...

extremism in expression,

which holds to a very strong argument she's making.

Australian speech is characteristically exaggerated

and over-coloured.

We overstate a case, if we can.

You know, that bloke was so generous

he'd give you his arse hole and shit through his ribs.

Only an Australian could even THINK that!

I mean, it's metaphysical, it's so crazy!

And Clive can do that and Bob can do that.

I would LIKE to be able to do that,

I don't think I do it as well as either of them.

And I think I'd extend that to Barry, as well.

In the Adventures of Barry McKenzie published in Private Eye,

Humphries' half excavated, half invented a new lexicon of vulgarity.

I deliberately made it a sort of synthetic character.

Sometimes inventing expressions -

some of which actually went into the language -

and recycling school boy slang.

And there was a great deal about incontinence.

Barry McKenzie drinks a lot

but he's always looking for somewhere to urinate

or to point Percy at the porcelain,

or something of the kind.

And if he's not urinating,

he's vomiting.

In fact, the comic strip was banned in Australia

for several years

because it was felt,

not that it was indecent,

but that it misrepresented Australia.

So I was a banned writer.

-But...

-Part of you might have enjoyed that.

I did. A lot of me enjoyed... MOST of me enjoyed it!

While Barry was relishing being banned at home,

our other Australians were acculturating to overseas.

Clive often said that the one thing he hadn't come to England to do

was meet the very Australians

he'd left Australia to avoid.

Why weren't you overawed by Cambridge?

I was overawed by Cambridge, and I'm an Englishmen.

-Mind you, I'd come from Manchester.

-That's WHY you were overawed.

You thought it was a class thing.

You thought, "What a miracle I'm here."

I never thought, "It's a miracle I'm here."

"I'm here. I'm where I deserve to be", has always been my feeling.

God, how I envy that. God, how I envy that!

That's a natural Australian thing.

What a wonderful thing, then, to have.

What a wonderful liberation that is.

Well, it's also an Australian fault.

Sometimes you make yourself too at home.

There's such a thing as good manners.

Germaine also headed to Cambridge

where our paths crossed for the first time.

In 1964, I meet you in Cambridge.

You've just come from Sydney.

I'm leaving Cambridge to go to Sydney.

The spot that you vacate is the spot that I fill.

I take, anyway.

I will never forget meeting you in Cambridge

because you struck all of us as astonishing.

We had never seen anybody like you,

we'd never heard of anybody like you.

You sat on the floor, Germaine.

No woman in Cambridge sat on the floor.

Weren't you at all awed by being in Cambridge?

Weren't you frightened of us, at all?

I had a pretty clear inkling that Cambridge was...

..not overrated - I think that would be wrong - um...

but stuffy and weird.

And they're still like that.

People in Cambridge pretend to stammer

because they're thinking of a way

to cap the conversation.

So they had this "ba ba ba ba" Cambridge stammer.

You just wanted to slap it out of them!

And of the best of the performing arts since 1936,

the very best was the annual Footlights Revue.

If you wanted to make a go of your Cambridge career,

Footlights was one of the best places to do it.

Clive spotted his opportunity and grabbed it with both hands.

So did Germaine...

And I never bothered with Footlights, didn't have the nerve.

You've got to know how to seize your opportunity.

And those two knew how to seize it.

The president of Footlights was Eric Idle,

not yet a Python.

October '64 -

and through the door came Germaine Greer and Clive James.

And I didn't know who they were of course,

but they were very startling looking people,

and in order to get into the Footlights you had to audition

at one of the smoking concerts in the club house

and so Germaine came on

and she came on dressed as a nun,

and she did a strip tease

and she did this whole nun... stripping nun outfit

and that got her elected, at once.

So she was the first female member of The Footlights.

Are the stripping nun stories true?

You did a stripping nun routine?

Yes, but I would take off all these clothes

and chuck them away,

but then we'd get down to my wet suit and my flippers,

and I'd go off into the SEA!

So that was it, and it was, really, a send-up of...um...

lechery, really.

I was a very nerdy undergraduate,

saddled with the job of editing something called the Cambridge Review

And I was looking around for people

to do occasional reviews -

film reviews, art reviews -

and there was...particularly Clive James, actually.

Even though it was "The '60s"

somehow the satirical edge was kind of soft and understated and gentle.

But there was nothing soft or gentle about either Clive or Germaine.

The Australians had this incredible kind of intoxication of happiness

about what language could do.

Did you frighten the English when you came?

I don't think I had the personality for that.

I would like to have thought that I was a bit daunting,

but I don't think I was daunting at all.

-Germaine was terrifying.

-She's terrifying even now.

And she was terrifying when we were all in Australia.

First of all, she has a formidable intellect

and I think it is true to say of her that she's not...

..a miracle of objectivity.

She talks for victory.

Didn't they used to say that in the 18th century?

I think Samuel Johnson said it - "I talk for victory."

She talks for victory. She doesn't talk any other way.

You like institutions, don't you?

I remember the two passions come out very clearly -

the passion for reading and for libraries,

You speak very warmly of Melbourne Public library,

and also the passion for... if not the nuns,

then some academics, and High Table.

You're wistful about High Table.

Oh, I'm a bit wistful about my academic gown.

I loved my academic gown.

And I flew around Cambridge on my bike with my gown,

which was a masters gown, so it had closed sleeves,

and the closed sleeves would fill up with air like zeppelins,

and there I'd be... nyarrr nyarrr nyarrr...!

With these two out-riders behind me.

Be nice to have a photograph of that.

Oh, I've never been interested in photographing myself.

-You don't like photographs. You've said somewhere...

-I hate them.

You've said somewhere that

"A photograph is the prelude to a goodbye."

Interesting line.

Do you remember saying that?

Oh, goodness, did I?

I might have.

I think...I think on one of the last times you see your father,

you're photographed with him,

and I think maybe you don't see him again after that

and you look back and you think, maybe that photograph

was a way of saying goodbye and since then you've...

Because it went away in his uniform pocket, yes.

He came back, but when he came back he...wasn't there.

There's an orphan feel about our Australians.

An absence of fathers.

Clive's died when he was a little boy.

Robert's when he was 12.

Germaine's father was a mystery to her,

and Barry was a mystery to his.

I've noticed that

I bond very well with people

who have lost their fathers,

or their fathers went off to the war

and both Germaine's father went off to the war,

Clive's father went off to the war,

and I think, in a sense, this generation of Australians

were orphans in the sense they were...

coming to Europe to find out why their fathers were killed

or put in the army.

And so for that first generation,

I think they're reclaiming something.

I think there's a degree in all the people we're talking about...

in getting their own back, in a sense.

I think there's a great degree of that.

We're funnier than you are, we're brighter than you are.

And I think that there's a lot of...

That that's the impetus in a lot of those people.

Bob Hughes got his own back

by making himself more at home in European culture

than most Europeans.

This is what he left Australia to find.

Civilisation,

or imperial loot, as he later called it.

Refined, he might've been,

but he never lost his rough colonial seditiousness.

He was like...a rugby team had come into your office.

You thought, "This is an intellectual rugger player,

"letting you have it between the eyes about...art".

He spoke as he wrote,

with the air of an aristocrat who'd just stumbled out of a bar,

but with his syntax intact.

You have to realise, of course, that no painting that's of any quality

is really very easy to understand,

because the function of a painting is always to expand one's experience

and so if it were easy to understand

it would fall within what you already knew.

While Germaine and Clive were making things happen for themselves

in Cambridge,

Robert Hughes was wondering around Italy

finally taking in the great art

he hadn't been able to see with his own eyes

in Australia.

Seeing the devastation caused to Florence

when the Arno burst its banks in 1966,

convinced him of the irreplaceability of the past.

The great centre of Renaissance art and patronage

was now in real danger of being destroyed.

I went to help with the salvage.

I realised that, once lost,

this rich history - so fragile and delicate -

could never be brought back.

And this confirmed a belief that art had to be my life.

In Italy, Hughes stayed with the expatriate Australian writer,

Alan Moorehead,

who had been instrumental in getting Hughes to leave Australia

and was now both a father figure to him, and instructor,

in the hard discipline of writing.

And then into your life comes Robert Hughes,

whom your father has often described as his mentor.

Tell us about Robert.

Bob appeared in Porto Ercole

which is where we have our house in Italy -

and I must have been, I suppose, about 16.

And he was this unbelievably glamorous figure -

very, very talkative, very articulate,

never drew breath,

and what I particularly remember...

My mother was not at all prim, but she was very English,

and...every second word of Bob's

was some expletive of some kind.

And I remember this clash of two cultures.

I mean, my mother loved Bob, and it was perfectly OK,

but I remember Bob erupting into our lives.

He seemed to be able to do everything -

he wrote, he knew about art, he painted pictures, he talked...

Above all he talked.

He sat at that table and he talked and talked and talked.

As far as I can remember, the first original work of art

that I ever saw, that actually affected my imagination

was by Norman Lindsay.

I was 13 and I found it behind a stack of trays in the pantry.

It was an etching from the late '20's.

A very white and ample lady

and a very tanned and muscular Pan

and all around them was this jungle of faces and bodies.

Great seething masses of them - satyrs and death's-heads and nymphs

and shepherds and dwarves and Bacchuses and demons - the lot!

What a world.

What a pagan fantasy.

Perhaps nobody can be corrupted by Norman Lindsay any more,

but he certainly corrupted me.

But although for a while I was left with the vague impression

that one had to be surrounded by dwarves in 17th century costume

in order to really get it on,

I'm still profoundly grateful.

Corrupted or not,

Hughes hit London full frontally in the late 1960s.

He came to see a sheila.

And he borrowed a little car from my lodger.

He was very good at making the most of any opportunity.

HE CHUCKLES

A long way from suburban Melbourne now,

Germaine Greer was discovering there was nothing she couldn't do.

# ..to me

# Come on and pour it to me...#

With a PhD from Cambridge,

a lectureship at Warwick University

underground magazines to write and pose for,

Led Zeppelin to play super-groupie to,

she had only to breathe to be subversive.

Germaine, whom I got to know very well,

I liked her very much,

she was very funny and quite a naughty girl at the time.

She bet me that she could sleep with every single member

of the tour.

And I took the bet and off we set off on the road

and she got stuck on the band.

She didn't get past the horn player,

that was it for the rest of the tour.

So she rather let the side down on her naughty behaviour!

Further naughtiness was exported from Australia to Britain

in the pages of the infamous underground magazine, Oz.

In late '60s London, Bob and Germaine contributed to it.

He on art, she on sexual politics,

if you could call such pieces politics.

Were you impressed with Robert?

Yes, but it was difficult to be Bob's friend.

And whenever Bob met me, he would patronise me

and sort of present me to people as...

And I'd think...

"All right, I'll let you get away with it this time."

If you wanted to get attention in 1960s Britain,

print was your medium.

And it was through print that our Australians made their first assault

on the national consciousness.

They're assuming the entitlement

to comment on the host country,

rather than saying, "Please like me.

"Or please accept me."

They are accepted because... Into the establishment itself...

as principle literary scholars,

film scholars, art scholars -

because they take no prisoners.

Clive James arrived in Fleet Street with a reputation for hard work

and quick wit.

If he could play the hack,

he could play the man of letters, too.

A combination that would soon make him

the most read critic in the country.

Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens -

both friends of mine -

Hitchens is dead now, alas -

they both said, "Go back to Australia",

when they'd disagree with something I said.

But there was a smile on their face

and anyway I would have ignored them.

I don't think there was ever any problem with acceptance.

If anything, there was a sort of exotic appeal.

And I started becoming a junior member of the London literary world

and I confess that for years, that's when I really did feel

that I'd left Australia.

I'm was slightly influenced, as everyone was, by Clive,

to such an extent that my father would,

at breakfast on Sunday mornings,

read out a review, if I had a review in The Observer,

he would read it out in an Australian accent

to show the influence.

An influence of which he disapproved?

Which he disapproved?

He had a lot of respect for Clive.

It was some...cliches, but...

it was just very fresh, his voice.

In both senses - cheeky and new.

Loaded with words,

fastidiously hypercritical,

armed intellectually to the teeth -

our four Australians could clean up any opposition.

But you aren't always liked for that.

They brought a sense that the world was not divided between us and them.

That it was full of people more like them.

They became the poster boys and girls for Australia.

In many, many ways, they did a huge service to their own country.

Now, it's strange, that in their own country because they actually left,

they've sometimes been regarded as traitors.

Well, I just don't think Australian humour is, as yet, well enough known.

And I think it's the duty of the practitioners of Australian humour

to make Australian humour as known abroad as it is in Australia.

And I hope that the time is not far distant when Australia will become

the laughing stock of the world, as it fully deserves to be.

GERMAINE: I'd like to go home.

Certainly, I still love Australians

better than any other people in the world.

But I don't know whether...

whether they want me. Yet.

Or whether they ever will, or whether I'll ever be any use to them.

But if I should see one day,

clearly what it is I have to do for my country and my people,

I guess I'll do it.

So where was home now?

And how was Australia reacting to news of their success?

With pride you'd think,

but Australians are suspicious of tall poppies.

So had our brilliant creatures outgrown the country

that had made them brilliant?

We shall see.

'And you're working on something associated with....

ROBERT: 'I'm doing a Time essay on Jagger, yeah, yeah.

'You know, it sort of interests me a great deal -

'the sort of principle sex object of the Western world

'should now be a man rather than a woman.

'You see, I hear a lot of men say now

'this has brought a sort of unrest into my household.'