Episode 2 Rebels Of Oz: Germaine, Clive, Barry and Bob

Robert Hughes, firebrand art critic.

Clive James, memoirist, broadcaster, poet.

Barry Humphries, savage satirist.

Germaine Greer, feminist, libertarian.

Exiled from Australia, all of them.

I did believe in the great Australian ugliness.

There was somewhere else outside of Australia.

The action was abroad and especially in Britain

and you'd choose Britain because it was easy to get to.

She came on dressed as a nun and she did a strip tease.

Had he walked into the room, three nuns might have actually

dropped their vows.

I was a banned writer.

Part of you might have enjoyed that.

Most of me enjoyed it.

Because they actually left, they were sometimes regarded as traitors.

What a duller place and we, a thinner place, this country

and in a sense, some parts of the English world would have been

if those four hadn't landed on these shores and made for London

and got it by the throat, which is what they did!

They were four prodigiously gifted writers, critics

and entertainers from Australia,

a place they considered a sleepy backwater.

They dared to take on the world, London and New York

and they succeeded spectacularly.

My name's Howard Jacobson and I feel that my life, strangely,

has been intertwined with theirs for the last 50 years.

Late in 1964, I sailed to Australia to take up

a lectureship at Sydney University.

I spent the next few years enchanted by the beauty of Sydney...

..while they tried there luck in the Britain I'd been glad to leave.

We pick their story in 1970s London,

where their brilliance is about to burst on the British.

England was no longer the deferential, class-bound country

they had found when they got here.

Change was in the air

and they, although they never considered themselves a group,

saw their opportunity in it.

In 1972, Clive James landed the job of TV critic at the Observer.

"Call no man happy," he wrote later,

"if he has never been ordered to go home and watch television."

I was wasting my time with a PhD that was never going to be written

but I was publishing stuff all over the place in Cambridge

and also in London because one of the editors,

at least one, the editor of the New Statesman,

invited me to write pieces for him

and I did and they started to catch on

and then I wrote for the Listener.

These magazines were very powerful at the time.

Everybody read them, everybody who you wanted to reach read them and

then television criticism for the Observer, so by 1972 I was on my way.

And when Clive got hold of a television column...

A television column in those days,

that's what you did when you retired, it's what you did

when you couldn't really write columns.

He got hold of a television column

and turned it into something everybody had to read.

He made it his power base in terms of literary London.

Nobody had done that before.

The ability of yours to move across

from popular culture to serious culture, your at-homeness in both,

it's kind of mad to say that's Australian but it's not English.

That carelessness of the distinctions,

that principal carelessness of distinction, isn't English.

Popular culture was my observation point.

I had a natural affinity to it and nothing was more natural to me

in the world, than to say what I thought.

It was a big advantage to come from a country where saying what

you think is something you do all the time.

Sometimes people bristle when they hear it.

Clive's form of engagement was a witty penetration,

based on serious reading.

He wants to, you know, sort of get everybody high on words

and thoughts and ideas

and things that are cleverly confounding at the same time.

'On the South Bank Show, Melvyn Bragg was extracting, drop by drop,

'a fascinating interview from Harold Pinter.

'It was exactly like getting blood out of a stone,

'except that stones do not smoke. Pinter smoked all the time.

'In the tight head shots, there was so much smoke pouring up

'from the screen, you began wondering whether his trousers were on fire.'

He says that humourless people, it's not just a little disability

that affects them, means they don't laugh at jokes.

He said, "People without a sense of humour shouldn't be trusted

"with anything," you know? "Don't even give them a letter to post."

He said, "People without a sense of humour have no common sense either

"because that's all a sense of humour is, common sense dancing."

-Common sense dancing?

-Dancing.

-That's fantastic!

Yeah, and sort of, things become clear.

It's a very sort of luminous remark there and his criticism

is full of things like that.

If a sense of humour is common sense dancing,

then the book that made Germaine famous was rage cavorting.

Part feminist tract, part literary criticism,

The Female Eunuch was also

a dismantling of that Australian masculinist code known as mateship.

Only an Australian woman hardened by the encounter

could have drawn on such reserves of scorn.

Everybody now knows that there is something called women's liberation.

A lot of people think they know what it is and they don't

but a great many more people think they'd perhaps better find out.

Germaine came and there'd been a lot of people writing about feminism

and tiptoe, this is the way it should be.

"Gosh, we've got things wrong," and she came in and...

The Female Eunuch - it was one of the books you'd roar through.

It really was an important book and it still is, historically,

but at that time it was important for the present.

She was a kid when she wrote this book. I mean, she was a kid.

She was 30?

I just... It's just unbelievable.

33, she must have been. 32 when it came out, I suppose.

Unbelievable!

She was talking about the way the patriarchy was duplicated,

even in the black power movement,

which, you know, was nothing new, you know.

You can't say that but she did and, you know, you sat back

and you thought, "Yeah, how come all the guys

"who are actually out there with the bullhorns

"and we're in the back rooms with the mimeograph machines?"

But she said it.

"I'm sick of the powder room,

"I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous, male, self-important

"pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention.

"I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to

"and sick of having no opinions of my own about either.

"I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female

"impersonator. I'm a woman, not a castrate."

Well, you can hear 18th century satire in The Female Eunuch.

It's one of the joys of The Female Eunuch. I think you can.

-Well, yippee! Yippee!

-The swell of it.

It's a very English literature book, I've always thought.

Yes, but it's badly written, I'm afraid. I just...

-Well, not to my ear.

-I write better now.

You'd want to, wouldn't you, after 50 years of trying?

-Have you read Germaine Greer's book, The Female Eunuch?

-No.

-Do you want to read it?

-No.

Yes, I wouldn't mind reading it.

Oh, I think so. What's it about?

All I have to sort of go on is what people tell me

about reactions that I don't have a chance to see,

like someone saying that her cleaning lady has been talking

about it or someone saying the barmaid in the pub was

talking about the issue,

because after all, they are interested in the issue,

they are women and the issue has touched them.

And my mum tells me interesting stories because she read the book

when she was about...when it first came out in 1970.

She got it from the library

and she said that it totally changed her life.

She was a teacher but she hadn't realised how suppressed she was.

It changed her views on everything - on motherhood,

on the workplace, on friendships, on the division of housework.

I'm often struck when I meet you at a party at the number of people

sort of waiting their turn to thank you for changing their lives.

A number of women, "Thank you for changing my life."

"Thank you for changing my mother's life."

It's not going to be very long until they'll be thanking you for

changing their grandmother's lives. That was a huge book for many.

But do you listen to my answers?

-Because I always say the same thing.

-What do you say?

I always say, "I didn't change your life. You changed your life

"and if I was any help in that process, I am grateful

"and touched, but I didn't change your life."

The thing about The Female Eunuch was not the book,

which I don't think is a terribly good book, it was the moment.

That sense that you've done something so big

that has made such a difference that everybody is talking about.

I don't have that sense. I really don't have it.

You didn't, at the time?

And that's partly my libertarian background

because that teaches me the way it would have taught any Marxian

historian, that books don't change events, events create books.

That's me on this month's POL...

Whatever event created The Female Eunuch, Germaine knew how

to write the crest of it.

The world's most photogenic polemicist

modelling feminism and frocks.

Were you a fan of The Female Eunuch?

Wasn't my line really, the Female Eunuch. It serves its purpose.

It was a good title.

Dame Edna would have been an avid reader of it.

Dame Edna claims to have inspired it

because Dame Edna had a small school in her house.

It was called the DEAD, which means the Dame Edna Academy of Drama

and various people... Mr and Mrs Crowe brought little Russell along.

Mr and Mrs Blanchett brought tiny Cate. Mr and Mrs Minogue...

They all went there and Mr and Mrs Greer

brought their difficult daughter.

And Edna gave her a few hints about how to...

I mean, she watched the way Edna treated Norm

and I think she got a few feminist ideas from Edna.

Barry was on a slower boil, acting in Oliver!, getting drunk,

forgetting which theatre he was appearing in

and writing his Barry McKenzie comic strip for Private Eye.

But in 1972, he tasted success with his film of a naive Aussie

led astray by unscrupulous, degenerate Poms.

Strike me pink! Hey, aren't we at Earl's Court yet?

This is taking longer than the plane trip!

-Nearly there, guv.

-Stupid pommie bastard.

I suggested to Barry that it would be good to make

a film of his comic strip of Barry McKenzie, you know,

the gormless Australian adrift in London.

The comic strip, I thought, was screamingly funny.

-Come on!

-You wouldn't do me wrong, would you?

ALL: No!

I've been poisoned!

Smells like piss! Stop mucking around...

Now Barry, at the time that we made McKenzie, was not having

a good time at all. Alcoholism was consuming him. He was more often to

be found in the gutter somewhere or being beaten up in back lanes.

So Bruce Beresford and I saw the Humphries films, saw Barry Mackenzie

as a method of getting Barry on the straight and narrow

and it did. It helped Barry focus his energies

and he worked brilliantly.

Also, he worked cheap.

He played almost three quarters of the characters in the film,

which saved us an immense amount of money on actors.

Now listen, mate, I need to splash the boots.

You know, strain the potatoes, water the horses.

I think he wants to go the loo.

Well, of course he made a fool of Australia.

That's not a bad thing to do. All of us need to be made fools of

and Barry did it brilliantly.

I was also talking about British society as I saw it at the time

and especially the trendy '60s, the swinging London,

a moral quicksand in which this poor Australian, innocent,

was sinking fast.

So how was Bob Hughes surviving these moral quicksands?

Heaven or hell, what does it matter, to the depths of the unknown

to find something new.

Outwardly prospering, a psychedelic lecturer, an art pundit,

he was living beyond his means

here in Chelsea, in a disintegrating marriage,

consoling himself with booze and drugs and literature.

But a single phone call is all it takes to change a life

and the phone rang suddenly for Hughes.

Bob was leading a very harem-scarem,

sort of freelance life. He was in debt and the bailiffs were after him.

And he was also, I would say...

More than his fair share of controlled substances

was flowing through that cerebral cortex at that point.

The then managing editor of Time read a book called

Heaven And Hell In Western Art by Robert Hughes

and he said to himself, "Why can't Time have art writing like this?"

And Bob was spooked by the thought that somebody who hadn't identified

himself very clearly was seeking him from the United States

and so he'd concluded that he was being stalked by the CIA.

He finally did get on the phone and it turned out that it was indeed

Time magazine seeking him and he was interested.

When I joined Time, all my friends in London like Richard Neville

and Co sort of looked at me and said, "Hmm, well, that's enough

"of you, Bob. You've joined the establishment now,"

and then reflecting upon this, I flew into New York

and walked into the Time office

and went up to see the managing editor's secretary, who sort of

looked at me cursively and said,

"Ah, yes. You're the new house hippy."

They needed to escape to flourish but paradoxically what flourished

were the very things that made them Australian -

Barry's high-wire scabrousness, Germaine's louche puritanism,

Clive's voracious mastery of every medium, big and small,

Bob's erudite thuggery.

What are these but expressions of Australian genius?

You know, Bob was a brave, colourful sort of magnificent man

and carried himself with real swagger.

When he was the art critic at Time,

when everybody else at Time Inc was very corporate -

they wore a certain type of tie, a certain type of suit -

Bob wore black leather motorcycle outfits.

He'd ride into the office on his Triumph.

So Bob just went counter to everything

and just made it work for him.

He always called me Bobbie, which was fine.

I liked being called Bobbie

and I usually called him Robert, trying to assign to him the dignity

he required. So this was his kind of introduction to the United States

and he didn't know anybody so I introduced him to everybody.

At that time I was writing for both Vogue and New York Magazine

and then of course he was writing for Time.

I think it's that Kris Kristofferson song, The Silver Tongued Devil -

"He's a walking contradiction, part truth and partly fiction."

This is SoHo, New York.

Run down and dangerous when Bob Hughes moved here in 1970,

not yet the epicentre of the fashionable art world,

but he had an eye for a grander canvas.

He knew that in Superman's New York, the art critic could be a hero.

-Hello, John!

-Hey, Howard!

How are you? Good to see you.

-Fanelli's! We're here.

-We're here at Fanelli's.

-Great bar.

-It's pretty amazing.

-And one of his favourites?

Yeah, it was one of is favourite hang-outs early on especially because

most of the artists we knew about in American art lived around this bar.

So if they drank, they'd have had a drink here?

And many of them drank here.

Because you always imagine the art critic is aloof from the world

of the artists themselves, doesn't want to meet

the actual artist. It's one thing to talk about art

but who wants to meet them? Because you might get a punch in the face.

He must have feared that.

Well, I think that he had no fear of that

and I think he also kind of relished the idea that he was sitting here

with a glass of whisky in amongst them. "Here I am. I said all I had

"to say about you. What do you have to say?"

If the cliche of modern sculpture used to be a piece of stone

chewing gum with a hole in it, then the cliche of video art

is a grainy close-up of some UCLA graduate rubbing a cockroach

to pulp on his left nipple for 16 minutes.

In American culture, whether you're talking about politics or

you're talking about art, you obey sort of certain rules of decorum

and that's why when Bob didn't in some of the Time pieces,

it had this kind of fantastic force of detonation.

Bob was a good hater, he was a good rager, he was a good ranter

but the things he hated and raged against and ranted about

were important and noble causes.

When I became art critic at the New Yorker he gave me some good advice.

He said, "Always remember, the art world is always the enemy of art."

You know, Bob used to get up very early in the morning and blaze away,

in those days at the typewriter and then later at the computer,

and then he would have lunch

and take a nap and these naps became notorious

around the Time corridors because people, other writers, would make

jokes about the fact that, "Oh, well, I suppose Bob is snoozing now.

"It's his nap time."

Once in a while I had to bring them up short by saying,

"Listen, before you come to work in the morning, Bob has written

"more words than you are ever going to write all week and better words

"at that, so, you know, don't make fun of his naps.

"They're well earned."

-Did you like his art criticism?

-Yes, I did.

I mean, I read it with the greatest pleasure now.

He was very good about artists,

that really, long before we knew much about them, you know.

I mean, he was there on the spot in New York where it was all happening.

Although Germaine Greer didn't roar in on a motorbike,

after the international success of The Female Eunuch,

she too was ready to storm New York.

When the American press started coming to talk to me,

one of the women from Vanity Fair or something said to me,

"You do realise, do you, that your life will never

"be the same again?" and I said,

"I don't want my life not to be the same again. I like my life."

I like teaching, being involved in the underground,

I like being involved with Oz.

"I don't want to be famous," is what I could've said, but...

I didn't really know what a bore being famous is.

Germaine Greer did have a real voice.

First of all it was the birth of feminism in the United States

and she obviously is a strong person.

Actually out of the four of them,

the person I read was Germaine Greer and I think everybody read it.

If I had to choose between Germaine Greer and Gloria Stein,

give me Germaine Greer.

I mean, she was a serious person, not a narcissist.

She wasn't selling herself.

'I would like to welcome you...'

Such was the notoriety of The Female Eunuch,

that Norman Mailer, the great male heavyweight writer of the time,

squared up against its author in a much-publicised debate

in New York's Town Hall.

A documentary captured it,

Town Bloody Hall it was called - Germaine's phrase.

It was more a love-in than a debate.

The novelist smitten, the young feminist flattered.

Positively Shakespearean, it was - Antony and Juliet.

Norman Mailer had made many statements that were anti-feminist

and the feminists absolutely hated him, so why not put him on the

panel with the great Germaine Greer?

Who else could answer him, we thought.

The young and formidable lady writer,

Miss Germaine Greer from England.

Germaine Greer at that time, there was a beauty and a glow

about her and an attitude, an attitude.

That I am having to confront one of the most powerful figures

in my own imagination, the being, I think,

most privileged in male elitist society,

namely the masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite.

And she was so brilliant and she came up with these remarks.

Why do you think the whole event was called Town Bloody Hall?

It's obviously a...

Because I think it's too serious to do it just so

I can defend myself against hecklers in the Town bloody Hall!

APPLAUSE

It was a bit scary, the whole thing.

You offered to have admired him and offered to be slaying the father

in a way, in your fight with Mailer. Did you admire him?

Of course I admired him

but I loved him too because quite early on, Dick Fontaine who made

the film about the raising of the Pentagon with Mailer,

Dick Fontaine had said to him,

"Oh, you have to understand that Germaine's actually

"quite vulnerable," and Mailer said, "Of course she's vulnerable,

"she's a writer!"

I thought, "Norman Mailer called me a writer! I'm a writer!

"Wow! Woo!"

Norman Mailer calls you a writer, guess what, you're a writer, damn!

But it wasn't just for being a writer that Germaine appeared

on the covers of magazines -

the price for fame being condescension.

Her refusal to lead with that kind of female, compassionate...

I understand, especially when we talk about Germaine being surrounded by

these giant male intellects,

all of whom had a fierce and overconfident masculinity.

But I thank God for the courage of the uncompromising female.

Yes, I'm afraid the gladies are a bit wilted.

Ah, well, look at these, look at the unusual colours.

Have you got colour, viewers?

Germaine wasn't the only Australian beauty exciting crowds

wherever she went.

They match my ocelot outfit rather, don't they?

By the mid '70s, Edna Everage,

once a plain Australian housewife, now a superstar,

had been made a Dame by the Australian Prime Minister,

Gough Whitlam.

Hello, my darling!

-Hello, darling.

-Hello, dear.

The joy of working with comedians, I found,

I love working with comedians,

the trick's always been to back off and understand the rhythm

that they work at, and I loved doing that with Barry,

cos again, it was in the eyes. I could see, he'd look at me when

he needed me and I could see this, put something to shift him this way

or that way, it's fascinating, fascinating working with him.

That's the first time I've seen your legs.

Well, I have very, very nice legs, though I say it myself, ladies,

and I'm not a bit ashamed to show them off.

I think I'm very lucky at my age to have them.

That's true, yes, in any shape or form.

And I have to thank Michael Parkinson

for really giving me a good thrust forward in the early '70s,

and I still think he was a great interviewer, because he could,

not unlike yourself, he could submerge his own personality

and he could take a step aside, you see.

He didn't see himself as the star of the interview.

There's a lesson here somewhere.

Barry McKenzie used to chunder all over the place

and fall down legless wherever he could.

There's Sir Les, who we're going to meet in a moment,

who now doubt will be sozzled,

and you yourself are a teetotaller, aren't you?

Yes, I am. I'm totally a teetotaller. I was, in fact, such a boozer

that I was offered a senior job at the BBC and that shows you...

Was he different to interview in Australia?

No, no. I didn't find that at all.

Sir Les might have been a little bit more vulgar in Australia,

although that's difficult to imagine.

I'm passionate about Sir Les, a lot of people don't get Sir Les, do you?

Well, women don't like Sir Les, you see. Men generally get Sir Les.

Have you seen the false dong hanging down?

Well, he was sitting next to an actress called Jackie Weaver,

an Australian actress, a very bonny actress

who had a comeback very recently,

and he shook her by the hand and put the hand on the...

Sorry. It's a brand-new...

Are you one of these women who doesn't go for Les Patterson?

Oh, no, I adore Les Patterson.

Les Patterson is such a parody of all those men I grew up with,

those media moguls and those sexist oafs, and that sexism is still

innate in the language, if you think about in the workplace in Australia.

If a man is seen to be good at work, he's called assertive

and a go-getter and, you know, boss material.

A woman seen with the same drive

is seen as a bitch and a ball breaker, more blatant in Australia.

At least you can see the enemy, the battle lines are drawn

and you can see the enemy. I find the sexism in Britain, for example,

much more insidious and hidden away.

He's a very good friend of mine and...

I never got into it. This is a misconception.

The '70s had seen our four Australians coruscating

on the page, but there was a bigger audience waiting to be dazzled.

By the '80s, you had only to turn on your television to see them.

One of the things we're told women really like is oral sex.

Oh! Do they get enough of that?

Well, look! Look! Did you see his face?

Need I say more?!

Sir Les Patterson.

You see bikes and bikers have an unfortunate image

in the United States.

Here's Billy Connolly!

He's Stephen Fry!

Michael Palin!

Good evening and welcome to a brand series of the talk show

that puts conversation on television, and why shouldn't it?

Look at the way television gets into conversation.

How, when everything was going so well in the literary sense, did I...

decide that television career was possible too?

And the answer is, I followed my nose.

I got asked and I couldn't resist it.

Because that little characteristic, that had been there

from the beginning since I was two years old, in my memory,

made itself manifest. I'm a performer and I was asked to perform,

and also, of course, it paid the bills.

We didn't like each other to start with.

He was writing television criticism for the Observer.

Russell Harty and I were endeavouring to do a talk show,

and he wrote a piece once where he said of both Russell and myself,

"Why don't they go do something useful like go and invade Russia?"

I took umbrage of this, I thought,

"That's a rather nasty thing to say."

So when he took my job over, the job I had before...

I did a talk show, Cinema Granada, which he did very badly

because he didn't understand how to write for television.

he wrote his column and then tried to read it. Well, it didn't work.

So I wrote to him and I said,

"We're nearly in Moscow, would you like to join us?"

-and from that point on...

-Revenge is sweet!

From that point on, we became friends.

I was persuaded, if I didn't already think so myself,

that entertainment was the sharp edge of television.

That if I really wanted to be of value, that's what I should do,

and since I could do it, I did it.

After the initial shock, I was glad to see that nudity was still

a feature of Berlin beach life, and I resolved to try it next time.

Perhaps at night.

They had something like 17 million viewers when it was at its height.

And people would be talking about it for the next few days.

"Did you see Clive James the other night? Absolute classic."

You'd hear that a dozen times a day after one of the shows.

So you didn't feel that your telly career interfered with

the other ambitions that you had? To be a serious literary...

Yes, I did, and I knew that it would, because television is very demanding,

especially if you write your own stuff.

You're going to be in the office five or six days a week for every hour

you get on air, and I was for 20 years.

And you must have known you'd have to beat back the idea

that you're a well-known television personality,

you do popular things, you reach ordinary people.

You can't be expected to be taken seriously as a literary figure.

Yes, I'm still fighting it.

For example, I write a serious book, say, my latest book of poems,

but these books might suffer the fate that a serious editor

will give them to an unserious reviewer.

I don't think any culture is negligible,

except possibly that of New Jersey.

James once warned Hughes that if he did too much TV,

nobody who mattered would take him seriously.

"I'm glad," Hughes wrote later, "That I ignored his advice

"and happier still that he did."

Hughes' first great television series was The Shock Of The New.

People said that he'd knocked the title off from somebody else...

The series itself was all his, and the most shocking

and the most new thing about it was Hughes himself.

I don't think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box,

or a row of bricks on the floor, or a video tape of some twit

from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself

and think, "This is the real thing."

I grew up... When was Shock of the New?

1980, I think it was...

I was a student then and it was, you know, we were riveted to it,

Every week we watched The Shock of the New,

and we had his sort of lyrical, aggressive, erudite...

clear explanation of the history of modernism, really.

We went to Houston once, to the Rothko Chapel in Houston,

filmed there, and it was incredibly serene and quiet,

and there were these huge, great paintings on the wall,

these great, dark mauve...

and we all thought they were just dark paintings,

but actually, when you listened to what he talked about,

they just came alive. You suddenly saw that they worked in that place.

The world is drained out of them, now does that make them

religious art?

Holier men than I have thought so in this chapel,

and if I have my doubts, it's because they're so very withdrawn.

The horizons and storms of earlier romantic sublimities have gone

and what is left as the soul subject of contemplation is a void.

There was no superiority, it was absolutely...

He was one of us.

I suppose that's what you find about Australians, you know,

there's no pretensions, there's nobody saying,

"I'm sorry, I can't talk to you, you're not important enough."

We never had any of that feeling with Bob.

He was, of course, always late with his scripts, you know.

He was always saying "Oh, yeah, I posted those last week,"

and we knew he hadn't written them at all.

So he was forever writing things at the last minute,

and that's why they were so brilliant because he had a deadline,

and he was doing these things.

So he'd be sitting in his room tip-tapping away,

minutes before we were filming.

It was hugely influential.

At the end of it, I mean, I quoted him in one of my lectures, I say,

"The avant garde is now a period style."

And he said that in 1980, and that was very close to the end

of modernism, really, to call that shot then.

Yes, he pronounced more or less the end of modernism.

In some ways, I mean, you know, now it's sort of,

there's a lot of art commentators will agree that modernism

fizzled out mid-60s, probably, mid-70s, something like that.

So to call that shot in 1980,

that's a nanosecond in cultural history terms.

Dame Edna was to endure longer than modernism.

By the 1980s, she had outgrown Moonee Ponds.

The world was now her playground.

It wasn't so much that she mixed with royalty,

as that royalty mixed with her.

I'm curious at what point you felt that Edna began to escape.

Novelists always talk about the fact that there's the moment you know

it's working when the characters are determining what happens

and you're not, and there's a moment, isn't there,

or maybe there were stages in which Edna stops being a satire

on a suburban housewife and becomes something altogether?

She starts to fulfil another function.

When did she escape you?

It starts to be about fame, you know, and celebrity.

The character of Edna, or Sandy, or even Les Patterson,

they do really seem to have a life outside of me.

I can't always decide what's going to happen to them.

She's gorgeous - Zsa Zsa Gabor!

APPLAUSE

SCREAMS

What she became is what Barry once described brilliantly to me,

he said, "Dame Edna looks like a bird of paradise -

"in reality, she's a vulture,"

and I think that's exactly the right description of it.

And I think that Barry uses Dame Edna as a licence to do things

perhaps that he might not do when he's himself.

A man in a dress, so it's a licence for mischief!

No, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry... Please.

I had to abort her. I did.

Is she going to be all right?

No, she was wearing a natural fur, and I'm sorry, I'm a conservationist.

And as for Dame Edna, she'd just become impossible.

She's now so bizarre and far flung, she doesn't...

she has nothing to with Moonee Ponds any more,

but when she first appeared on the scene, she was Melbourne.

You preferred her before she became Dame Edna, superstar?

Oh, of course.

Myself, I think this misses the genius of Dame Edna's evolution

from a mere satirical portrait of a suburban housewife

into a figure of orgiastic comedy, unrestrained and terrifying,

a supreme affirmation of unfettered life.

At the height of their careers, our brilliant creatures

turned their thoughts to the Australia they'd left.

The other side of the exhilaration of leaving home

is a longing to go back.

They've done great things, not least, it seems to me,

because they have done them far from home,

a long way from any comfortable, consoling sense of belonging.

Let me try and put my finger on the nostalgia for Australia.

The big challenge that Australia offers is you're there.

You're living in a country that's quite hard to improve on.

If you're in a lucky part of it, you're faced with

incredible amount of beauty.

In an Australian suburb at the age of 18,

I played the music of Delius and Vaughn Williams

on the gramophone and dreamt of England.

Now, so often in reluctant exile,

I hear Summer Night On The River...

and it is Melbourne's Yarra I picture in my mind's eye.

You have to answer the question,

if I can't be happy here, where can I be happy?

And the answer is...

no, nobody can be that happy.

I don't think I could've come from anywhere else. I really don't.

I think...my impudence is Australian,

my insensitivity is Australian,

my lack of respect for social nuance

and position is Australian.

The place they once couldn't wait to leave

was taking its revenge on their imaginations.

Clive's first memoir was published in 1980

to the warmest of receptions. For all its hilarity, it is shot through

with a sort of anticipation of melancholy,

giving readers all they normally have to go to several books to find.

The Americans call it a break-out book,

and that, in Britain anyway, was my break-out book.

Unreliable Memoirs did unexpectedly well.

Television didn't get in the road of that.

I wrote that one as if I was breathing the air,

it just seemed the natural thing to do.

It didn't occur to me not to do it, and it was only later on that

I realised I'd hit a lucky streak.

I was writing something I should write more of.

Unreliable Memoirs is the funniest book, besides your books,

that I have ever, ever read.

Don't you think? It's just a perfect little comic masterpiece.

It's a joy. You could never tire of reading it.

The last couple of sentences, I actually had in my brain

since Sydney University. They were there for 20 years.

And then I wrote the book that went in front of them.

What is the last sentence?

It's about the light on the bridge calling us home.

"Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace

"of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection.

"It always has and it always will,

"until even the last of us come home."

That book was written like a poem.

I had all kinds of phrases lying around for years.

It's not written like a novel.

He was always very funny about Australia,

and of course, Unreliable Memoirs and all that.

We were on holiday and I was staying with him in Biarritz,

where he'd rented a place, and we were walking along

one evening and he said,

"It's just like Australia here,

"except that a giant, blood-sucking spider

"hasn't just attached itself to your leg."

He was very funny about how red in tooth and claw Australia is.

Germaine Greer wrote her own take on her childhood and family,

Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.

It was a very different work from Unreliable Memoirs,

more touching than you'd expect, but also, as you'd expect,

not funny.

I remember my first meeting with my father. I was six years old

and my mother and I went to Spencer Street Station.

We walked along the station looking at all these army greatcoats,

and they all passed and met other people and we kept on looking

and looking, until there was one man left, and my mother walked up

with her head on one side and said, "Reg?"

And he, this old man said, "Peg?" That was my father,

and I thought...

because there is this wonderful photograph of this laughing cavalier

on the mantelpiece, and I got this old man instead.

It's a very interesting book and one of the things you say...

I think it's my best book, actually, by miles. Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.

Yes, I like it very much indeed.

I like the sort of relentless pursuit of him.

It's like a thriller actually,

tracking him down and tracking him down.

My generation grew up fatherless, at least till

we were six or seven.

In the case of Clive, he grew up fatherless altogether.

Our relationships with our fathers were never quite right.

One of the reasons why we're the way we are is because we lacked that

-paternal element.

-She's right. She's put her finger right on it.

It's the lack of an emotional outlet.

In my own books, it's just a glaring absence, the absence of my father

and what my mother was faced with, bringing me up after the war.

This is just the key subject, but it's not the central subject,

because I really can't think of a way of treating it.

In the Fatal Shore, Bob Hughes found a way of treating fathers,

forefathers, anyway.

This epic of Australia's colonisation burned with the rage

of the disinherited.

He speaks of the colour of the waves and the feel of the wind,

the smells... And somehow he encapsulates all that different stuff

in one moment where you're actually thrust back in history

and you feel like,

"My God, I'm on this boat with these mortal suffering fools."

It had an enormous effect on me.

It was one of the couple of books that made complete sense

of my country and the total cruelty of its founding.

And which was so continually, richly, beautifully written,

and I thought it was a work of genius, a book for the ages

and a book for us for the ages.

To write The Fatal Shore, to hold Australia to look at our history,

not through the view of, you know, a romanticism of colonisation,

but the brutal, bloody reality, is a painful and shocking thing to do,

and it's unsurprising that we don't celebrate Robert to the degree

that we should, because he's made us uncomfortable.

In fact, Australians found it hard to forgive any of them

for having kicked their heels clear of the country years before.

They were there, we were here.

They weren't, in fact, central to what was happening here.

They'd taken their energies overseas, leaving some of us here

to try and, well, overcome the cultural cringe by organising

a cultural binge.

Visits from any of them were like Royal tours.

Years went by when we all got it in the neck

from resident Australian critics.

It's all smoke and mirrors, surprise, surprise.

Germaine, do you sometimes just sit in England and think,

"I've got something crazy to say, I'll jump on a flight to Australia!"

I think the truth was that although...

we might not have carried the flag highest, we'd carried it furthest.

We were part of Australia's image.

On the whole, we've made Australia look like what it is.

Well, we don't like people who go away.

We don't like people who act grand.

But it was a mighty hand in the Australian public opinion

that cut Hughes down.

Police say there was a head-on collision more than 100km

south of Broome.

In 1999, while on a fishing trip in North-west Australia,

Robert Hughes nearly died in a head-on collision.

"Bloodier than Banquo," he wrote later. Shakespearean to the last.

He said several things about the...

that four hours where he thought he was going to die

because he thought the car was going to catch on fire

and he was going to be burned.

He begged Danny O'Sullivan, our guide who was there,

to shoot him if the car caught on fire, cos he was so hopelessly

pinned inside of it that he knew that if the car ignited,

that he would be burned, and he just couldn't...

And of course, Danny just kept comforting him and saying,

"Don't worry, Bob, everything's all right," that kind of...

You can imagine this god-awful scene.

And the only people there were a number of Aborigines

who had circled the car and were singing,

doing some ancient ritual.

And I think that that so profoundly affected him,

he didn't know how to deal with that.

He understood Catholicism, he understood the art

and the history of ancient Egypt or whatever,

but I don't think he had a grasp of Aboriginal chanting

that would keep someone alive.

Very interesting, seeing a cripple climb.

Physically, Hughes never fully recovered,

but the subsequent publicity took its toll on him as well.

The press accused him of elitism,

a necessary quality in an art critic, but really it was

the silver spoon he'd been born with that they couldn't forgive.

You did an interview in New York where you said,

"Tow Australia out to sea and dump it, for all I care."

Do you still struggle with a sense of bitterness about this?

No. I don't. What I said was, as far as I'm, you know,

after the stuff I've had from the Australian media,

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

That's not actually the way I feel about Australia.

He loved Australia. He told me, you know, in Sydney Harbour,

the manhole covers with the quotes and names of writers,

it's called Writers Walk.

Bob went to see his, and it was of such huge importance to him,

and he felt so happy, deeply happy about it.

He was our Dante. He did take us on a guide into our hell,

the hell of the beginning of the country,

and it would have been really nice...before in his last years,

for people to have that more in mind than their desire to slaughter him.

They woke us up,

made us laugh, made us think, made us question,

made us see Australia differently,

and made England a richer place too, and now for themselves, what?

Is there a last frolic in them?

I've set up this charity called Friends of Gondwana Rainforest,

because Gondwana Rainforest is the most threatened in the world.

It's a sub-tropical rainforest.

This is a very different voice one hears now from the voice

of The Female Eunuch.

Yes, and so it should be.

Because you're older

and you've been on the Earth longer, or because... do you regret anything

-about the you of The Female Eunuch?

-No, no.

-Was that a necessary thing to you?

-No, no, no.

Women are all change, as you know.

We change and change and change. We have seven climacterics in our lives,

and I'm in the last one. Well advanced in the last one.

And in the last climacteric, you're the sleepless people,

you're the guardians, you're the watchers on the house top,

and that's what you do.

Dame Edna - is she now truly about to hang up her frock?

Well, I personally am sick of trailing her around and touring.

DAME EDNA: ..as the show wears on and on,

I will glance up there from time to time, I will, I will.

In strict proportion to the amount that you have paid.

Goodbye!

I'm calling it a day, but I think I'm presenting a very good show now.

It's tried and tested in my homeland of Australia,

and I can always say in England, "World Premier in Milton Keynes

"after a provincial tryout in Melbourne, Australia."

-Too cruel.

-Or the other way around.

But you're going to miss her.

Oh, I think she might be doing the odd television spot.

And Clive has crowned a career of astonishing versatility

with a translation of one of the greatest of all epic poems.

Your translation of Dante, is there no end to the man's ambitions?

I thought, maybe I've learnt enough about poetry in 50 years

of writing it, 60 years, that I can bring this off,

a verse translation of the verse masterpiece.

So I set out to do it, and it took years.

Tutta tremble... What's that wonderful line about...

Tutto tremante. Trembling.

The lovers kiss each other, tutto tremante.

Really, I'm clearing my desk,

and resigning myself to the fact that I can't do anything big.

The idea of writing the perfect poem still attracts me.

The perfect poem? Wow.

This is Lavender Bay on Sydney's north shore.

I came to live here in 1965.

When I first arrived, I had a little flat over there

from the balcony of which I watched the Opera House go up.

What I looked out on was beauty.

And beauty, like boredom, is highly conducive to the making

and the appreciation of art.

Robert Hughes died in 2012.

He called me "mate" once. You treasure something like that.

But these films have been a sort of requiem for all of them.

Clive, very ill, writing exquisite poems of remorse,

Barry, indulging Dame Edna one final demonic act of comic cruelty,

and Germaine, concentrating her energies on one small

Garden of Eden, instead of the great battlefield of ideas

she once audaciously commanded.

Can I ask you, where would you want to be buried?

Would I want to be buried? I might want to be eaten.

Where would you want to be eaten?

Wherever it happens. Wherever I'm felled.

And you know, I broke my leg in the forest one day

and I realised that if I hadn't have been able to get back up the stairs,

one of my goannas would have eaten me. Bones, hair, teeth, eyes,

spectacles and all.

Germaine talks about being eaten by goannas.

I can't see you fancying that.

No, the goannas I know would not tackle a task like that.

Outside my parents' house, the grassy verge was called the nature strip,

an American term, I think.

And I think there might be nice,

if there was enough room for people to leave bouquets of flowers.

There could be a fight over this in Australia.

Various people in Moonee Ponds might want to...

Yes. There might be a state funeral, perhaps.

Strangely enough, I'm not afraid, and to die in your own time,

having lived a full and rewarding life, is a great privilege.

It's bad manners to complain.

I've chosen the music.

-Delius?

-Bit of Delius, little bit of Cole Porter.

A song by Leonard Bernstein from On The Town called Some Other Time.

Do you know the song?

Um... It was calculated to make people cry, you see.

I'm crying already.

So it'll be a nice event and I think I may stay alive for it.

At the end of my present show, which is advertised

as a farewell show, and is, I say to the audience,

"Thanks for coming, and promise to come to my next farewell show!"

They called Australia a culturally stagnant country,

but don't they prove that you can come from a rough house

and be the more civilised for it?

Australia taught them to mistrust "can't".

It's convulsively funny.

To question authority.

It means the battle is beginning.

To nose out self-righteousness, and to imagine on an epic scale.

And was it not for these qualities that we have admired and loved them.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Clive James.

BARRY HUMPHRIES SINGS

# I was down by Bondi Pier

# Drinking tubes of ice cold beer

# With a bucket full of prawns upon me knee

# But when I swallowed the last prawn

# I had a technicolor yawn

# And I chundered in the old Pacific Sea... #

The song is entirely about vomiting,

I don't think there was much in that genre at that time.