David Burchell, Barry Humphries, and conflating the national psyche, satire and refugees

(Above: Barry Humphries making a living, and a nice one at that).

While it's of no real interest to anyone - even those astonished that The Australian regularly provides a place for his column on a Monday - the unvarnished dribble issuing from David Burchell's keyboard remains an eternal, valuable marvel.

At once pompous and incoherent, his work would be a top notch example for a high school student required to write an essay on clear thinking, and they'd find no better starting place than Demonising ourselves.

Now it might not have escaped your attention that Barry Humphries has recently turned up in the antipodes and has been hitting the chat show circuit. As always, he's a canny entertainer, and he usually turns up when he's got something to sell, not wishing to alienate his audience by 'in their face' over familiarity. Once he's done the selling, he's off to his next gig, or takes a lower profile.

This time he's been hitting the traps to flog an 'unauthorised biography' of Dame Edna Everge, called Handling Edna. If you want a typical example of his pitch, you can watch a fawning interview on The 7.30 Report with the star-fucker Kerry O'Brien here (links to transcript as well), wherein O'Brien does one of his standard 'rap with the stars' routines which allows him to mingle with the rich and/or famous as a show ender. (He's been doing it for years, right back to the dark forgotten days of the Howard era).

In the interviewe, O'Brien plays along with the schizophrenic notion that the Dame is real, and that Humphries has a difficult relationship with her, in much the same way as Margaret Throsby did when Humprhies took the stump in her ABC Classic FM show (here). In that show, Humphries was pitching the angle that he'll be performing with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney and Melbourne in December.

Well nothing wrong with any of that, Humphries has always assiduously courted the media, and been a hard worker. As an entertainer, he likes to connect with his audience, and keep his assorted routines - now positively aged - front and centre. A lack of attention is death to a performer.

Well Burchell obliges by trying to weave something out of the gossamer thread that Humphries appeared on the 7.30 Report, juxtaposed in an ironic way, with a report on asylum seekers - as if it's anything more than coincidence that Humprhies was hustling, O'Brien star fucking and asylum seekers seeking all at the one time.

The 7.30 Report leaped back into the fray of our revisited asylum-seekers debate the other week with an urgent, heartfelt and thoroughly editorialising story about those poor exhausted Sri Lankans aboard the leaky fishing vessel. As it happens, this report was followed - with that same wonderfully swift incongruity - by a lengthy, jolly and rather doting interview with the grand grey eminence of Australian cultural snootiness, the veteran comedian Barry Humphries, creator of those Dadaesque buffoons Dame Edna, Barry McKenzie and the rest. The mood-shift was a bit of a challenge. And yet for once - entirely by happenstance - the juxtaposition seemed to make logical sense.

After all, to whom if not Humphries do we owe the seeds of our characteristic cultural anxiety about how others will view us as a nation, an anxiety which, at times such as these, produces unhelpful instincts and helpful ones in nearly equal measure?

Say what? Instead of exploiting something there in the national psyche - something to be mined and used for entertainment - Humphries sowed the seeds of our characteristic cultural anxiety?

Well surely Bazza must be chortling at Burchell. To be credited with the creation of a national anxiety is truly remarkable:

To whom do we owe that eminently Humphries-esque distaste for the great army of dull-witted, closed-minded, benighted suburbanites out there, on the unready shoulders of whom our fragile national reputation always seems to rest? Why is it that in Australia - otherwise that most relaxed and egalitarian of countries - at times like these, so many of our great cultural lions are as arch and condescending as the habitues of an old-style London's gentleman's club at closing-time? Why, it's the work of Humphries and his contemporaries, the old suburban-loathing Anglophiles, of course.

I guess this means that Humphries success in the UK (less so in the United States, though the Dame will insist otherwise in a loud voice) is due to his ability to market his Anglophilia in the UK. Unless of course the British happen to share the national anxiety belonging to the antipodes, and so it made a natural 'coals to Newcastle' export.

The same gibberish is of course talked about Kath and Kim, which rather ignores the way these entertainers hold up the mirrors and if we like what we see, we buy - to the extent that Channel 7 took what they were selling away from the ABC, and made a buck selling a send up of suburbia to surburbanites.

But from reading Burchell that he's stuck in a stew of self-loathing back in the suburbs in the nineteen fifties, while recent phenomena like the now fading star of Kath and Kim has passed him by.

Because Burchell can't get enough of his indignation about the way the three vegies and lamb chops world of fifties suburbia has been savaged, maligned and sent up shitless, when of course it's as close to god's own as god herself might have imagined when creating paradise for Adam and Eve.

There is a weighty fund of political knowledge so well-attested that it requires no earthly substantiation whatever. To the best of my knowledge, the received wisdom in some quarters that many ordinary Australians are narrow-minded provincials waiting to be stirred up by some two-bit nationalistic demagogue has never been substantiated by any serious program of empirical research. But somehow we know it's true all the same, not least because two generations of self-styled social satire, inaugurated in the 1950s by Humphries and carried on by university-revue vaudevillians ever since, has told us so.

Burchell is of course in the process doing his best to demonstrate what a narrow-minded provincial looks and sounds like, because I'm personally unaware of any serious program of empirical research that has demonstrated that the weighty fund of political knowledge, requiring no earthly substantiation whatever, is due to two generations of self-styled social satire.

But I can imagine Gerry Connolly doing a first rate impression of Burchell, glass of port in hand, sitting in a leather chair, sounding like a pompous git (or perhaps sounding like Sir Joh - who on earth could imagine that robust rural man as a fit subject for satire?).

As it to prove completely that he knows nothing about entertainment, satire, or the way entertainers intersect with the national psyche, Burchell imbues these creative types with a Homeric capacity to define the Australian soul.

There's a primal, almost Homeric myth of the Australian creative individual, and it goes something like this. Back in the days of Old Australia, this citizen of the world was bound to feel themselves a kind of stranger in their own country. Surrounded by legions of bland-browed suburbanites with steady limbs and untroubled eyes, they were doomed to a restless moral wandering. This was the experience that stimulated the personal anguish, the lofty and yet narrow and resentful world outlook, of cultural heroes from Manning Clark and Patrick White to Humphries, through to their voluble acolytes in our own day.

Well yes, if you want to sound like a twit, you'll cherry pick your culture accordingly. No need here to brood on Paul Hogan, or his battles with a giant thong, or any of his other affectionately satirical portraits of suburbia. Or a dozen other comedians who worked the riff, because you need something to be funny about, and a BBQ gone wrong is as good as anything.

But no, Burchell is on his hobby horse, and a fine frothing and foaming follows - the most alarming thought being that he construes this kind of conventional conservative line as somehow meaningful, because if it is then we are indeed in a much feared desert of intellectual mediocrity:

Multiculturalism was supposed to be the balm that cured this ancient Australian curse. The great walled camp of Australian suburbia, that feared desert of imagined mediocrity, was supposed to have been fragmented into a multitude of disparate communities, each nourished by some special cultural wisdom spirited from a foreign land. But when the MVTampa was refused entry into Australian territorial waters back in the dying months of 2001, this fable of the New Australia faded fast. It turned out that the New Australians were, by and large, just as nationally minded, just as local and territorial, as the old ones. And so a new cult of the moral outsider was born.

Oh spare my days, and cudgel my brain with a marshmallow - as if Australia was somehow the inventor of the cult of the moral outsider. Bugger off Camus, bugger of Sartre, Burchell has a new thesis. (My own thought - he should be sentenced to a hundred viewings of They're a Weird Mob, while gentlemen viewers will be allowed to see a young, nubile, nude Helen Mirren in Age of Consent).

But you know the funniest thing happens when Burchell begins to emulate the languid tones of social satire, as originally mined by Barry Humphries. And celebrates the myth that Australians are in fact ignorant suburbanites who'd struggle to find Colombo on a map.

In recent weeks, as the little fishing boats, toiling across the vast seas with their straining engines, have multiplied before the western shores of Indonesia, this primal myth has stirred itself once more. People who a few weeks ago might have struggled to locate Colombo on a map are now full of those awful stories about the atrocities of Sri Lanka's civil wars. (Who knows, maybe some of them have even opened the covers of the harrowing US State Department report, published earlier this month, out of which most of those stories have come.)

Oh dear, how witty, how droll, oh dear Mr Burchell, you are such a card, and such a wicked one at that. Why I'm almost reminded of Oscar Wilde, the lad who invented England's national anxiety.

Yep, it sounds as much like the scribblings of a condescending, smug twit as I've come across recently outside the pages of Private Eye, or a Monty Python sketch.

But not content with trivializing Australian culture and its entertainers, Burchell then proceeds to trivialize any concern or empathy people might feel for those more unfortunately placed than themselves:

And so the same unreal arguments - founded on this same vague if powerful sense of empathy - are once again taking hold. Sri Lanka has hundreds of thousands of internally displaced citizens, and we, somehow, have a moral obligation to take all of them. Somehow, it makes sense for everybody concerned if we accept any and all among the most enterprising of the middle classes of developing nations, even as we know that there are people dying right now in the former safe zones of northeast Sri Lanka for lack of medical expertise. And so on. Compassion that knows no logic, because it knows no limits.

You know, it's a lot simpler when a commentator simply reviles chardonnay sipping latte supping arty farty types from the inner west (unless compounded with eastern suburbs types requiring a mention of sav blanc). Because in the end all of Burchell's gibberish has been designed to say that the suburbanites know what's best when it comes to refugees, and so does the government, and it's a steady ship with a firm hand at the tiller:

Only a political innocent could have imagined that the federal government would react to this current flotilla of boatpeople in any other manner. It is not mere political necessity that drives the government to dissuade people from taking to boats chiefly in the hope of a new life in a rich country. There is also the policy necessity to maintain the refugee intake within manageable limits, so that refugees can be integrated into society without too much distress, established in local communities without too much friction, and found viable sources of employment without too much delay. This too requires a kind of political compassion, albeit of a less demonstrative kind.

Yes, but what the fuck has all this got to do with Barry Humphries, and his trampling of the national psyche, not to mention Paul Hogan and his battle with the Tax Department? Well I'm glad you asked that, because Burchell provides a very nifty conclusion:

The 7.30 Report's journalists are manifestly not political innocents. Taken as a whole they are some of the shrewdest and most gifted political observers in the country. It takes a certain heroism to subsume those political skills at times like these. That, and the primal call of Humphries's old fearful snootiness.

No, sorry, I have no idea what it means, but then I have no idea what Burchell is banging on about, like a barn door flapping long and hard in the breeze.

All I know is that Barry Humphries is somehow to blame, and the next time he comes on to the media flogging a book and pointing out a concert tour will happen in December, he should be held accountable.

Perhaps a public flogging or twenty four hours in the stocks? After all, reducing the national psyche of suburbanites to a shameful low, and reducing David Burchell to a simmer of resentful indignation is surely a crime against humanity of the first water ...

But there is a solution. Instead of watching the 7.30 Report, all Burchell has to do is switch over and watch Tracy Grimshaw on A Current Affair or Today Tonight or perhaps even Sunrise, and show what a happy little suburbanite he is ... instead of watching Kerry O'Brien and imagining it provides him, and therefore us, his suffering readership, with a deep insight into the ways of the world.

Why is it that the commentariat spend all their time watching and brooding about the ABC? Are they alienated moral outsiders, lost from the world of commercial television? Who knows, but Barry Humphries has so much on his conscience, why not add this to his burden ...

(Below: Barry Humphries doing his impression of James Mason in Age of Consent - here - and below that James Mason impersonating James Mason).