Dedication: To Tessa and Emily, Oscar and Rupert
In the hope that somewhere in these pages they might recognise their father.
'It may be argued that audiobooks should not substitute for reading, and authors—contrary to common conception—seldom are the best narrators of their own work. On the other hand, as the first-person narrative constitutes an inherent aesthetic property of the audiobook as a unique performance-based aural artefact, the audiobook versions of autobiographies can potentially amplify one’s aesthetic experience of a written personal history. Nonetheless, rather than focusing on so-called ‘standard’ autobiographies, this essay attends to the aural iterations of Barry Humphries’s pseudo-autobiographical writing. Overall, the aesthetic complexity in Humphries’s work is virtually labyrinthine and borderline-surreal. While there surely prevail far more complex first-person narratives, the complexities in Humphries’s case stem from the texts’ incarnation as audiobooks, putting into question not only the identity of the narrating protagonists, but also their very (non)-existence. They simultaneously exist as commonplace works of fiction written by Humphries, and as the quite literal memoirs of Humphries’s own fictional characters. They thus raise the question whether certain audiobooks might in fact negate the original printed work.'
Source: Abstract.
By the time of Australian Federation in 1901, almost 70 per cent of 'Sydney’s population were living in the suburbs: a statistic that suggests that despite prevalent and enduring images of the bushman and the ocker, the ‘real’ Australia was, and still is, more likely to be located in what Barry Humphries has described as Australia’s ‘vast and unexplored suburban tundra’.1 As a satirist, Humphries has been in the forefront of an expedition to map the tragi-comic dimensions of this territory with characters such as Dame Edna Everage, who first appeared on Australian television in 1956, offering the box room of ‘her lovely home’ as a potential billet for an athlete during the Melbourne Olympic Games.2 Some 50 years later, Dame Edna not only presided over the closing ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but was joined on the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, during a ceremony to award her the key to the city, by two more recent suburban icons, Kath and Kim. With the international success of Dame Edna and Kath and Kim, it seems that the Antipodean suburb is still being mapped and mined for comic effect on television both at home and abroad. This article will explore the conditions of such success within a long tradition of anti-suburbanism dating back to the nineteenth century while exploring the role of comedy in constructing a national imaginary which is now widely circulated via increasingly transnational flows in television.'
Source: Sage Publications.
By the time of Australian Federation in 1901, almost 70 per cent of 'Sydney’s population were living in the suburbs: a statistic that suggests that despite prevalent and enduring images of the bushman and the ocker, the ‘real’ Australia was, and still is, more likely to be located in what Barry Humphries has described as Australia’s ‘vast and unexplored suburban tundra’.1 As a satirist, Humphries has been in the forefront of an expedition to map the tragi-comic dimensions of this territory with characters such as Dame Edna Everage, who first appeared on Australian television in 1956, offering the box room of ‘her lovely home’ as a potential billet for an athlete during the Melbourne Olympic Games.2 Some 50 years later, Dame Edna not only presided over the closing ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but was joined on the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, during a ceremony to award her the key to the city, by two more recent suburban icons, Kath and Kim. With the international success of Dame Edna and Kath and Kim, it seems that the Antipodean suburb is still being mapped and mined for comic effect on television both at home and abroad. This article will explore the conditions of such success within a long tradition of anti-suburbanism dating back to the nineteenth century while exploring the role of comedy in constructing a national imaginary which is now widely circulated via increasingly transnational flows in television.'
Source: Sage Publications.
