John Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. James's. He was a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter.
Knowing how much I admire Barry, a friend gave me this little 53 page book she found in a thrift shop. What a delightful gem - a beautifully written reminiscence of childhood in Melbourne and at the extended family 'bush shack'. And I found eleven words whose meanings I had to locate in my dictionary - for example, the knurled knob on his Bakelite radio - 'having small ridges on the surface' - yes, exactly, Barry! He's not only a comic genius, he's also a damn good writer.
Good mix of innocence and retrospective meanness. Like me, his childhood appears to him as a series of fixations (licking the cake mixer, staring at a cement mixer, hushed discussion of lead poisoning from a pencil stab). Would probably be 4* in full.