The Nanny Nation?? Us???
Jan. 14th, 2007 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanHow a recent visitor to Australia felt comfortable, relaxed, alert, but not alarmed...
Welcome to the lucky country
Martin Johnson
January 14, 2007
FOLLOWING England's cricket team around Australia for the past few weeks has not been an especially uplifting experience, but, as Boris Becker once said after losing a tennis match: "Nobody died."
As it happens, Australia is now a country where you aren't allowed to die. But, if you somehow manage to pass away before the government's decreed life expectancy (age 150 and rising) it'll be because you haven't read the "Watch Your Speed!" warnings (and that's just the pedestrians) or have failed to read the list of safety instructions before cleaning your golf shoes.
Let it be said here and now that England's 5-0 Ashes loss may not have done much for our sporting feelgood factor, but it almost certainly saved lives. A giant neon sign flashed up a notice informing the spectators of the dire consequences of misusing their tip-up seats, but as England's batsmen barely left anyone with enough time to sit down, catastrophe — if indeed several hundred mangled Barmy Army supporters could be viewed as such — was, happily, averted.
The nanny factor in Australia is such that if you sneeze in the street it will be caught on CCTV cameras and you will be pounced on by a team of government nurses carrying anti-flu syringes and hygiene masks and carted off home for a month's compulsory quarantine. Your front door will be daubed with a black cross to alert the postman and the newspaper delivery boy to the dangers of getting too close, and in extreme cases, the entire street will be cordoned off.
When arriving in Australia by plane, as most people do, your first sensation is of a fog entering the cabin and your eyes beginning to pour water. Don't be alarmed. This is merely a hygiene procedure in case you are importing any contagious diseases such as head lice or ingrowing toe-nails. The only difference from arriving in prison for the first time is that you are not obliged to remove all your clothing before being decontaminated.
The next thing that happens, should you happen to have a set of golf clubs on your trolley as you wheel it past immigration, is that a very nice man will ask you if you are attempting to bring golf clubs into the country.
He will be looking at your golf clubs while asking you this, so it is a good idea to admit to it.
Then he will ask you whether your golf bag contains any golf shoes, and, if so, whether they are clean ones.
Now here's a handy travellers' tip. If you get mud on your golf shoes immediately before bringing them to Australia, then leave it there. It's got something to do with BSE, or farm animal disease, or maybe the spoors from an Asian fruit fly, but, if you confess to dirty shoes, don't worry about instant deportation. They whisk them away, and five minutes later they come back to you in the same gleaming state as when you first took them out of the box.
You could clean them before leaving home, but they'll inspect them anyway, so why go to all that trouble?
However, once you've had them cleaned, be warned. If you actually go out and play in them and get them muddy again, severe injury, or even death, is a likely outcome — so counselled the notice attached to the high pressure boot-cleaning machine at the Kooyonga Golf Club in Brisbane. It listed four ways of killing yourself by misusing the nozzle. One of the instructions cautioned against employing it for removing particles of sand from your hair, so bad bunker players can consider themselves at especially high risk. Another advised not to use it in the pursuit of "practical jokes". This seemed reasonable, as Australia is a country not renowned for its chivalrous treatment of sheilas, and sticking the nozzle up the lady captain's skirt is probably par for the course at all but the most exclusive of clubs.
If you are driving normally when leaving the golf club in your hire car, be prepared to be pulled over by a police car and given an on-the-spot fine for going just fast enough to overtake a bicycle.
So, if you're importing a car into Australia, bring a Morris Minor. The NSW cricket team is actually nicknamed (the Speedblitz Blues) after a government anti-speeding campaign. And when you leave a controlled area, a neon sign will flash: "Kept Your Speed Down? Well Done!"
Walking is another pastime that has been rendered non-hazardous in Australia, where stringent fines apply for crossing the road without getting permission from the little green man. A journey of, say, half a mile can take either 15 minutes or an hour, depending on what colour the traffic signal is when you want to get across the road.
Australians wouldn't dream of trying to nip across until they get the green light, so no wonder they need to live longer. Depending on your age and sex, you can grow a beard, or develop deep vein thrombosis waiting for the little man to change from red to green.
Oh, and don't forget to apply the factor 30 while you're waiting, as dire warnings about skin cancer are posted on every street corner.
If you fall ill in Australia (and measures are doubtless in hand to forbid it) then make sure you complete your illness in the state you are already in. A doctor's prescription in Adelaide is not worth the paper it's written on if you try to convert it into medicine in Perth, even if you start foaming at the mouth and sprouting a second head in front of the pharmacist.
The Australian government knows where it wants its people to go: now all it has to do is inform the taxi drivers. Final travellers' tip: if you get into a cab in Melbourne and ask to be taken to somewhere not too taxing — such as the airport — allow at least 24 hours to get there. The taxi drivers not only don't speak English, but they can't even get you round the block without reaching for a street directory.
If you're really determined to defy the government's ban on premature death, you could try swimming with sharks, or snorkelling through a shoal of box jellyfish, but getting into a Melbourne taxi without a sextant, emergency food rations and a box of distress flares, remains the most painless.
DAILY TELEGRAPH
An afternoon of soundtracking in The Outhouse. My foil & I were joined by an erstwhile work colleague of mine, who's become our bass player on-call. Today was spent trying to sound like an out-of-tune beginners garage band. A suitable cacophony ensued & much laughter will have to be removed from the recordings during mixdown, but damn it was fun!!
Later... And how a certain Australian luminary sees his hometown.
Barry about town
Peter Wilmoth
January 14, 2007
AMID the humid attractions of the conservatory in the Fitzroy Gardens, Barry Humphries is marvelling at Melbourne's parks and gardens and admiring the hydrangeas.
"I think people are beginning to rediscover hydrangeas … And they say they have no perfume. But a woman I know once said, 'Oh yes, they do have a faint perfume when you press your face into them'. And I think once Edna on stage rather wickedly said to a woman, 'What do you grow in your garden?' and she said 'hydrangeas'. And Edna said, 'Do they have a perfume?' And the woman said, 'No they don't, Edna'. And Edna said: 'Well, they do if you push your face into them, and you look like a woman who's pushed her face into quite a thing or two in your time.' "
Even though delivered in a respectful whisper, it sounds like an amalgam of the voices we know so well: some classic Edna, a touch of Sir Les Patterson, even shades of Sandy Stone's cracked falsetto drawl rhapsodising the most unfashionable of foliages. But now it's their creator's turn to talk freely. The famously stylish dresser, in beige suit and hat at its trademark angle, stands out amid the tourist groups in shorts and runners.
He has chosen to start our guided tour to the best and worst of Melbourne at his favourite statue in Melbourne, Diana and the Hounds by William Leslie Bowles, at the conservatory's entrance. From here we'll visit the city whose associations date back to Humphries' birth here nearly 73 years ago.
In "Ednaville", Dame Edna's mock "house" she shared with husband Norm, set up at the Victorian Arts Centre, there's a list Edna has written featuring two columns: one marked "Common", the other "Nice". While not as cut and dried, our tour across several days is a bare-knuckle analysis by a man whose characters have taken Moonee Ponds, Glen Iris and the minutiae of the surrounding suburbia to the world.
The conservatory is quiet today. Indeed, all you can hear is the whirring of a couple's digital camera and the babble of a small pond. "This may be the last place in Victoria where you will ever hear the sound of running water," Humphries says.
"We used to have ferneries in suburban Melbourne gardens. I loved them. I don't think any young couple would think of building a fernery now, with staghorns, begonias. And always dripping water."
From the calm of the conservatory, Humphries turns his attention to the undulating urban stonescapes of Federation Square. "There's a lady journalist who's had some intimate relationship with the architect who will tackle me very quickly on any pretext," Humphries says, "so I must be very, very generous about it, even though it was out of date before it was erected.
"I found a way of going to Flinders Street Station without seeing Federation Square. There's a wonderful route you can go. You have to go on a few detours but it is possible. And in the tram you have to sit in a certain seat as you go past so you don't even glimpse it."
He'd rather never have glimpsed the "Tuscan" mansions that scar Toorak. "It's hilarious … You can't drive down there without actually having to pull over because you're weeping with laughter at some of these buildings. And you think, 'What sort of pretentious nouveau riche live in them?' What happened to old money? They wouldn't be allowed in Umbria. Umbrians would take umbrage."
Further down Punt Road, he is indifferent to the splendors of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. "I have no interest in the MCG at all. Been once. I appeared at the grand final. I've always avoided sport, as you know. I'm grateful for these places because they keep undesirables off the streets."
He wouldn't have had much to say to Shane Warne then. "He approached me at an airport lounge somewhere. He seemed very nice. I didn't know who this person with spiky yellow hair was. He introduced himself very nicely and then he was shown onto the plane before everyone else. When I got on much later with the rest of the crowd, Shane was already on board grinning at me from his first-class seat."
We are sheltering from the sun under one of Fitzroy Garden's magnificent oak trees. Humphries says he is keen not to sound like he's whingeing or being a "fogey", and his commentary is underscored by a love for his home town.
His children enjoy Melbourne "because I show them around. I take them to the Shrine, the aquarium, the zoo. Our zoo is better than it's ever been. The new restored National Gallery of Victoria is magnificent and the restored library is great."
His disappointments and anger towards some Melbourne buildings are equalled by his admiration, even passion, for others. He can't help but comment when architects and civic planners just miss, as he believes they did with the Melbourne Museum. "It's too close to the Exhibition Building. It's fine, but it's a bit near. A good try. It's as though they say, 'We will restore an important building, but let us build something really horrible next to it'."
He has watched as areas special to him change for the worse, such as South Yarra. "I like Chapel Street very much, especially as it gets further away from South Yarra towards Windsor, where it gets more interesting. These streets always undergo changes. I think what destroyed South Yarra was that certain important things went from it. The Black Mask bookshop, Readings, gone. Her Majesty's Hotel stopped being the kind of music place it was. The great international florist Kevin O'Neil died. The restaurant Maxims some years ago, the poshest restaurant in Melbourne, moved into the Como and then disappeared. So now it's one frock shop after another. I hope they all go broke, as they will."
One South Yarra institution Humphries remembers with mixed emotions is Melbourne Grammar School, his alma mater. "I keep asking children … is there one teacher who has an inspiring effect on you, whose classes you look forward to? There was a famous figure called Albert Greed, who was our music teacher, who was an organist and composer. My love of music was started there, in The Lodge. Albert Greed was always a bit merry after lunch because he'd wander up to the Botanical for more than a quiet snifter. So he could be induced to play all sorts of popular tunes on the piano. He did what a good schoolmaster did. He was an enthusiast."
While we walk through the gardens, Humphries riffs on a variety of topics, from mobile phones ("Out of control altogether — I'm abandoning mine. I'm finding it like giving up smoking, difficult), his admiration for Jane Turner and Gina Riley ("My favourite Australian comedians") and John Denton's "red zipper" and yellow "cheesesticks" overarching the freeway as you drive in from the airport ("I rather like them; it's like a Jeffrey Smart painting").
Humphries does a mental sweep, snaking past Crown Casino, which he believes has "sort of" settled into the city. ("And children are becoming more and more content to sit in the car park all day. It's just a question of training the kiddies to wait for a day, or perhaps even a week.")
He moves past "those flaming things" outside Crown and onto the beautiful murals of the Florentino restaurant and the civilised environments at the Paperback Bookshop and the Hill of Content. "Though I miss Arthur Murray's across the road. You could sit in the Florentino and watch couples learning to dance on the first floor."
Humphries is a regular visitor to the Job Warehouse, the large, defiantly old-fashioned fabrics outlet in Bourke Street. "It's the only place in Melbourne where you could walk in and hear Yiddish spoken. The old men who ran it, their sons run it now. The sons tell me they don't speak Yiddish any more, which is sad."
At the corner of Bourke and Exhibition streets there's more sadness: the huge glass-panelled modern skyscraper. "The Southern Cross, which I hated when it was built, I miss when I see what has replaced it. The Southern Cross had a certain charm. Aqua panels all over it. A huge bathroom in the sky."
He reserves a special scorn for two Melbourne buildings. The first is the housing commission flats in Park Street, South Melbourne. It is "the building that most makes me want to become an arsonist … It's the worst building in Melbourne and almost the world."
Also causing him pain is the Ear, Nose and Throat building, which sits behind St Patrick's Cathedral at the top of the city. "It should be called The Eyesore Hospital," he says. "It must have been built by a blind architect. There is no way you can look at one of the great ecclesiastical monuments of the southern hemisphere — St Patrick's — without seeing this red brick monstrosity."
We head into the city, to tiny Cathedral Arcade, off Swanston Street. A world away from the spruikers selling $2 DVDs is one of Melbourne's last attended elevators. "I like an attendant in a lift," Humphries says. "In my youth, the lifts generally were manned by people who'd been disabled in the First World War. There was very rarely a person driving a lift with all their appendages. All lifts were attended. It dropped off as people began eating sandwiches and pies in lifts and drinking these endless bottles of water, hydrating themselves excessively."
As they do during his shows. "Drinking in the theatre — it's a new thing. There are no known cases of dehydration during any of my shows in 50 years. It's a fashion. It used to be chocolates, now it's water. I cannot stand people drinking water. People will look back and laugh."
We arrive at the Collected Works Poetry and Ideas Bookshop on the first floor. Humphries is at home in this arcane world. "A poetry bookstore in the heart of Melbourne is a treasure, an absolute oasis."
On every trip to Melbourne, Humphries visits second-hand and antiquarian bookshops with as much passion as he did in his youth. "The book stores of Melbourne were really my university. I formed reading tastes there — notably in the shops of Ellis Bird at the top of Bourke Street, Seward's in Bourke Street in the other direction, and Evans in a large basement in Collins Street — that I still retain." His quest for desired titles takes him anywhere. "It's a form of meditation, rummaging in a bookshop."
Next door is the Retro Star, a vintage clothing shop. The tone has changed considerably and Humphries is delighted at this discovery. With its Qantas carry-on bags (not dissimilar to the one carried by Dame Edna's nephew, Barry McKenzie, in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie), spangly cocktail frocks and store dummies wearing lurid expressions, it's not hard to see why. This, too, is Humphries heaven.
Not that he's a willing buyer. Sir Leslie Colin Patterson isn't averse to stains of a food-based or bodily type, but his creator holds to a higher standard.
"I don't buy second-hand clothing for myself," Humphries says. "I always think that it's still inhabited by some ghost who may not be friendly. Or something may have happened. I just saw a very nice crocodile belt, then I thought, 'Whose trousers did they support? What happened in those trousers?' You can never be sure."
We walk through the Swanston Street crowds towards City Square. He looks up at the hotel in Collins Street, which overlooks the square. "How many architectural styles are represented on the face of that Westin Hotel? It's an awful mess."
We've come to look at the Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Swanston and Collins streets. "It's one of the best buildings in Melbourne and I suppose an ignorant person would call it Art Deco, but it isn't; it's a kind of mini-skyscraper. At one stage you could buy the tower and make it into a flat. I actually considered it. Had a wonderful view.
"It had a New York sort of name — Manchester Unity. Underneath were coffee lounges run by Viennese Jewish refugees. One was called Rumpel Meyer, the other was called Raffles, and it was very smart to go there as a student and have coffee and toasted raisin bread."
He enjoys Melbourne's proliferation of decent cafes. "It's marvellous, I think. You can get decent coffee everywhere here. The coffee in America is horrible. I'm sure Starbucks is here, but it's not so ubiquitous. Starbucks doesn't make coffee, it makes something else. It makes a brown drink. They should just call it Brown Drink."
Bad coffee is just one of the challenges he faces on tour. "Well, there are a lot of frustrations when you're touring, and discomforts, as Russell Crowe knows, when you're trying to make a phone call from your room … I sent him a letter of congratulations. He was very restrained. I felt like actually murdering people on the desk in American hotels. But on the whole, it's fun touring. I like the itinerant gypsy life. I like living in hotels, I like room service. On the whole, I feel more at home in a hotel than anywhere."
He felt at home in Georges of Collins Street until it shut its doors. Still, there is much left to celebrate. "One can't lament the disappearance of the past too profoundly when there are still marvellous things."
One such marvel is Lord Mayor John So. "People are vaguely aware, when they look at the Town Hall, that there is an extremely jovial, intelligent Chinaman living there. It's good, isn't it? And not some go-getting spiv lining his pockets, cementing his connections."
The tour wouldn't be complete without some audience participation — provided by a family from outer London. After posing for a snap, Humphries has a little chat with them. "You weren't expecting a town like this," Humphries says. "Everyone speaks English. Very nice?"
"It's just like being at home, it is," says the woman.
"What town are you from?"
"Ilford," comes the response.
Had it been Edna asking the question, with her propensity for seeking forensic domestic detail, the conversation might have taken a different turn.
"Ilford!" Humphries says. "I think this beats Ilford."
"It does," the woman smiles, "and how!"
Welcome to the lucky country
Martin Johnson
January 14, 2007
FOLLOWING England's cricket team around Australia for the past few weeks has not been an especially uplifting experience, but, as Boris Becker once said after losing a tennis match: "Nobody died."
As it happens, Australia is now a country where you aren't allowed to die. But, if you somehow manage to pass away before the government's decreed life expectancy (age 150 and rising) it'll be because you haven't read the "Watch Your Speed!" warnings (and that's just the pedestrians) or have failed to read the list of safety instructions before cleaning your golf shoes.
Let it be said here and now that England's 5-0 Ashes loss may not have done much for our sporting feelgood factor, but it almost certainly saved lives. A giant neon sign flashed up a notice informing the spectators of the dire consequences of misusing their tip-up seats, but as England's batsmen barely left anyone with enough time to sit down, catastrophe — if indeed several hundred mangled Barmy Army supporters could be viewed as such — was, happily, averted.
The nanny factor in Australia is such that if you sneeze in the street it will be caught on CCTV cameras and you will be pounced on by a team of government nurses carrying anti-flu syringes and hygiene masks and carted off home for a month's compulsory quarantine. Your front door will be daubed with a black cross to alert the postman and the newspaper delivery boy to the dangers of getting too close, and in extreme cases, the entire street will be cordoned off.
When arriving in Australia by plane, as most people do, your first sensation is of a fog entering the cabin and your eyes beginning to pour water. Don't be alarmed. This is merely a hygiene procedure in case you are importing any contagious diseases such as head lice or ingrowing toe-nails. The only difference from arriving in prison for the first time is that you are not obliged to remove all your clothing before being decontaminated.
The next thing that happens, should you happen to have a set of golf clubs on your trolley as you wheel it past immigration, is that a very nice man will ask you if you are attempting to bring golf clubs into the country.
He will be looking at your golf clubs while asking you this, so it is a good idea to admit to it.
Then he will ask you whether your golf bag contains any golf shoes, and, if so, whether they are clean ones.
Now here's a handy travellers' tip. If you get mud on your golf shoes immediately before bringing them to Australia, then leave it there. It's got something to do with BSE, or farm animal disease, or maybe the spoors from an Asian fruit fly, but, if you confess to dirty shoes, don't worry about instant deportation. They whisk them away, and five minutes later they come back to you in the same gleaming state as when you first took them out of the box.
You could clean them before leaving home, but they'll inspect them anyway, so why go to all that trouble?
However, once you've had them cleaned, be warned. If you actually go out and play in them and get them muddy again, severe injury, or even death, is a likely outcome — so counselled the notice attached to the high pressure boot-cleaning machine at the Kooyonga Golf Club in Brisbane. It listed four ways of killing yourself by misusing the nozzle. One of the instructions cautioned against employing it for removing particles of sand from your hair, so bad bunker players can consider themselves at especially high risk. Another advised not to use it in the pursuit of "practical jokes". This seemed reasonable, as Australia is a country not renowned for its chivalrous treatment of sheilas, and sticking the nozzle up the lady captain's skirt is probably par for the course at all but the most exclusive of clubs.
If you are driving normally when leaving the golf club in your hire car, be prepared to be pulled over by a police car and given an on-the-spot fine for going just fast enough to overtake a bicycle.
So, if you're importing a car into Australia, bring a Morris Minor. The NSW cricket team is actually nicknamed (the Speedblitz Blues) after a government anti-speeding campaign. And when you leave a controlled area, a neon sign will flash: "Kept Your Speed Down? Well Done!"
Walking is another pastime that has been rendered non-hazardous in Australia, where stringent fines apply for crossing the road without getting permission from the little green man. A journey of, say, half a mile can take either 15 minutes or an hour, depending on what colour the traffic signal is when you want to get across the road.
Australians wouldn't dream of trying to nip across until they get the green light, so no wonder they need to live longer. Depending on your age and sex, you can grow a beard, or develop deep vein thrombosis waiting for the little man to change from red to green.
Oh, and don't forget to apply the factor 30 while you're waiting, as dire warnings about skin cancer are posted on every street corner.
If you fall ill in Australia (and measures are doubtless in hand to forbid it) then make sure you complete your illness in the state you are already in. A doctor's prescription in Adelaide is not worth the paper it's written on if you try to convert it into medicine in Perth, even if you start foaming at the mouth and sprouting a second head in front of the pharmacist.
The Australian government knows where it wants its people to go: now all it has to do is inform the taxi drivers. Final travellers' tip: if you get into a cab in Melbourne and ask to be taken to somewhere not too taxing — such as the airport — allow at least 24 hours to get there. The taxi drivers not only don't speak English, but they can't even get you round the block without reaching for a street directory.
If you're really determined to defy the government's ban on premature death, you could try swimming with sharks, or snorkelling through a shoal of box jellyfish, but getting into a Melbourne taxi without a sextant, emergency food rations and a box of distress flares, remains the most painless.
DAILY TELEGRAPH
An afternoon of soundtracking in The Outhouse. My foil & I were joined by an erstwhile work colleague of mine, who's become our bass player on-call. Today was spent trying to sound like an out-of-tune beginners garage band. A suitable cacophony ensued & much laughter will have to be removed from the recordings during mixdown, but damn it was fun!!
Later... And how a certain Australian luminary sees his hometown.
Barry about town
Peter Wilmoth
January 14, 2007
AMID the humid attractions of the conservatory in the Fitzroy Gardens, Barry Humphries is marvelling at Melbourne's parks and gardens and admiring the hydrangeas.
"I think people are beginning to rediscover hydrangeas … And they say they have no perfume. But a woman I know once said, 'Oh yes, they do have a faint perfume when you press your face into them'. And I think once Edna on stage rather wickedly said to a woman, 'What do you grow in your garden?' and she said 'hydrangeas'. And Edna said, 'Do they have a perfume?' And the woman said, 'No they don't, Edna'. And Edna said: 'Well, they do if you push your face into them, and you look like a woman who's pushed her face into quite a thing or two in your time.' "
Even though delivered in a respectful whisper, it sounds like an amalgam of the voices we know so well: some classic Edna, a touch of Sir Les Patterson, even shades of Sandy Stone's cracked falsetto drawl rhapsodising the most unfashionable of foliages. But now it's their creator's turn to talk freely. The famously stylish dresser, in beige suit and hat at its trademark angle, stands out amid the tourist groups in shorts and runners.
He has chosen to start our guided tour to the best and worst of Melbourne at his favourite statue in Melbourne, Diana and the Hounds by William Leslie Bowles, at the conservatory's entrance. From here we'll visit the city whose associations date back to Humphries' birth here nearly 73 years ago.
In "Ednaville", Dame Edna's mock "house" she shared with husband Norm, set up at the Victorian Arts Centre, there's a list Edna has written featuring two columns: one marked "Common", the other "Nice". While not as cut and dried, our tour across several days is a bare-knuckle analysis by a man whose characters have taken Moonee Ponds, Glen Iris and the minutiae of the surrounding suburbia to the world.
The conservatory is quiet today. Indeed, all you can hear is the whirring of a couple's digital camera and the babble of a small pond. "This may be the last place in Victoria where you will ever hear the sound of running water," Humphries says.
"We used to have ferneries in suburban Melbourne gardens. I loved them. I don't think any young couple would think of building a fernery now, with staghorns, begonias. And always dripping water."
From the calm of the conservatory, Humphries turns his attention to the undulating urban stonescapes of Federation Square. "There's a lady journalist who's had some intimate relationship with the architect who will tackle me very quickly on any pretext," Humphries says, "so I must be very, very generous about it, even though it was out of date before it was erected.
"I found a way of going to Flinders Street Station without seeing Federation Square. There's a wonderful route you can go. You have to go on a few detours but it is possible. And in the tram you have to sit in a certain seat as you go past so you don't even glimpse it."
He'd rather never have glimpsed the "Tuscan" mansions that scar Toorak. "It's hilarious … You can't drive down there without actually having to pull over because you're weeping with laughter at some of these buildings. And you think, 'What sort of pretentious nouveau riche live in them?' What happened to old money? They wouldn't be allowed in Umbria. Umbrians would take umbrage."
Further down Punt Road, he is indifferent to the splendors of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. "I have no interest in the MCG at all. Been once. I appeared at the grand final. I've always avoided sport, as you know. I'm grateful for these places because they keep undesirables off the streets."
He wouldn't have had much to say to Shane Warne then. "He approached me at an airport lounge somewhere. He seemed very nice. I didn't know who this person with spiky yellow hair was. He introduced himself very nicely and then he was shown onto the plane before everyone else. When I got on much later with the rest of the crowd, Shane was already on board grinning at me from his first-class seat."
We are sheltering from the sun under one of Fitzroy Garden's magnificent oak trees. Humphries says he is keen not to sound like he's whingeing or being a "fogey", and his commentary is underscored by a love for his home town.
His children enjoy Melbourne "because I show them around. I take them to the Shrine, the aquarium, the zoo. Our zoo is better than it's ever been. The new restored National Gallery of Victoria is magnificent and the restored library is great."
His disappointments and anger towards some Melbourne buildings are equalled by his admiration, even passion, for others. He can't help but comment when architects and civic planners just miss, as he believes they did with the Melbourne Museum. "It's too close to the Exhibition Building. It's fine, but it's a bit near. A good try. It's as though they say, 'We will restore an important building, but let us build something really horrible next to it'."
He has watched as areas special to him change for the worse, such as South Yarra. "I like Chapel Street very much, especially as it gets further away from South Yarra towards Windsor, where it gets more interesting. These streets always undergo changes. I think what destroyed South Yarra was that certain important things went from it. The Black Mask bookshop, Readings, gone. Her Majesty's Hotel stopped being the kind of music place it was. The great international florist Kevin O'Neil died. The restaurant Maxims some years ago, the poshest restaurant in Melbourne, moved into the Como and then disappeared. So now it's one frock shop after another. I hope they all go broke, as they will."
One South Yarra institution Humphries remembers with mixed emotions is Melbourne Grammar School, his alma mater. "I keep asking children … is there one teacher who has an inspiring effect on you, whose classes you look forward to? There was a famous figure called Albert Greed, who was our music teacher, who was an organist and composer. My love of music was started there, in The Lodge. Albert Greed was always a bit merry after lunch because he'd wander up to the Botanical for more than a quiet snifter. So he could be induced to play all sorts of popular tunes on the piano. He did what a good schoolmaster did. He was an enthusiast."
While we walk through the gardens, Humphries riffs on a variety of topics, from mobile phones ("Out of control altogether — I'm abandoning mine. I'm finding it like giving up smoking, difficult), his admiration for Jane Turner and Gina Riley ("My favourite Australian comedians") and John Denton's "red zipper" and yellow "cheesesticks" overarching the freeway as you drive in from the airport ("I rather like them; it's like a Jeffrey Smart painting").
Humphries does a mental sweep, snaking past Crown Casino, which he believes has "sort of" settled into the city. ("And children are becoming more and more content to sit in the car park all day. It's just a question of training the kiddies to wait for a day, or perhaps even a week.")
He moves past "those flaming things" outside Crown and onto the beautiful murals of the Florentino restaurant and the civilised environments at the Paperback Bookshop and the Hill of Content. "Though I miss Arthur Murray's across the road. You could sit in the Florentino and watch couples learning to dance on the first floor."
Humphries is a regular visitor to the Job Warehouse, the large, defiantly old-fashioned fabrics outlet in Bourke Street. "It's the only place in Melbourne where you could walk in and hear Yiddish spoken. The old men who ran it, their sons run it now. The sons tell me they don't speak Yiddish any more, which is sad."
At the corner of Bourke and Exhibition streets there's more sadness: the huge glass-panelled modern skyscraper. "The Southern Cross, which I hated when it was built, I miss when I see what has replaced it. The Southern Cross had a certain charm. Aqua panels all over it. A huge bathroom in the sky."
He reserves a special scorn for two Melbourne buildings. The first is the housing commission flats in Park Street, South Melbourne. It is "the building that most makes me want to become an arsonist … It's the worst building in Melbourne and almost the world."
Also causing him pain is the Ear, Nose and Throat building, which sits behind St Patrick's Cathedral at the top of the city. "It should be called The Eyesore Hospital," he says. "It must have been built by a blind architect. There is no way you can look at one of the great ecclesiastical monuments of the southern hemisphere — St Patrick's — without seeing this red brick monstrosity."
We head into the city, to tiny Cathedral Arcade, off Swanston Street. A world away from the spruikers selling $2 DVDs is one of Melbourne's last attended elevators. "I like an attendant in a lift," Humphries says. "In my youth, the lifts generally were manned by people who'd been disabled in the First World War. There was very rarely a person driving a lift with all their appendages. All lifts were attended. It dropped off as people began eating sandwiches and pies in lifts and drinking these endless bottles of water, hydrating themselves excessively."
As they do during his shows. "Drinking in the theatre — it's a new thing. There are no known cases of dehydration during any of my shows in 50 years. It's a fashion. It used to be chocolates, now it's water. I cannot stand people drinking water. People will look back and laugh."
We arrive at the Collected Works Poetry and Ideas Bookshop on the first floor. Humphries is at home in this arcane world. "A poetry bookstore in the heart of Melbourne is a treasure, an absolute oasis."
On every trip to Melbourne, Humphries visits second-hand and antiquarian bookshops with as much passion as he did in his youth. "The book stores of Melbourne were really my university. I formed reading tastes there — notably in the shops of Ellis Bird at the top of Bourke Street, Seward's in Bourke Street in the other direction, and Evans in a large basement in Collins Street — that I still retain." His quest for desired titles takes him anywhere. "It's a form of meditation, rummaging in a bookshop."
Next door is the Retro Star, a vintage clothing shop. The tone has changed considerably and Humphries is delighted at this discovery. With its Qantas carry-on bags (not dissimilar to the one carried by Dame Edna's nephew, Barry McKenzie, in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie), spangly cocktail frocks and store dummies wearing lurid expressions, it's not hard to see why. This, too, is Humphries heaven.
Not that he's a willing buyer. Sir Leslie Colin Patterson isn't averse to stains of a food-based or bodily type, but his creator holds to a higher standard.
"I don't buy second-hand clothing for myself," Humphries says. "I always think that it's still inhabited by some ghost who may not be friendly. Or something may have happened. I just saw a very nice crocodile belt, then I thought, 'Whose trousers did they support? What happened in those trousers?' You can never be sure."
We walk through the Swanston Street crowds towards City Square. He looks up at the hotel in Collins Street, which overlooks the square. "How many architectural styles are represented on the face of that Westin Hotel? It's an awful mess."
We've come to look at the Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Swanston and Collins streets. "It's one of the best buildings in Melbourne and I suppose an ignorant person would call it Art Deco, but it isn't; it's a kind of mini-skyscraper. At one stage you could buy the tower and make it into a flat. I actually considered it. Had a wonderful view.
"It had a New York sort of name — Manchester Unity. Underneath were coffee lounges run by Viennese Jewish refugees. One was called Rumpel Meyer, the other was called Raffles, and it was very smart to go there as a student and have coffee and toasted raisin bread."
He enjoys Melbourne's proliferation of decent cafes. "It's marvellous, I think. You can get decent coffee everywhere here. The coffee in America is horrible. I'm sure Starbucks is here, but it's not so ubiquitous. Starbucks doesn't make coffee, it makes something else. It makes a brown drink. They should just call it Brown Drink."
Bad coffee is just one of the challenges he faces on tour. "Well, there are a lot of frustrations when you're touring, and discomforts, as Russell Crowe knows, when you're trying to make a phone call from your room … I sent him a letter of congratulations. He was very restrained. I felt like actually murdering people on the desk in American hotels. But on the whole, it's fun touring. I like the itinerant gypsy life. I like living in hotels, I like room service. On the whole, I feel more at home in a hotel than anywhere."
He felt at home in Georges of Collins Street until it shut its doors. Still, there is much left to celebrate. "One can't lament the disappearance of the past too profoundly when there are still marvellous things."
One such marvel is Lord Mayor John So. "People are vaguely aware, when they look at the Town Hall, that there is an extremely jovial, intelligent Chinaman living there. It's good, isn't it? And not some go-getting spiv lining his pockets, cementing his connections."
The tour wouldn't be complete without some audience participation — provided by a family from outer London. After posing for a snap, Humphries has a little chat with them. "You weren't expecting a town like this," Humphries says. "Everyone speaks English. Very nice?"
"It's just like being at home, it is," says the woman.
"What town are you from?"
"Ilford," comes the response.
Had it been Edna asking the question, with her propensity for seeking forensic domestic detail, the conversation might have taken a different turn.
"Ilford!" Humphries says. "I think this beats Ilford."
"It does," the woman smiles, "and how!"
