The Raunch of Oz

Dame Edna, a.k.a. Barry Humphries

The thing that surprised me most about Australia was its happy public raunchiness. My exposure to Aussie raunch began the night I checked into my Melbourne motel--the Marco Polo ("When you discover us, you'll return").

I switched on the TV--to be assailed for two hours by the transvestite lunatics of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna, a sort of Down Under Lenny Bruce with a cleaned-up vocabulary. "She" mocks everyone in a non-stop monologue aimed at her celebrity student audience.

The higher they were in Ozzie status, the more they seemed to delight in being put down by "her." "She" is manic in her hilarity, and I was exhausted by the madness of her two-hour comic marathon.

So I tried to come down from this romp by watching the evening news. Fat chance. A zany flake named Clive Robertson ("Robbo" in the press babble, where he frequently figures) pretended to anchor the hour-long program. Imagine Mel Brooks standing in for Dan Rather and you have half-caught the idea.

But Robbo saved the breast for last. He presented a Kleenex poet (one blow for his poem is through) who delivered himself of a little confessional ode of how the nurse giving him his bed bath in the hospital was getting more and more intimate.

His blackout line: "We couldn't have our cake / so we ate each other." My jaw dropped half way to Adelaide. The evening news?

Throughout my month in Australia, I tried this poetic gem out on every conceivable type of Ozzie, from the straightest to the most twisted. It became a kind of Rorschach blot for Down-Underers to descry themselves.

Their responses ranged from semi-apologetic--"Well, it was the evening news"--to deeply contented chuckles. No one seemed upset or disconcerted. Hell, no big deal mate.

On my way to the airport in Sydney, my feisty cab driver, a native-born of my age, gave me corroboration of a second kind. I'd been listening to talk radio my last night in Sidney and had stumbled across the palaver of one Philip Adams, a literate man-about-Australia who had delivered a rousing speech on the need for Aussie culture to be authentic, not aping the Up-Overs in Britain and America.

To make conversation, I asked the cabby what he thought of Adams, wondering if such a cultural mover and shaker was known only to the trendies in Paddington. Whoa.

"That son of a bitch is so into himself that his snakeskin boots have disappeared up his ass." Whaaa? It seems Adams had recently plopped his credit card down on the cabby's front seat, and the cabby had warned him that is could fall through. Adams balked in a high huff, swaggered a bit, threatening the driver with his eminence, which the driver turned back on him, "Since I'm 20 years your senior."

Just a little urban soap opera. Must happen every day. But my cabby, in his diction and his demeanor, revealed that raunch is a systematic part of the egalitarian character in Oz.

At the splendid Victorian Art Centre, just across the river from the main train station in Melbourne, I had my first pass at Mo, the Charlie Chaplin of Australia, whose career in vaudeville, musical comedy and radio (he flopped only in film) was lovingly outlined in image and sound.

Mo began his career under the strange rubric of "Hebrew Eccentricity," presumably a semantic pre-emptive strike against latent anti-Semitism. His radio routines were too blue for our Red network, maybe acceptable in Redd Foxx-type nightclubs in the 1930s and '40s.

I found a similar frankness of discourse on politics in their media. One night in Hobart, I was dealing with jet lag by listening to part of a bicentennial history of labor in Australia, the episode at hand dealing with the coal strike of 1949 and the Red Scare it unleashed. No namby-pambying about the legitimate existence of a left wing in the Labor Party and the hardball politicking that ensued.

I was truly impressed by the candor in their public broadcasting, something I've ceased finding in our public broadcasting since Nixon tried to geld it fiscally. (Now they geld themselves, all too eager not to unbalance next year's budget with far-out notions.)

When I asked the features editor of the Hobart Mercury if such candor were typical, he affirmed it was and gratuitously wished out loud that the network got even better financing so it could do even more of its indispensable work.

Ironically, newspaper people look to the broadcast media for the breadth and depth they fear is being bled out of the metro dailies. A features editor of the Melbourne Herald, for example, was openly despondent over how that newly Murdoched medium was cutting back its art coverage as it tried to get into the black by upscaling to the yuppies.

For six months arts coverage bloomed--until the circulation didn't budge up. Then, off with the arts.

Civic authorities, paradoxically, are much less intimidated. At Hobart's City Hall there was a bicentennial photo essay so aggressive in its straightforward depiction of the class and gender conflicts in the city's history that halfway through the exhibition I decided that the editor must be a Marxist.

Three-quarters of the way through, I further inferred that the editor was a feminist Marxist as well. On the way out I asked the young man sitting at the desk if he knew who had edited the display.

"My sister-in-law did it," he replied proudly, if warily.

"Is she a Marxist?"

"Yup."

"Is she a feminist?"

"You better believe it!" with a great guffaw.

I remembered the censorship episodes at our City Hall art exhibits, and envied the Aussies their heritage of candor and raunch.

I don't mean to sentimentalize complex issues. But there definitely is a directness Down Under which influences politics, media and everyday discourse. For example, in Adelaide, at the World Agriculture Congress, I became fascinated by two Merino rams which a breeder had stocked in a mini-pen on the mezzanine as a conversation-starter.

Unfarm boy that I am, I was schmoozing with the owners about the lifestyle of their regal animals. "When do they, er, ah, start, er, ah?" I fished for the rut word.

"In a couple of months now," was the master's easy reply.

"And, er, ah, how often do they do it?" I pressed on.

"Any time. They're not seasonal, like up North."

Quick as a lewd wink, his wife chimed in, "Just like Australian men. Always ready to go." Now, Oz has no corner on the world randy market, but they sure like to call a spayed thing a spayed thing.

If you have any doubts about how randy they are, savor Paul John Radley's Jack Rivers and Me, in which a zany Austral-American family who run a laundrette in Boomeroo indulge in "furbangers" (sex) and use the shitoir (a sit-down pissoir), all viewed from the innocent perspective of a six-year-old Peanut Delarue.

As the town's biggest cuckold concludes at the end of the world's beeriest wedding reception, "Rand-men would resolve his and Sadie's problem." Sadie's problem is she can't get stuffed enough, a plight she shares with Boomer-oosters one and all, including a 90-year-old lady who hungers for a lad whose fetish is senile flab.

There's no earthly end to the randiness of Oz.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, June 28, 1989