Bazza, Kath and Kim

Abstract

In a letter to Keith Michell in 1957 Patrick White said ...we are un-dramatic, too boring. The average Australian can't tell one anything without making it sound pointless. Such a chronic shapelessness can build novels, but the drama will hardly flourish in it. Yet drama flourished. Using this boring, shapeless language both White and Humphries created expressionistic comedy that changed the way Australians saw themselves and the way they saw the mother country.. Far from being a comic sideshow to history, Humphries made history by liberating Australians from a cringing embarrassment about their accent, syntax and vocabulary Humphries celebrated the Australian idiom, warts and all. His acute ear for Australian English provided the raw material for his satire. Put in oedipal terms, then the child Australia - simply repositioned itself in relation to the mother country. As Humphries has said himself and i quote 'If Australia was a flower child in the '60's, it was a swaggering adolescent in the 1970's. Indeed the Barry McKenzie cartoons were addressed to English readers.