Sandy Comes Home: The Reveries of a Returned Man

This Sandy Stone monologue appeared in the August 1989 Quadrant. The introduction is by Peter Coleman.

Sandy Stone is one of the great poetic creations of Australian literature—or perhaps one should say theatre and literature, since it is impossible to imagine him without Barry Humphries’s performance of Sandy’s disappointed but stoic face, eyes and mouth and his representation of his quavering voice. He is also Barry Humphries’s favourite character, and possibly the public’s: when he died in 1971, there was not a dry eye in the house and his return as a revenant must have been in part due to popular demand.

Like his distant relative, Dame Edna Everage, he has changed over the years, from being largely (but never entirely) a butt of satires on suburbia to becoming a Chekhovian commentator on a changing and doomed way of life. It is this latter Sandy who speaks in the accompanying sketch, “Sandy Comes Home”, which is the most recent of Sandy’s monologues, having…