Vale Barry Humphries

It has been no secret this past week that Australia was about to lose Barry Humphries, who passed away in Sydney’s St Vincent’s hospital on Saturday. Thirteen years ago, upon the publication of Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography, reviewer Mark McGinness observed in Quadrant

… no one has Humphries’s ear for dialogue or his eye for the prosaic detail. His only rival in the English-speaking world is Alan Bennett. So even if, at times, one thinks one has been served an old sponge, Humphries’ brio, his instinctive sense of the ridiculous, his genius for evoking the past and divining the present, provide sufficiently delicious icing to make it eminently edible … one hopes Dame Edna’s obituary is a long way off.

Alas, even at the age of 89, the Humphries obituaries came too soon, much as they did for his good friend, the great and much missed Bill Leak. Below, a reminder of what we have lost.