Mr BURKE (Watson—Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for the Arts and Leader of the House) (09:25): Where do you start with Barry Humphries? When he died last month, it wasn't like we'd just lost one person; it was like an entire crowd had left us. And, for many of us, that was the way we knew him. Some, like the member for Wentworth, knew him much more personally. He had so many familiar faces and so many distinctive voices. There was Sandy Stone, with his tales of suburbia in all their exhaustive minutiae, rendered in the hypnotically soporific tones of a man clad in a nightgown that was the colour of decay itself. There was the cultural attache, Sir Les Patterson: a full frontal assault of teeth and eye-jarring wardrobe choices and an endless spray of spittle, as if his mouth was a permanent monsoon—and that was before he started talking. As delightful as laughter was to his ears, Barry once explained how much more he preferred to hear a sharp intake of breath from the audience, and Sir Les delivered this in spades. Yet such was Barry's genius that, even with a creation so over the top that the word 'grotesque' probably undersells it, Barry was still able to weave subtlety into the Sir Les experience: the tiniest movement of an eyebrow, the slight shift into a smirk, a perfectly timed sip from a glass or all of them working together to let you know that something wickedly funny was about to happen and that it would have precisely nothing to do with good taste. And of course Dame Edna probably towers above them all, in those dazzling spectacles and extravaganza of hair, hurling lines and gladioli like festive spears. Has anyone ever brought such a gleeful sense of menace to the stage or to the TV studio? And people just kept lining up, both as spectators and as targets. After Barry died, the writer Lucy Kellaway recalled a very early manifestation of Edna in London in the 1960s. A skint Barry and his then wife, Rosalind, had come to live with her and her family in London, occupying a couple of shabby rooms in exchange for what Barry would later describe as 'a modicum of household help'. That included Barry's sometimes acting as nanny to the infant Lucy. One time her mother came home and: … spotted a familiar pram being pushed up the front steps. The person propelling it was a stranger—a sinister woman, tall with pointy glasses and a gash of lipstick. Unfortunately for Lucy, she concedes she slept through it, missing the opportunity to say that her earliest memory was in fact looking up from her pram and seeing a prototype of what would later become Edna Everage. The bright heart of this galaxy of characters was Barry. We've lost a satirist, wit, raconteur, comic genius; a towering imp of a man who sparkled in the shallows and thrived in the depths; a great Australian who was as much at home with a well-executed practical joke as he was with art and poetry and the history that held it all together and gave it context. Few people had such a keen sense of every shoulder of every giant that any artist has ever stood upon. And yet, amid it all, Barry Humphries was a true original. Our hearts go out to his adored wife Lizzie Spender and to all his family and loved ones. May Barry rest in something a good deal more fun than mere peace!