Volume LIV Number 1-2
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Books
The Freshly-Iced Sponge
Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography, by Barry Humphries; Hachette, 2009, 387 pages, $49.99.
Surely Australia’s greatest, certainly most monstrous, comic creation, Dame Edna Everage has been inspiring and challenging, entertaining and insulting the public for more than half a century. Such is the Dame’s pull on reality that when her memoirs, My Gorgeous Life, were published in the UK they appeared on the non-fiction best-seller list. It was surprising then to find that, when recently approached for an obituary of her on file (all famous women have them in wait; the Queen Mother’s was being updated for sixty years) the Times demurred, suggesting instead that the Features pages were a more suitable spot.
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