This lecture provides a detailed analysis of the way in which the world-renowned Australian satirist Barry Humphries created a series of performances in a variety of genres and modes that lampooned the idea of Empire and Britishness over a 30-year period, with origins in the Menzies era, and evolving through to Thatcher's Britain and beyond. The Keith Cameron Lecture in Australian Studies is an invited public lecture delivered annually by a distinguished international scholar at the School of History and Archives, University College, Dublin. A large audience of students and staff of University College Dublin, and the Australian Ambassador to Ireland, attended the lecture on 30 September 2009. This lecture took place in conjunction with the James Joyce award given to Barry Humphries on the same day by students of the Literary and Historical Society of UCD.

The lecture analyses the framing stories of Barry Humphries' life and his anarchic approach to satire, its genesis in his boyhood and the discomfort Australians exhibit towards his distinctively anarchic form of satire. Barry Humphries has published two autobiographies - with different takes on the same life. The research background to this lecture is the framing stories of Humphries' life and the way in which I as biographer evaluated them in order to write my biography of this actor and writer. The lecture examines several key episodes in Humphries' life that reveal his personality, the power of his satire and the way in which one drives the other. The lecture considers Humphries' association with the conservative magazine Quadrant, the Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, a performance of Humphries' enduring character Sandy Stone in 2007 and its ambivalent satire of the prime minister at the time, John Howard. This lecture also presents a defence of satire as a refusal of ideology.