In Memoriam

Conversations with Clarkey

The satirist John Clarke was a household name in New Zealand. He went on to become Australia’s most revered satirist and comedian. Clarkey was a mate of mine for nearly 50 years. He died unexpectedly on Sunday, April 9, 2017.

Despite travel and work we always kept in touch, letters at first, then an easy transition to email. If you were a mate of Clarkeys, you were a mate for life, for never has there been a man who prized loyalty and friendship more. Clarkey saw mateship as the essential, unifying ingredient of antipodean life. He saw that it was disappearing too, and that bothered him. He resolved that he would hold firm to the idea of it. And that’s how I now find myself with a treasure trove of his thoughts, all masked by the characteristic silliness of his singular satiric creation, Fred Dagg.

There were a couple of rules that governed the correspondence. First, nothing whatsoever was to be taken seriously. Any event, however significant, was considered ripe for what J.P. called “the treatment.” Second, the overall metaphorical context governing the conversation was sports. Great efforts were made to sign off in a novel way, most often by using the name of an ancient New Zealand All Black from back when we were little kids. Terry Lineen perhaps, or Pascoe Brown. These simple rules governed our correspondence over the…