I’ve always had a strong reaction to images of Barry Humphries.

Edna Everage behaving like someone’s doting grandmother always felt more like the wolf from Red Riding Hood dressed in grandma’s clothes.

Les Patterson seemed synonymous with the drunks at the many parties held by my criminal family in the 1970s.

As an adult when I saw pictures of Barry Humphries I felt dread. I couldn’t help but see a leering, macabre clown. So I’m not at all surprised to find he’s now been cast in Peter Jackson’s film, The Hobbit as The Goblin King.

Goblins, described in Wikipedia, are legendary evil or mischievous creature, described as a grotesquely evil.

I had nightmares of such a grotesque clown, the hungry eyes, the leering smirk like smile broadening into teeth. I was one of those kids who was wary of clowns, all I saw were dressed up men.

Perhaps my own experiences colored that. My father was friends with entrepreneur and TV host Kevin Dennis since the 60s and entertainer Smacka Fitzgibbon in the early 70s, both of them mutual friends of Barry Humphries, who my older brother told me came to the parties too.

I’m sure, rhe parties in the early 70s would fit in the film, The Hobbit. Our parties were places of wild decadence and extravagance, places of no boundaries, the stuff of film really. Our parties had the very lack of boundaries so openly celebrated, enjoyed and written about in the diaries of self confessed pedophile, Donald Friend, a close friend of Barry Humphries whose ten year sexual lifestyle with Balinese ‘Houseboys’ aged 9-12, Humphries refers to as ‘benevolent pedophilia’.

I’m sure you could find many a Goblin King at our parties back then. As for Hobbits, as an almost eight year old around the adults swanning it at our parties, I felt like a hobbit, seeking out places to feel safe. But those parties were never safe for children.

Donna Williams, BA Hons, Dip Ed.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.
http://www.donnawilliams.net