A sophisticate in gumboots

cracking good impression of so many of us.

What happened there? Maybe it’s primarily that what John Clarke did isn’t that easy.

Maybe it was (muddy-gumbooted appearances to the contrary) so artful, that even those among us who inspired it struggle to replicate it.

Much is made of Clarke’s dry wit. That’s not inaccurate, but it scarcely serves as any helpful summation.

Only his delivery was dry. The wit behind it was incandescent, a hardwon effect the achievement of which was not merely instinctive, or wellobserved, but highly educated.

So rare was Clarke’s talent that lots of people even seemed to forgive him for being, just quietly, a bit highbrow, really.

A secondary thought also arises. A suspicion that maybe those off-pitch Dagg impressions of ours suggest we changed as a nation since the character’s heyday.

When the dear departed Murray Ball came to make the Footrot Flats movie, Clarke wasn’t so much the perfect choice to play archetypical farmer Wal. He was the only choice. Yet Ball eventually stopped producing Footrot cartoons because he believed the New Zealand he was describing had changed underneath his feet.

If anything, though, New Zealand hadn’t been changing fast enough for Clarke, who buggered off to Australia, where he became a towering figure in a different cultural firmament.

Aussies, too, will now be feeling bereft at his death.

In his post-dagg years, which framed most of his performing life and output, he became the godfather of so much that is good about the way that Australia’s collective humour has developed.

It wasn’t merely that he skewered politicians so pleasingly.

If he snuck some fairly sophisticated insights into his Daggish days, the depth and incisiveness of his thinking was more conspicuously seen across the Tasman.

No doubt the time will come when Kiwis and Aussies get flinty and competitive about which country can claim him. Neither can, at least not in the sense that either could have been said to have fully contained his gifts.

He captivated New Zealand, then Australia, and was an inspirational – even transformative – figure so much farther afield than that.