Is it being a dominion country, a well-heeled colony, that makes this country good at comedy? The death of Barry Humphries makes you wonder and so does the preternatural nature of his genius which made everything that is most ridiculous about us seem like a joy forever. Of course there was the widest possible disjunction between the Humphries characters and their creator. The attempt to think this through uncovered a weird recollection. Everyone knows that Humphries was a Tory to the extent that he could be thought to have any politics at all in this absurd world. But the memory came flooding back of an occasion when he actually sent this aspect of himself up. It must have been on Q&A, of all things, and the great creator of rampaging Edna and tottering Sandy Stone was inveighing against refugees in the traditional manner somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan but he was also actually sending himself up and being fed cues by that shameless lady of the left, Miriam Margoyles. Humphries gave a tremendous performance of the position he was emulating so that the effect was mesmerising. It had a dazzling weirdness that absolutely transcended the politics. No other memory survives of anyone else on the show: it was just an extraordinary routine that took the breath away. Well, they’ll come no more, the old masters, not with that mastery, not with that mockery, not with that sublime capacity to risk everything for the sake of a joke that’s within an inch of being on the teller. What’s the old adage derived from Paul Kelly: nationalism governs every aspect of life in Australia until it becomes official and then it is universally despised. Try taking that as your abiding joke sheet and getting away with it.

It’s worth adding that it would have been wonderful to see Barry Humphries’ Long John Silver in the Christmas panto of Treasure Island, a minor jotting in the career but it would have been marvellous.

‘Sailor tales to sailor tunes,’ was how Stevenson described that extraordinary yarn that captivates the childhood heart but is written in a bejewelled and sparkling prose that means Ben Gunn and Blind Pugh and all the rest of the yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum crew are still there in the language of the orginal story together with the sinister jollities of that peg-legged sea cook famously played by the great Robert Newton in the 1950 Disney feature film, there for the taking on the Disney+ channel.

On the other hand, that fable for all ages Blueback by the great Tim Winton seems a bit diminished in its movie version despite a fine cameo by Eric Bana. The central young figure has been turned from a boy into a girl in young adulthood played by Mia Wasikowska (nothing wrong with that in theory) but something of the effortless flow of the undulating romance of the book has departed despite Rhada Mitchell’s grace as the younger version of the mother.

It’s funny how these things work. A small film like Bosch & Rockit with Luke Hemsworth as a guy on the run and Rasmus King as his devoted surfer son has perfect pitch through all its twists and turnabouts. Tim Winton is so intrinsically dramatic that you ignore the line of his pacing at your peril. And it’s not hard to see how as serious a writer as Philip Hensher can be in such awe of Cloudstreet. If you want the mystery of nationality beyond any illusion of class the sandgroping saga is your Homer.

What though are we to make of The North Water recommended to us by that redoubtable lady of the stage and screen Marg Downey who said it was remarkable if you could withstand its brutality. Again, men on a ship, mid-nineteenth century. Jack O’Connell (who made a name for himself as Cook in Skins) plays a surgeon adicted to laundanum. Colin Farrell, almost unrecognisably broad and bearded and sinister, is a harpooner. Old Tom Courtenay plays the owner of the ship. The storyline is awful beyond belief. Anal rape, multiple murders, the deliberate ploy of destroying the ship. All of this on great sheets of ice and with the only comfort being to throw yourself literally into the guts of a dead polar bear. The North Water (available on Binge) represents long-form streamer television at its most austere and magnificent. It proffers a scarifying vision as if the sea and its frozen detritus were just the outer form of the malignity of the human heart. But it is radiant with the tonalities of colour and light this all but terminal world offers. The source of The North Water is a novel by Ian McGuire, an English author and academic with a passionate interest not only in the contemporary novelist Richard Ford but in those dark romancers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the author of the greatest monster of them all, Moby Dick. Conrad who knew a lot about the sea said Moby Dick did not have a single line of sincerity in it but Melville’s epic of Captain Ahab and his vengeful quest for the great white whale who took his leg has a dazzling grandeur and an equal darkness. Melville declared that America didn’t want an American Milton or even an American Shakespeare. Well, I will never forget one of my teachers, a man from Oregon with an improbably refined American accent, who declared, ‘If ever there was an American Milton it is Moby Dick.’ Like Milton, Melville – in Dr Johnson’s phrase – ‘writ not language’. Soon ‘Call me Ishmael’ gives way to that extraordinary ‘babylonish dialect at once stately and a bit inhuman in its magnificence with which Ahab visits the agony of his tragedy on his crew. The book has a thunderous utterly far-fetched majesty and it is – with its opposite, Mark Twain’s Huckelberry Finn – the claimant to be the great American novel.

If this brings us back to nationalism which Barry Humphries took as his quarry we might remember Anzac Day was just the other day.

No one mocks those who died at Gallipoli, those who suffered in Changi. The Greeks had their phrase: ‘Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by / That here obedient to their word we lie’.