Les: Out-laughing And Out-lasting
Newcastle Herald
Saturday November 7, 1998
DOCTORS will tell you that laughter is good medicine. The elixir of life.
And so it seems with some of Australia's most famous cartoonists. EricJolliffe is 92 years old and still churning out Wichetty's Tribe calendars. Jim Russell is 89 and has been drawing The Potts comic strip for the past 58 years. And, because he's got time on his hands, he's recently opened his own travel agency in Sydney.
Then there is Les Dixon. He drew the famous Bluey and Curley strip that was syndicated in newspapers around Australia for nigh on 20 years until theMelbourne Sun, which owned the copyright, retired Dixon (and Bluey and Curley with him) in 1975.
But Dixon eventually persuaded the newspaper boffins to let him have the rights to the strip and he's still drawing the two larrikins (for Australian Senior magazine) ? even though he's past his 88th birthday.
`Keeps the cobwebs away,' he laughs. `They can grow quite easily if you let them.
`As long as my eyesight holds out and I don't get the "Joe Blakes" I don't see why I can't keep on drawing for some years yet.
`Mind you, that's not at full blast. But slow and steady.'
Not that one would expect it to be full blast for a man who, during the two decades of drawing Bluey and Curley daily, produced almost 6000 strips. That's a helluva lot of gags.
That Dixon ever became a cartoonist is a combination of luck and misfortune.
First the misfortune.
As a youth he used to dabble in drawing just for fun. But it was the Depression and Dixon had to eat. He worked as a truck driver for an oil company.
One day he drove down a back street in the Sydney suburb of Erskinville and straight into a trench that workmen had dug.
There were no warning signs and as the vehicle dived into the trench, Dixon's head slammed into the roof of the truck's cabin.
His spine was dislocated and he was off work for two years.
Complications also caused premature baldness. But at least he was still alive.
That's when he decided he would become an artist.
It was easier said than done. The famous old publication Smith's Weekly kept rejecting cartoons he sent in.
`No chance in the world', the Art Editor would scrawl across the rejection slip. `Don't waste our time.'
But what is it they say about if at first you don't succeed . . .
Eventually, in 1938, Dixon had one of his cartoons accepted by The Bulletin.
The cartoon is pretty corny by 1998 standards, but back then humour was quite different.
Two young girls were baby-sitting their baby brother. So as he wouldn't interrupt their game of marbles, they pegged his pants, with him inside, to the back-yard clothesline.
For his effort Dixon received the princely sum of 25 shillings ($2.50).
In those days The Bulletin would display the originals of all their cartoons in the window of Sydney office.
`I was so proud. I hung around outside the office for hours,' he recalls. `I was waiting for people to come up and willing them to laugh.
`I was convinced I was going to be a great success so I headed home and knocked off three more cartoons to submit to The Bulletin.
`It wasn't that easy. The Art Editor rejected all three.'
But he battled on.
His work began appearing in other publications. Rydge's Business Journal, Frivolity and Humour.
Yes, and eventually in Smith's Weekly.
In 1942, he joined the permanent staff of Smith's Weekly drawing cartoons (or joke boxes, as they used to call them). And by the time the publication closed its doors in 1950, he had risen to be Art Editor himself.
Queensland Newspapers grabbed the best of the art staff and set them to work drawing cartoons that were syndicated in newspapers and magazines around the country.
Bluey and Curley were already household names, created by an artist called Alex Gurney.
When Gurney died in 1955, another artist, Norm Rice, took over. But on New Year's Eve the following year he was killed in a car crash in Sydney.
Dixon was asked to continue the strip ? and it's now history how he drew the pair for longer than the previous two artists combined.
`I was bloody unhappy for about three years,' he remembers. `It's so hard taking over someone else's creation. You don't have that man's style. You don't have his sense of humour.
`But eventually my own Bluey and Curley evolved.
`When I started they were a couple of layabouts. I gave them a job.
`They were in the construction industry and that enabled me to put them anywhere in Australia. On city building sites. In country towns. On properties out in the bush.
`They were the archetypal Aussie blokes who didn't give a bugger about anyone.
`That's blokes, not guys.
`They had this sense of freedom to say and do whatever they wanted.
`The strip was a bit ribald at times, although by today's standards it was pretty tame.
`In all my time I only got about 10 strips rejected. I knew what was unacceptable. I couldn't poke fun at religion. A political stand was a no-no. There were political jokes, but nothing about specific political parties.'
Dixon said the feedback from the public was incredible. There was a never-ending stream of mail from Bluey and Curley afficionados.
`I got thousands of ideas for jokes from readers,' Dixon says. `Mind you, once you cleaned a lot of them up, you couldn't use them. They'd lost their punch-line.'
Deadlines were always met.
Indeed, he had to get a bit ahead in case of sickness or the need for a holiday.
When they pulled the plug and told him to retire he was more than a month ahead.
`They told me young people weren't interested in the two larrikins,' says Dixon. `They were, you know! I was getting letters from a lot of young readers.'
Dixon retired to the Central Coast of NSW. And as well as Bluey and Curley, he created another strip, Sandy Lakes, about a retired bloke living . . . on the Central Coast.
But the ultimate irony is that Bluey and Curley, resurrected 10 years ago, have outlasted most of those who wanted them retired.
`The old proverb was right,' says Dixon. `He laughs best who laughs last.'
© 1998 Newcastle Herald