Neither Fat Nor Tall But Still A Target
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 17, 2001
What fate lies in store for Simon Crean at the hands of cartoonists? Nick Leys investigates.
For the Prime Minister, it will always be the thick and fuzzy eyebrows sitting above nerdish glasses and the smug toothy grin, while former opposition leader Kim Beazley will go to his grave as an expansive girth and double chin on legs.
Politicians must accept the sobering thought that a successful career means becoming a target for newspaper cartoonists who will zero in on physical attributes when they put pen to paper.
And now they have a new target the man who looks like leading the Opposition in what will be a period of soul-searching and rebuilding, Simon Crean.
But what are the physical attributes we will see as Crean is sent-up and lampooned?
He is an average-looking man, neither short not tall, fat nor thin a hard one to draw, admit some of our most well-known illustrators.
Herald cartoonist Rocco Fazzari has given it some serious consideration and calls it the ``The Full Crean Effect."
``The real Crean characteristics happen around the nose, which is quite sizable," he says. ``There is virtually no chin, a little mouth and he has got a few chipped looking teeth, or maybe they are crooked."
Rocco says the image is finished off with squinting eyes and ``a sizeable forehead, but whether this is a sign of intelligence we will have to wait and see."
Geoff Pryor of the The Canberra Times says he too has been mulling the problem over.
``Up until now most cartoonists have drawn him as quite small because he has always been in the company of Beazley," Pryor said. ``He isn't small, its just that Beazley is quite large. Similarly Howard always gets annoyed because he is depicted as being short, but he isn't, and is in fact taller than Hawke."
He said Crean would remain a puzzle for the profession until his persona as a leader developed and he could put the common perception of being a whinger behind him.
``What I have done is made his nose prominent long and beaky like a bird's bill and given him a fairly well-groomed helmet of hair on a smallish head," he says. ``Crean has a small cleft chin below the nose, and is beetle-browed."
Another Herald cartoonist, Cathy Wilcox, describes Crean as ``neat and angular" but otherwise difficult to reduce to simple characteristics. Jenny Macklin offers similar challenges, she says, because she remains at this stage a relative unknown.
``The difficulty will be putting these unknowns on the map," she says. ``Beazley had been around for years until becoming leader, so people knew what to expect. I don't perceive Crean to have any outstanding personality or charisma."
And so it seems we will have to wait for the Full Crean Effect to fully develop and, says Rocco, for him to grow into his caricature.
``Characteristics become exaggerated, so you find that a cartoon might be instantly recognisable for us, but someone from overseas might think it looks nothing like them," he says.
``They grow into their caricatures and their caricatures become them."
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald