Memories Of A Fine Penman With A Point
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday August 1, 2001
Alan Ramsey recalls one of Australia's finest political cartoonists, and the wit that set him apart.
BACK in the late 1970s/early '80s, when Bob Hawke's political ambition was forever threatening to overwhelm Bill Hayden's leadership of the Labor Party, as it eventually did, Hayden once asked me why it was some cartoonists always drew Hawke taller than him when, in fact, the reverse was true. Those sorts of things really niggle politicians, who we mostly forget are human too, but I don't recall having had the courage to tell Hayden it wasn't his height relative to Hawke's the cartoonists were seeking to illustrate.
Hayden's angst came rushing out of the past after Les Tanner died in his sleep at his Melbourne home 10 days ago.
Many years earlier, in 1967, Tanner and Peter Coleman co-edited a selection of cartoons from across 180 years of the rich tradition of Australian political cartooning. It was their introduction to their book, Cartoons of Australia's History, I wished I'd known about and been able to quote to Hayden all those years ago.
It eloquently answers his question.
Tanner, the cartoonist, and Coleman, the journalist, editor and, later, politician, wrote, in part: ``A cartoonist has no right to be fair; if you are a fair-minded, sober kind of artist, you should not be a cartoonist. Cartoonists are satirists, not magistrates, and they seize on one important aspect of a situation for the purposes of ridicule or dramatisation and hammer at that as unfairly or righteously as possible.
``A censor of books is not, for the cartoonist, a servant of the public trying conscientiously to strike a balance between the freedom of literature and the need to protects the morals of the Commonwealth; he is usually a drooling, idiotic pervert who finds secret dirty meanings where none exist or viciously wants to impose his own narrowness on everyone else.
``A politician is not an overworked citizen doing his modest best; he is a weed, a parasite, a corrupt party hack, unable to distinguish truth from advantage. These images may be, to one degree or another, unfair, but and this is their value by their unfairness and often their crudeness, the cartoonists [catch] the attitudes, prejudices and hopes of the Australian people of the time ... usually [far better] ... than journalists' reports, let alone government documents."
I knew Les Tanner through his extended family.
His sister, Gwen, was the wife of the late Adrian Deamer, a distinguished editor of The Australian and a man a good many of us who worked for him both admired and loved hugely.
Dinner at the Deamers in Sydney, as they say, was an experience if either Jim McClelland or Les was there, too. All three greatly enjoyed a drink and an argument.
Gwen told a rollicking wake for her brother at his favourite Melbourne pub, the Pump House, last Friday that these arguments could be so willing that her husband once ordered his brother-in-law out of the house. Next morning, when Deamer came down for breakfast, there was a note from Les on the table: ``Can't we stay together for the sake of the children?"
It was this wit that put Tanner's talent up there in the great traditions of Australian political cartooning. He spent the first 40 years of his life in Sydney and his last 34 in Melbourne. He made his name with Frank Packer's Daily Telegraph and The Bulletin in the 1950s and '60s and his reputation during the next 30 years with The Age. Tanner's mentor and close friend Bruce Petty wrote of him last week: ``I am surprised I feel so shaken at his not being about."
For all the years of his superb pen and he wrote as astringently and as wittily as he drew Tanner's name will forever be remembered in Australian journalism as the cartoonist who jointly caused Kerry Packer's father, Sir Frank, an uncompromising Liberal acolyte knighted in 1959 by a grateful Menzies, to pulp an entire edition of The Bulletin. The incident was as forthright a demonstration of Packer's authority and politics as anything later enforced by Sir Frank's youngest son.
Peter Coleman, The Bulletin's editor at the time, upset Sir Frank with an editorial in February 1967 critical of the contentious hanging, in Victoria, of Peter Ryan, the last person legally executed in this country. Tanner enraged him with an accompanying cartoon showing Victoria's then Liberal Party Premier, Henry Bolte, a ruthless, cunning and immensely successful country hick, holding a noose. The caption underneath read: `` I do not bow to mob protest only mob support."
Coleman and Tanner were gone from The Bulletin within weeks, Coleman into law and later NSW Liberal Party politics and Tanner to Melbourne to join The Age. Last Friday, colleagues and family farewelled Les at the Pump House to the strains of Jimmy Durante creaking through I'll be Seeing You.
Here in Canberra, in an election year, the older among us will be remembering him.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald