Quick Draw

Sun Herald

Sunday April 9, 2006

Lily Bragge

Political cartoonists provoke controversy and mirth, death threats, derision and charges of simply not being funny. Lily Bragge talks to the artists about wielding the power of the pen.

During his 25 years in politics, Kim Beazley has often been depicted as a pig. The leader of the Australian Labor Party has also been drawn as a whale, a grizzly bear and a giant squid, as well as a porky ballerina, tortoise, dog, sphinx and demented chicken. "They all blur into a stream of thunderous horror," says Beazley, unsuccessfully trying to choose one cartoon that hurt the most. "You know you are alive when you see the horrible cartoon first thing in the morning. It's like

I'm being fired on with a full German artillery in the trenches, while I'm armed only with a Pogo Stick."

Beazley can blame his physiology as well as his job for this relentless bombardment. The Labor leader, says cartoonist Bill Leak, is a caricaturist's gift. As well as his fluctuating girth, "Beazley's a great contradiction - he has a long thin nose in a great fat man's face."

While having your physical flaws magnified and served up to the nation with breakfast might shatter the staunchest of egos, politicians accept it's all in

a day's work. Australia boasts a grand tradition of biting black-and-white satire. Launceston's Cornwall Chronicle, established in 1835, was the first Australian newspaper to attack its government in drawings. The Bulletin has published controversial political cartoons since it was founded in 1880. And in 1924, the world's first society of cartoonists was formed in Sydney: the Black and White Artists' Society, now known as the 200-member Australian Cartoonists' Association.

Publications across the country employ 30 to 40 cartoonists. Like stars of painting, they are known by their surnames: Leunig, Moir, Nicholson, Petty, Tandberg, Leak, Knight, Pryor, Spooner, Wilcox. The Sydney Morning Herald's Alan Moir says he and his drawing compadres' role is to "try to provoke debate, prick pomposity and, in the case of government and opposition, clean away the hoodwinking". "They can make you wince but they don't make you crumble," says Beazley. "Cartooning suits the Oz character. They are great demolishers of tall poppies."

Of course, the luxury of public self-expression has a price. Lawsuits are always a possibility, although no cartoonist has been sued for defamation in Australia since 1982, when Patrick Cook compared a fictitious Harry Seidler-designed retirement village to a chook farm (the outraged architect sued, lost and appealed unsuccessfully). Still, cartoonists live under a cloud of wrath - from their subjects, people who disagree with their views and those who just don't think they're funny. "Sometimes, it's a shock to be reminded that people are still genuinely offended by stuff - by language or subjects - that, for me, are just part

of modern life," says Melbourne cartoonist Andrew Weldon. Every day, there are angry letters. And worse.

"I've received my fair share of death threats over the years and I've learned not to let the nutters bother me," says Leak. Ten years ago, one of his cartoons was returned to him "by a reader who'd wiped his bum on it. He could have been a cartoonist - he knew how to get his point across."

Recently, cartooning has grown even more perilous. September saw violent international protests and a Pakistani Muslim cleric put a bounty of $US1 million ($1.4 million) on the head of a Danish cartoonist who satirised the prophet Mohammad. Then in December, the Australian Upper House passed new laws that allow those who "urge disaffection" against the government or constitution to be imprisoned for up to seven years. Critics have expressed concern that the law is open to interpretation - so joking about the government's security or military operations could potentially be regarded as a crime of sedition.

The laughs completely died out in February when a Melbourne satirist pretended he was The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Michael Leunig and submitted one of Leunig's works to an ? Iranian competition for cartoons about the Holocaust. Leunig was inundated with hate mail and newspaper letters pages were flooded. "The distorting of my life is about to become extreme," he wrote in an opinion piece for The Age. "The consequences for me and my family could be dire."

Working from his farm near Euroa, two hours from Melbourne, Leunig won't discuss his work for now. "I've decided to say as little as possible," he says, "seeing as so many people seem intent on twisting just about everything I say and using it against me."

Although each cartoonist interviewed for this story argued that they would not be doing their job unless they regularly provoked dissent and debate, the prospect of jail daunts even the most defiant. Weldon, 34, who contributes to The Age, says the new laws haven't tempered his work, "not at this stage, anyway. I might lose my nerve after a couple of cartoonists get thrown in prison."

"I love my job and I wouldn't want to give it up for anything," says Bill Leak, whose work appears in The Australian. "But jail? Call me old-fashioned, I wouldn't want to go to jail for murder. But if it transpires that I'm jailed for seditious cartoons, then so be it."

The protests, the sedition laws and the Leunig episode have all combined to make Alan Moir crave a calmer working environment. "Everyone needs to just settle down and take a cold shower." Moir, who honed his talents as a child drawing caricatures of his schoolteachers, knows you can't please everybody. In fact, he says, cartoonists rarely please anyone.

When he first left his New Zealand home in 1973, Moir supported his freelance cartooning by working in factories, "which hardened both my resolve and my hands". He says his political sympathies lie left of centre but "the Liberals think I'm a big leftie and the Labor Party reckon I'm a Labor basher".

At 58, he says he's begun to think like a politician himself. "A good cartoonist gets right into their heads," says the recipient of a swag of awards, including a Churchill Fellowship and the Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism, both in 2000. "Everybody has their spinners - we get to clarify the spin."

Moir, whose face is mapped by deep lines and crevices that could keep his own pen busy, gives free cartooning lessons to the public through his website. Liberal senator Amanda Vanstone, long the subject of cartoonists, booked a private lesson with him four years ago after she took to sketching members of the opposition during Parliament. She's bought a few cartoons of herself over the years. "If you can't see something funny in a desperate situation," she says, "you should put a down payment on your coffin." Still, says Moir dryly, "She is probably a better minister of immigration than she is a cartoonist."

During Moir's career, there's been only one cartoon he regrets. "It was 20 years ago. Dr Denis Murphy [then state president of the Queensland branch of the ALP] had a terrible toupee and I used to put a 40-cent label on it. His wife rang and complained so I changed it to $5. Months later, he was in hospital; he'd been having chemotherapy. He died. I felt a real rat."

He works from the home he shares with his web-developer wife, Diana, and is a self-confessed "news junkie", rising at 6am to read the world's newspapers online and deciding on his theme for the day by noon. He files by 5pm with as little discussion as possible. In 20 years and some 5000 cartoons, he says he's used other people's suggestions only six times. "A chip on my shoulder about independence, I suppose." Nor does he labour over his work, arriving at the finished product after one rough draft. Only once has he had a cartoon rejected by an editor. "A Neville Wran one was said to be defamatory but neither I nor the lawyer could see where. I try to work impeccably a millimetre within defamation boundaries."

For Moir, who has four children from a previous marriage (including Herald photographer Nick, 30), there is no such thing as bad taste in cartooning. He will comment on religion, "particularly where morality overlaps into politics", but says Australian cartoonists will not draw Aboriginal sacred rituals. "We don't do it out of respect."

Moir likes to draw PM John Howard - "he's a cartoonist's dream" - as does Bill Leak. "I like drawing him because the meanness of spirit of his government is so beautifully encapsulated by the meanness of the man," says Leak. "The grim mouth, the pinched eyebrows, the squashed blowfly's eyes and the general ordinariness give us a lot to work with." But he finds it impossible to draw Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. "How can you draw someone who doesn't have a soul?" he asks.

Leak, who has won multiple Walkley and Quill awards, adores the daily cut and thrust of national politics. Newly single at 50, he is boyishly handsome despite a thatch of silver hair. He has two sons, Jasper, 22, a double-bass player living in New York, and Johannes, 25, a graphic designer and painter working in Berlin. Leak, who comes from a working-class, musical family, was in his 20s, struggling to survive as an artist, when his sister sent him books by the Melbourne cartoonist Bruce Petty and British illustrator Ralph Steadman. Inspired, "I fronted up to The Bulletin with a handful of my first cartoons one day and the next week, one of them was in the magazine. The pleasure was indescribable. It didn't take long for me to realise I'd found my true vocation."

Diagnosed as both a manic-depressive and alcoholic, Leak says his work provides crucial stability. "In recent years, I've been able to sustain long periods of abstinence. Having to commit myself daily to doing a cartoon, which - I hope - will be a source of amusement to people, imposes a discipline upon me without which I think I'd go insane."

Leak's opinions are often diametrically opposed to the views expressed in the newspaper's editorials but he still attends a daily conference. "It's good to know what other people are thinking about." Aside from a serious nicotine habit, Leak requires little to fuel his creativity. "Like most cartoonists, I read as much as I can about the subject at hand, then sit down - and wait. If that doesn't work, I tend to rely on lively discussions with friends over lunch. That's a sure-fire method of getting myself into the right mood."

Leak prefers to incite controversy rather than rage. "I like to push the envelope. But I'm aware of how far you can go before you start offending people. I once did a cartoon in which Jesus and Mohammed were watching TV to see how the war in Iraq was going.

I knew it was 'out of bounds' to depict Mohammed so all you could see of him were his legs and ankles."

"In being nasty or provocative for the sake of it there is a risk of extinguishing your own soul," says Cathy Wilcox, one of the few female cartoonists in the business. "You only do that if you are swallowing your own meanness. You become desensitised."

Wilcox, who trained as a graphic artist, started cartooning 15 years ago, fresh from three years of studying literature in France. She'd grown up in a privileged, conservative family and started drawing the customers during a stint selling hats and coats at David Jones. "I fell into political cartooning feeling initially that I was out of my depth but once I was given the opportunity to do editorial cartooning for The Age, I loved it."

Now her work appears in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - and last year she published her second collection, The Bad Guys Are Winning - Wilcox, 42, says readers have changed the way she works. Early in her career, she drew a schizophrenic shooting himself in self-defence before receiving a heartfelt letter that laid out what schizophrenics went through. "I began to call into question more about other people, their circumstances and their suffering."

Wilcox, 42, who splits her working week between her home in Riverview and the Herald's office, has two sons, aged eight and four, with her architect husband of 10 years, Giles Parker. Having children, she says, has also changed her perspective. "I have not tried to distinguish myself by doing women's issues stuff, which a lot of people expect. But I can handle touchy subjects without being insensitive."

She's never been sued but gets her share of complaints. "Sport and the military hit a nerve, funnily enough." Cartoons about the Middle East raise maximum ire. "You can barely put your toe in the water there." But, she says, a sensitive issue wouldn't stop her from commenting on something she felt strongly about. "I wouldn't like to stay home and play it safe," she says. "I think I'd prefer to continue with an attitude of 'They wouldn't dare.'"

© 2006 Sun Herald

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