Design and Art Australia Online

painter, cartoonist, poet and writer, was born in Footscray, Melbourne, only son of the three children of an abattoir worker; one of his sisters is the cartoonist Mary Leunig . A self-taught artist, he began drawing cartoons for university student newspapers, especially Monash University’s Lot’s Wife where his work first appeared in 1965 when he was a student at the Swinburne Film and Television School. He left in his third year, having been offered a job on 'a new professional newspaper’ (according to Good Weekend 1998, 31) Newsday , an afternoon daily in the Age stable established to rival the Melbourne Herald . He had already published work in the first issue of the short-lived Age fortnightly magazine, Broadside (March 1969). He recollected in Good Weekend 1998, 31:

It was in the midst of a mental block back at Newsday one Saturday morning when I had a total disillusionment with politics. It was all too grim – the Vietnam War and the Liberal Government of the time being so conservative. I’d been to Canberra and seen the hypocrisy of the politicians, these bitter enemies in the House all drinking together afterwards and making deals and talking to journalists, and I thought, “This is all bullshit. It’s a kind of organised sport and I’m not going to be part of it.” ... I drew a cartoon about a fella who puts a teapot on his head and climbs on a duck and rides into the sunset. I was sick of having to make a political point to a deadline, to be rational and relevant, of having the weight of the worries of the world on my shoulders. The cartoon was a rebellion against all that compliance – a quick, mad, absurd thing à la Spike Milligan and the absurdist tradition. Other people were also probably sick of all this relevance – they needed a mystery, a fairy story, something they could not quite understand so they could lose themselves in it and laugh.

I took it to the editor and he sort of looked at it bleary-eyed, without his glasses, saying, “I don’t understand it but I sort of like it.”

Newsday folded after six months. Leunig then contributed to Melbourne’s Sunday Observer until he joined Nation Review later that year (1970). There, he said ( Good Weekend 1988, 31), 'I really started to develop my style – ink and wash instead of just hard black line, and a more individualistic, eccentric point of view’. Mr Curly was invented here; a drawing of Mr Curly and his curly world for Nation Review remains one of Leunig’s favourite drawings (reproduced Good Weekend 1988, 31). His cartoons appeared from the first issue, 11 October 1970, until 'the Ferret’ expired in 1981, e.g. Onanism on Trial (about Portnoy’s Complaint ), published Sunday Review 1970 (ill. King, p. 202), and a political cartoon about McMahon, The mouse that roared , in Sunday Review 1969 (ill King, 206).

Leunig later contributed to London Oz . He has contributed irregularly to Overland , including the covers of number 56 (Spring 1973) and the 21st anniversary issue (Spring 1975). He has been the weekly Age cartoonist since c.1980 (with a weekly cartoon repeated in Sydney Morning Herald in more recent years), having contributed irregularly to the Age since 1969. When asked to contribute to the new Sunday Age in 1989, instead of drawing a cartoon he wrote a prayer. He has continued these from time to time, despite their somewhat mixed reception (lengthy discussion about the reasons for and meaning of them in GW article).

At least fourteen anthologies of Leunig’s cartoons and poems have been published, mainly by Penguin Books. His 1974 collection had sold 62,447 copies by the seventh reprint. In the 1980s he began colouring his drawings and painting on canvas; in the 1990s he began doing fine art prints. The NGV mounted an exhibition of his cartoons and drawings in 1992, the Leunig 'introspective’, which travelled around Australian state galleries until May 1994. State of Bewilderment , a Sydney Theatre Company performance in November/December 1996, was based on Leunig’s cartoons. An exhibition, The Happy Prints , published by Chrysalis Publishing, opened on 25 March 1999 at the Australian Archives, Canberra. The Federation 'Peoplescape’ concert (November 2001) featured repeat selections from Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals illustrated with giant blow-ups by Leunig and presented by Bryan Brown – a show that had been very successful in 2000.

'[Unhappy, Self-destructive] Thoughts of a Baby Lying in a Child-Care Centre’ about his mother – whom others may call 'a cruel, ignorant, selfish bitch’ but the baby defends for abandoning him in 'this horrendous crêche’ and solely blames himself for being unlovable, was published in 1997 and caused a furore, especially among feminists; he 'was flooded with all sorts of mail’ (GW 33). 'Recently’, he wrote in 1988 (GW 34):

I have done many overtly political cartoons. It’s part of an emerging sense of duty to the earth and the environment, and to the notion of community. We need a healthy community, just as we need an environment that is healthy and which sustains us and itself. Economic and political principles are a practical way of creating or destroying community. The world vitally needs an economics based on human need. Politically we have become too individual-rights focused: I want this, I want that. But there’s a trade-off; sometimes you’ve got to think of your duty, one’s human responsibilities.

In February 1973 a Leunig cartoon was the subject of a court action against Nation Review for publishing cartoons that were 'obscene, crude, offensive, and unduly emphasised sex’. Signed “Lazlo Toth” – a pseudonym taken from the man who defaced the Vatican’s Michelangelo Pieta , then in the news – the drawing showed a line-up of naked men with very obvious genitals in front of a policeman and a pointing woman saying, 'That’s the flasher’. It appeared on the back page of Nation Review 2/35 (17 June 1972, illus. Walsh 1993, 164). Along with a Patrick Cook cartoon inside, captioned “Now that’s what I call a mutation” (a danseur with genitalia like a bunch of bananas – a joke about Melbourne’s controversial nude ballet 'Mutations’, ill. Walsh, 195), it led to the Victorian Chief Secretary Ray Meagher charging the Review (edited by Richard Walsh) with being an indecent publication. Vane Lindesay was among those who testified for the paper, but the Review lost and was fined $150. The appeal in September 1973, led by Walsh (not a lawyer), was successful and the conviction was quashed. Leunig presented Vane Lindesay with a cartoon ( Neighbours ) and a cartoon rough for testifying as an expert witness; both were included in the 1999 SH Ervin Gallery b/w show. (For details of the case see Walsh 1993, 164-65, 194-95, and Hepworth article pp.197-98).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007