Right now, I’m in Japan, where Christmas is a time of year for sparkly Christmas trees and odd slogans like “Have a precious Christmas”, as well as for going out and having sex in a hotel with your loved one, but in English speaking countries, it’s a time of year for being kind of nice and kind of meaningful to one another. I think that’s a reasonable common denominator. This general nice feeling leads to gooey movies, soppy editorials and bloody awful songs, most of which are being played at me every time I step out for a hamburger here in Tokyo.
So Michael Leunig is a good cartoonist to describe for a Christmas column. Not because he’s a complete antidote to the Chrissy spirit. I could find some dark, gothic negative type, some visual equivalent of Marilyn Manson to posit as the anti-Chrismtas artist. But instead, I’ll hold up Leunig, who is to me the meaningful version of it. He’s warm without being saccharine, meaningful without being pretentious and ummm, Australian without being a bloody idiot like Rolf Harris, Germaine Greer, Clive James or Steve Irwin.
Australians who are reading this column can stop now. You know all about Leunig, especially if you’re from Melbourne. If you don’t, shame on you!
As for the rest of you, what on earth am I talking about? Well, I’m talking about a cartoonist who started off doing very ordinary political cartoons. One day, when he was supposed to be drawing something about the Vietnam War, he did a picture of a man with a duck on his head just for fun. It was printed and thereafter Leunig (pronounced Loo- nigg) went his own whimsical way. Since the late seventies, he’s been a feature of the Melbourne mental map and it seems a shame for people who have the misfortune to be born elsewhere to miss out on him.
For me there are three Leunigs. The first is an atrocious artist, leading at least one commentator to say that Leunig was funny before he could draw. Perhaps I should say ‘crude’ rather than atrocious, since I’m no artist myself. His early cartoons are quite savage and surreal. A devil interrupts a sermon to shout “bulldust!” at the startled preacher. A man leers up a woman’s skirt and is alarmed to see a watchdog growling out at him. The surreal ones are my favourites from this period; the nude fog sucker, who just stands outside a shop looking mysteriously happy, sucking fog in the nude. Or the train divided into ‘farting’ and ‘non-farting’ sections, where the non-farters are the picture of inhibited misery and the farters confident.
Through the eighties Leunig’s cartoons became more popular and were themselves parodied as being on every student household fridge in Melbourne. He became a nicer, gentler cartoonist during this time, quite lyrical about such Australian themes as ‘dags’.
A dag is literally a piece of shit that has dried and hangs off the wool near the sheep’s anus. It sounds like a horrible thing to be called but has a meaning somewhere between the English ‘naff’ and the new American usage of ‘gay’, the sense in which Sponge Bob Squarepants IS gay. Dagginess is very important in Australia. It’s a kind of pride in being the underdog and a way of laughing affectionately at oneself (unless one is Barry Humphries, for whom laughing cruelly at the ordinary is bread and butter). Dags wear unfashionable but comfy clothes and are not cool.
Leunig’s ‘Dag Pride’ march had banners for ‘people who whistle in public’. I can’t remember the other banners but they were very daggy, beer mat collectors, wearers of Ugg boots and so on. Towards the end of the 80s, a Leunig tram appeared around Melbourne, resplendent with large-nosed innocents and, of course, ducks. He had an exhibition in the gallery. Sometime in the 90s, a musical puppet show based on his works appeared.
His recent work is Leunig at the peak of his powers. By turns he’s political, wise and funny. I used to worry that he would disapear completely into feel-good whimsy, when his books of poems and prayers appeared. However, week in, week out, he draws something that makes The Age newspaper worth having (and which almost made up for the ridiculous amount of coverage they gave Steve Irwin)
(two street football players looking oddly professional)
He has copped some flack for criticising the Israeli government recently (after Sharon’s stroke, a cartoon showed somebody explaining that Sharon still had enough movement in his body to justify assasination by the criteria Israel used for assasinating crippled Hamas leaders) and is never popular with our most vile of Prime Ministers, who he attacks for being a lying weasel who has incarcerated under-age children and lied his way into the war in Iraq.
(not much drawing, but I like it)
Every year for the past four years, The Age has given out a Leunig calendar at the end of the year and Leunig wrapping paper at Christmas time. It’s a popular thing to do and quite an uplifting one.
I have to stop now, so that I can go and do Christmassy things. Also because if I keep writing this column, I will keep finding more Leunig cartoons I want to include and either burst the website’s image limit or get done for copywright infringement. However, my Christmas wish for all my readers is to check out Leunig’s work if you can. I’ve stressed his Australianosity, and some of his cartoons are best understood by Aussies. Most are universal and I recommend them to all my readers.
Happy Christmas to the lot of you.
Floyd
