Inkspot 93

Inkspot Presidential Palaver

Issue #93, Spring 2021 www.cartoonists.org.au

ACA Board

Patron VANE LINDESAY

President CATHY WILCOX president@cartoonists.org.au

Deputy President DAVID BLUMENSTEIN david@experienceillustration.com

Secretary STEVE PANOZZO steve@noz.com.au

Treasurer MARTINA ZEITLER treasurer@cartoonists.org.au

Membership Secretary PETER BROELMAN peter@broelman.com.au

Committee: JUDY HORACEK judy@horacek.com.au

NAT KARMICHAEL comicoz@live.com.au

IAN McCALL mccallart@bigpond.com.au

DAVID POPE info@scratch.com.au

DEAN RANKINE deanrankine@gmail.com

Affiliated Organisations

National Cartoonists Society

President: Jason Chatfield www.nationalcartoonists.com

Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain Chairman: Richard Skipworth www.ccgb.org.uk

FECO

President-General: Peter Nieuwendijk www.fecocartoon.org

Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO) Chairman: Clive Goddard www.procartoonists.org

Your Inkspot Team

Editor: Steve Panozzo

Contributors: Christine Baumann, Daniel Best, Matt Bissett-Johnson, Roy Bisson, Robert Black, David Blumenstein, Dave Blumenthal, Jason Chatfield, Kaz Cooke, Phil Day, Jed Dunstan, Jules Faber, Lindsay Foyle, Andrew Fyfe, Marnie Giroud, Matt Golding, Leigh Hobbs, Judy Horacek, Ian Jones, Phil Judd, Nat Karmichael, Steve Keast, Mark Knight, Simon Letch, Vane Lindesay, Mark Lynch, Matthew Martin, Ian McCall, Mark McHugh, Phil Norrie, David Pope, Dean Rankine, David Rowe, John Shakespeare, Phil Somerville, Peter Sully and John Thorby

Cover Art: J.C. Bancks

Inkspot is published quarterly by the Australian Cartoonists’ Association

Deadline for next issue is 14th DECEMBER PO Box 5178

SOUTH TURRAMURRA NSW 2074

ABN 19 140 290 841

ISSN 1034-1943

Australia Post Registration PP 533798/0015

As you may have noticed, this issue of Inkspot has been a long time coming. The fact that it’s put together - and largely written by - cartoonists in their “spare time” speaks to the reality of life as a freelancer: you’ve gotta take the work when it comes, and sometimes the other stuff must wait (thanks again for the great job, Steve).

But, boy oh boy, it’s worth the wait! I had to read it cover-to-cover before I could write about it. At a more leisurely pace, this could definitely last me a few lazy weekends. There’s so much in it! Beginning with the gorgeous, retro cover, you know it’s going to be about Ginger Meggs. As you see, he’s turning 100 this month, and we were hoping to celebrate it at the Stanleys conference which would have been on 12-14th November this year. Thanks COVID. Well, don’t be too sad - we’ll raise a glass and share cake (cake!) at the rescheduled Coffs Harbour Stanleys conference in February. Like everyone else this year, we’ve had to practice “adaptive management” and be ready to adjust plans as we go. We expect Jason Chatfield to join us too, in person! And we really want you to see the renewed National Cartoon Gallery which is waiting to host our awards night. Fingers crossed for “2021 in 2022”!

I’ve loved the chance in this issue to study the beautiful line-work of the various Ginger Meggs artists, and be reminded of what captivated me as a child reading the Sunday comics. We’re used to everything being in colour these days, and often digital, but check out the masterful ink monochromes from the artists of old. You’ll read about Emile Mercier too, and Nat Karmichael’s successful crowdfunding project to publish a collection of his work.

Meanwhile I think there’s a lot to be excited about among our current and up-and-coming cartoonists and comics artists, and I have a sense that there’s some renewal in the air (hello, new members!). Our zoom coffee mornings, hosted by David Pope, have been shining a light on the many ways our artists work, and the variety of shapes their careers take. All who attend seem to get a lot out of them, and I think they show that adaptive management is something we’re especially good at. Please enjoy this issue!

Editorial Notes

100 years. Whichever way you slice and dice it, it’s still a magnificent achievement. We certainly acquire wisdom and insight from someone turning 100 (I mean, they were there, right?). Do we still gain as much insight or wisdom from a comic strip character like Ginger Meggs? Given that they are as much a time capsule as any over such a long period, perhaps we do - as much as we have enjoyed the red-headed larrikin’s evolution over time, we also learn about the social conventions and accepted behaviours at each point on his timeline. As artists, we can learn much about the development of drawing techniques, too. It really is fascinating stuff. Putting together this special issue of Inkspot has been an absolute privilege and I only wish there was more room to tell the myriad stories we couldn’t squeeze in.

Of course, there is an abundance of joy to be found in this issue - David Pope’s amazing travel posters, Emile Mercier’s wry observations, Non-Fungible Tokens, the Comic Arts Awards of Australia, everyone’s views on mask-wearing and - most specially - a warm welcome back to Kaz Cooke! And, as we slide towards the festive season, we even have a twisted Christmas story from Bisso. I know I’m not alone in wondering where 2021 went, but I am looking forward to 25th-27th February, 2022, and a trip to Coffs Harbour for our hard-earned Stanley Awards weekend.

Happy birthday, Ginger Meggs!

Love From Lockdownland

Muchly enjoying current issue of Inkspot. Well done. I have long been an admirer of Brian Kogler’s cartoon style and have a number of tear sheets of Thin Ice in my reference folder. Always wondered what happened to him. Now enlightened. Thank you. Bisso from Lockdownland.

Roy Bisson

MARYVILLE NSW

King Kogler

Just received mine, thank you. So great to see the article on one of my favourite cartoonists, Brian Kogler. I met him in the 1990s doing work experience at Fairfax and he not only was one of the nicest guys, he is an amazing cartoonist.

Mark McHugh

AVALON NSW

The Wrong John

Another great issue, mate. Congratulations! I really loved the cover illustration by Buddy Ross. I must pull my friend Peter Foster up on a couple of errors in his (otherwise) interesting article: Air Hawk (two words) was written and drawn by John Dixon (not John Ryan, as stated). You’re forgiven, Peter!

Nat Karmichael

MARGATE QLD

ACA WELCOMES NEW MEMBERS!

The Australian Cartoonists’ Association is proud to welcome aboard these new members, and we look forward to reading about your adventures in Inkspot! Your contributions are always welcome. So, it’s a massive welcome to:

Dave Blumenthal (Victoria)

James Brennan (NSW)

Damian Castellini (Qld)

Maurilio Augusto (NSW)

Megan Herbert (Victoria)

THE

Without

Tobias Krebs (NSW)

Mal Love (WA)

Julie Maurer (Qld)

Philip Norrie (NSW)

Elena Ventura (Qld)

There’s

COMIC

DANIEL

WTF ARE NFTS?

Just when you think you understand this Brave New World - along comes something only DAVID BLUMENSTEIN can explain

HEAVENLY VISTAS

DAVID POPE seems to have almost single-handedly reinvented tourism posters, and they’re wonderful

BISSO’S CHRISTMAS

Roycee

Happy 100th Birthday ginger meggs!

Ginger Meggs is the oldest twelve-year-old in the world. He came to life on 13th November, 1921 and has not aged a day. He owes his existence to Monty Grover who had the idea of the comic strip, Us Fellers, while travelling on a Bondi tram - quite a symbolic birthplace for such a quintessential Australian boy.

Grover was fascinated with comics. He was convinced that local version of The Katzenjammer Kids or The Captain and the Kids would work well in The Sunday Sun’s kids section, Sunbeams He wrote a script for a comic, featuring a small girl, Gladsome Gladys, who would accompany a gang of boys on adventures and extricate them from the various predicaments they got themselves into. The artist chosen to bring Gladys and friends to life was J.C. “Jimmy” Bancks, an artist who had been working for The Bulletin as well as freelancing for The Sun.

Because Grover was moving to Melbourne - to launch The Sun News-Pictorial - he was unable to continue with the scripts. Bancks took on the writing as well as the drawing of the comic.

He quickly became disenchanted with Gladys. Ginger Smith, originally a minor character in the first episode, was elevated to the lead. By December 1921 he had become Ginger Meggs, and his mother made an appearance. Gladsome Gladys had completely disappeared by March, Minnie Peters had appeared, and Us Fellers had moved to the front page of Sunbeams to become a weekly feature. All the changes Bancks had introduced found favour with the readers, and Ginger Meggs soon became the most popular boy in Sydney.

Interestingly, Ginger was given his nickname because there was red ink available to use on his hair; and there has probably not been a redhead in Australia since who has not been called ‘Ginger Meggs’ at some time or other. Bancks gave Ginger a home on the fringes of suburbia, not quite in the city or in the country. The perfect location for a boy to live in, as anything was possible. He was portrayed as existing on a basic diet of ice cream and stolen fruit. Neither would be considered these days to be politically correct. Ginge would be joined in his suburban

Words by LINDSAY FOYLE and STEVE PANOZZO

BELOW: Us Fellers debuts in The Sunday Sun on 13th November, 1921

escapades by not only Minnie Peters, but also his mates Benny and Ocker, and faithful companions Mike the dog and Tony the monkey.

Intentionally or unintentionally, Meggs was the realisation of everything our national image needed to be. That is one of the reasons Ginger has remained popular for a century. He is just a boy who loves cricket, billy carts, fishing and swimming. While never being anything other than Australian, Ginger Meggs has appeared on the pages of newspapers in many countries, and is the fifth-oldest comic strip in the world. Not a bad effort for a twelve-year-old without a first name.

Once Us Fellers became popular - appearing weekly in Sydney and Melbourne - it did not take long before Meggs had competitors. The most successful of these was Fatty Finn, drawn by Syd Nicholls, who came along in 1923 and was enormously successful. Fatty Finn twice made it into major films and probably could have continued being a major feature in newspapers if someone was drawing him today.

In 1924, Sun Newspapers published a collection of the best strips as The Sunbeams Book: Adventures of Ginger Meggs. Enormously successful, it kickstarted a series of Sunbeams annuals that continued until 1959.

By 1929, Us Fellers was being syndicated to New Zealand and eighteen newspapers in North America. Bancks had become Australia’s highest paid artist; some people were saying he ‘was getting more than the Governor’. On 5th November 1939, Us Fellers was renamed Ginger Meggs as part of the revamped Sunday Sun comics section. Bancks had, by now, signed a deal to syndicate the strip throughout America. By the time World War Two broke out, soldiers would be painting Ginger Meggs images on the sides of tanks, trucks and aircraft. For the most part, war made little difference to Ginger Meggs’ narrative, although posters occasionally appeared in the backgrounds promoting war bonds, and twice there was direct appeal for the war effort. Ginger and his mates shot down a Japanese plane on 22nd November 1943 with a skyrocket and General MacArthur appeared on 4th October 1943.

BELOW: Ginger Meggs annuals from 1942, 1944, 1949 and 1950

ABOVE: Jimmy Bancks chats with billy cart drivers in the Ginger Meggs Derby, held at Sydney’s Centennial Park 0n 10th May, 1941. A crowd of 30,000 turned out to see the heats, eventually won by Noel Eddington

RIGHT: Jimmy Bancks hard at work in his home studio, wearing 1948’s equivalent of trackie dacks and T-shirt

Prime Minister John Curtin famously claimed, ‘Ginger Meggs is Australia’s Peter Pan. Most of us can recognise in him our own youth, but unlike him, we had to grow up. Good luck to Ginger and all Australian youth.’ At the end of the war, Dame Mary Gilmore suggested, ‘Australia is still young and daring enough to be Ginger at the peace table—will Dr. Evatt please take note!’ Gilmore had a great affection for Ginger Meggs; in 1942, to celebrate his 21st birthday, she wrote a poem for him:

Battered, beaten, troubled, sore.

Ginger Meggs gets up for more.

“Where’s the paper?” Boy or man. Eagerly his doings scan.

Boy or man? And woman too.

Ginger laddie, here’s to you!

Post-war, Bancks was increasingly pressured to draw a daily version of Ginger Meggs to satisfy the US market, but - wary of such a workload - he declined. Dan Russell was urged by Arthur J. LaFave, Bancks’ American agent, to draw the dailies to Bancks’ scripts. From time to time, Russell did draw Ginger, if only for books and some advertising projects. He even said, ‘on one occasion I drew the comic for two weeks when Bancks was unable to do it’. While the daily strip did not eventuate, the weekly strips continued to be syndicated. Ginger Meggs was being read in newspapers in London, Boston, Dallas, New York and St. Louis. It was also being translated into French and Spanish. Bancks said, ‘It has been a special pleasure to see him (Ginger) published in London and New York and other cities, and to see him printed in a foreign language.’

On 3rd June 1951, following a contractual dispute and a resulting court case, Ginger Meggs moved from The Sunday Sun to Frank Packer’s The Sunday Telegraph. A staggering 80,000 loyal readers followed Ginger in the move, which more than justified Bancks’ eye-watering £10,000 per year salary. Two years later, The Sunday Sun was merged with Fairfax’s The Sunday Herald to form The Sun-Herald, a demise many believe was triggered by the departure of Ginger Meggs. Character-driven, the comic has always appealed to its young and adult readers as much for its narrative bent and comic wit as for its illustrations. It has also been persistently tuned to the events, preoccupations and tone of its time, capturing a distinctly Australian spirit and vernacular.

Passing the Torch

Bancks died suddenly on 1st July 1952, leaving an unfinished strip on his desk. He did not wish Ginger Meggs to die with him, and is on record as saying, ‘Creators come and go but their characters live on... When I pass on I hope the character I have created in Ginger will live long beyond me’.

Packer had only recently got his hands on Ginger Meggs, so he had no wish to lose such a valuable asset. He came to an agreement with Bancks’ widow, Patricia, to continue publishing Ginge’s adventures with new artists creating the strip. Bancks was almost a year ahead with Ginger Meggs, so the search for a new artist needn’t be rushed. Eventually, the pen was taken up by Ron Vivian, a staff artist with Packer’s Consolidated Press. One of Vivian’s more visible talents was mimicry. Jim Russell said, ‘Ron had his own style and was a very good artist in his

ABOVE: Bancks’ unfinished Ginger Meggs strip (1952)

Lloyd Piper at his drawing board in 1981

A portrait of Bancks by Bill Pidgeon (“WEP”) (1952)

own right, but he could mimic other people’s work. He once did a drawing in my style and I couldn’t tell it from my own work.’

After drawing Ginger Meggs for 21 years, and prevented from signing his own name to the comic strip he had come to call his own, Vivian decided to take long service leave and enjoy his first proper holiday. While on leave, on 5th May 1973, he died following a heart attack.

Lloyd Piper became the third artist to draw Ginge after submissions from Dan Russell, Ken Emerson and Stewart McCrae were turned down. Like Vivian, Piper was not allowed to put his name to Ginger Meggs. Later he would approach the Bancks family to see if he could, and was allowed to put his initials in the bottom right-hand panel. Later on, he was permitted to sign his name - the first artist other than Bancks to do so.

While Piper was focusing on the comic strip, well-known journalist Bill Peach wrote two books: Ginger Meggs Summer Lightning (1975) and Ginger Meggs Meets the Test (1976), both illustrated by Dan Russell.

In 1977, upon the passing of Syd Nicholls, his family decided against hiring another artist to continue Fatty Finn. Meanwhile, the Bancks family wasn’t happy with the way The Sunday Telegraph was treating Ginger Meggs. With a Fatty Finn-sized hole in The Sun-Herald to be filled, an agreement was reached and Ginger “returned home” on 27th August, 1978.

While Meggs was getting up to his usual scrapes at The Sun-Herald, his artist remained unsettled. Piper had not been approached nor consulted for the 1982 feature film, Ginger Meggs, and his wage for producing the strip had stagnated. Planning to escape suburban Sydney to simplify his life, he had started building a new home near Port Macquarie. On an inspection trip in 1983, he was killed instantly in a car accident just outside Nabiac, New South Wales. The Sun-Herald saw submissions from several artists, deciding to offer the job to Ken Emerson, who was then drawing two strips already for the paper: The Warrumbunglers and On the Rocks

‘Ken’s artwork was by far the best, it was superbly drawn,’ recalled The Sun-Herald’s editor, Peter Allen. ‘The problem with

Ken was that he already had two strips in the paper. We couldn’t have three of his strips in The Sun-Herald; he would have to drop at least one of them. As Emerson was reluctant to do that it basically ruled him out.’

Pat Bancks suggested James Kemsley, a friend of her son-in-law and Ginger Meggs film director, Michael Latimer. Latimer had been advocating Kemsley as a replacement artist, feeling that he understood the character. Kemsley had spent time as an actor on Australian television, before moving to London and working for Top Deck Travel as a guide. At the time, he was eagerly submitting cartoons to various magazines with little luck. In 1981, Latimer offered Kemsley a job on the Ginger Meggs movie as a drama coach.

‘One night, when I was sitting down drawing, some of the kids asked me if I could draw Ginger Meggs,’ said Kemsley. ‘I was surrounded by images of Ginger, so I did this drawing. The kids then took it off and gave it to Latimer as a present and we all forgot about it.’

On 18th March 1984, James Kemsley’s first Ginger Meggs strip appeared in The Sun-Herald, almost six months after the death of Lloyd Piper. Once Kemsley had taken on the job of drawing Ginger, he set about moving the strip into the present, together with new clothes and new friends; Jugears Jonson was one and another was Aggie Hopkins. He also incorporated people he knew into the comic. Many of the changes did not please the purists, but Meggs was soon enjoying a level of popularity he had not enjoyed for years. In July 1985, Australia Post released a set of stamps under the banner Australiana: Classic Children’s Books. Five 33c stamps were released in the set: Elves & Fairies, The Magic Pudding, Blinky Bill, Snugglepot & Cuddlepie and Ginger Meggs. Additionally, Kemsley released five variant First Day Covers, each of which were numbered in a limited edition.

In 1993, Kemsley did what Bancks had never achieved: a daily version of Ginger Meggs. Kemsley was also actively selling the strip at home and abroad; the smaller daily strip held more appeal. Soon Ginger Meggs began appearing in a multitude of Australian papers and in October 1997, The Express in London began running the strip, making it the first Australian daily comic strip to run in a British national daily paper.

James Kemsley pictured in the mid-1980s LEFT: The 33c Classic Children’s Books stamp from 1985

In 2000, Kemsley signed up with Atlantic Syndication. Ginger Meggs was soon being seen in over 120 newspapers in some 34 countries. Kemsley also found time to author no less than seven Ginger Meggs novels and strip compilations, beginning with Ginger Meggs at Large in 1985. Kemsley also wrote and illustrated the hugely successful instructional guide, The Cartoon Book (1991), proving so successful that Scholastic commissioned a second volume, called The Cartoon Book 2 (1999). In 2001, he was awarded the Gold Stanley Award for Cartoonist of the Year, acknowledging the ground-breaking impact of the daily version of Ginger Meggs. It remains to this day Australia’s most widely-syndicated comic strip.

In May 2005, the daily strip was dropped by the Sydney Morning Herald to make way for a new Japanese number puzzle sweeping the world, called Sudoku. Kemsley was approached to place the daily strip in the Daily Telegraph, part of a larger push for News Limited to secure the Sunday strip from The Sun-Herald. While Kemsley refused to upset the apple cart with the Sunday strip, he agreed to run the daily in the Daily Telegraph.

By 2006, Kemsley was suffering recurring speech problems, but diagnosis was proving problematic. One doctor suspected motor-neurone disease, which turned out to be prophetic. As Kemsley’s speech was slowly robbed from him over the following year, his mobility, too, began to suffer. Remarkably, his right arm - his precious drawing hand - seemed unaffected and he was still able to create Ginger Meggs using the computer right up to his last days. Several fellow cartoonists wrote scripts for Ginger Meggs to assist Kemsley, who was struggling with the demands of the strip. One of them was Perth-based Jason Chatfield; impressed with Chatfield’s offerings, Kemsley offered him the job of taking over the strip. Upon his return home from hospital, Kemsley informed Michael and Sheena Latimer of his decision. Since Pat Bancks’ death in 2001, Sheena now represented the Bancks estate and was happy to him to choose a successor.

James Kemsley died on 3rd December, 2007, after a sustained battle with motor neurone-disease. He was only 59. On 8th June 2008, Kemsley was posthumously awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia ‘for service to the community as a cartoonist and illustrator of the Ginger Meggs comic strip, through local government roles, and through the Bradman Foundation’. His wife Helen and their sons travelled from Bowral for the investiture at NSW Government House.

23-year-old Jason Chatfield had been a fan of Ginger Meggs since he was eight years old, after he had read his first book, which happened to be Kemsley’s Ginger Meggs at Large. He had

been contributing editorial cartoons to The Perth Voice since 2004. With a little urging, submitted work to The Australian’s Bill Mitchell Award in 2005, easily winning a trophy and $2,000 prizemoney. His first Ginger Meggs strip appeared on 20th January, 2008. He had been drawing Ginger Meggs for just five months when Sheena Latimer died in 2008, followed by Michael Latimer in 2011. Since then, their daughter Miranda has represented the Bancks estate.

In 2011, the Perth Mint released a 90th Anniversary 2011 1oz. Silver Proof Coin, in an edition limited to a circulation of 3,000. They quickly sold out. The training wheels off, Chatfield was now feeling confident enough in the role to begin making subtle changes to the character. In modelling his version of Ginger, Chatfield gave Meggs red shorts and switched his shoes to red, as they were with Bancks. Chatfield reasoned: ‘I want to differentiate him as much as possible from the American characters like Bart Simpson to ensure he is uniquely Australian, and keep his traditional themes.’

Chatfield moved to New York City in 2014. Stunning advances in technology meant that he could chase his dream to pursue a career in stand-up comedy while still producing and delivering the strip. In 2015, the Museum of Sydney staged a retrospective Ginger Meggs exhibition which ran from 25th July until 8th November. It had now been 94 years since Ginger Meggs and his band of mates and rivals first featured in a Sydney newspaper. Chatfield worked doggedly to ensure that Ginger had a future in the burgeoning digital media landscape. By this time, he was writing a blog, publishing Ginger Meggs online and had launched ‘iMeggsy’, an app where - instead of reading across a page - a new generation of fans could simply scroll down.

‘This generation is not going to know anything but phones and the internet,’ Chatfield said. ‘We’ve got this entire new audience who thinks it is a brand new web comic. They have no idea it is a 94-year-old comic strip.’

In 2019, Chatfield introduced three new characters to make the strip more reflective of contemporary Australia: Rahul Jayasinha, part-Indian, part-Sri Lankan who - like Meggs - loves cricket, Gloria Tudehope, a young Aboriginal girl who loves nothing more than slipping on her running shoes and Penny Chieng, a whip-smart Malaysian Australian girl who gives Fitzzy a run for his money in all things academic.

On Sunday 14 June 2020, Ginger Meggs failed to appear in The Sun-Herald, which caught everyone by surprise. Even Chatfield. He had been supplying the paper with Ginger Meggs comic strips for 13 years and nobody at the paper had even suggested

something like this might happen. Sydney talkback radio and breakfast television shows were inundated with complaints. Instead of Ginge, readers were greeted with Bushy Tales, drawn by Ian Jones, which was being given a four-week ‘trial run’ in its place without any prior notice to Chatfield; he did not hear from Cosima Marriner, the editor of the paper - or anyone else at The Sun-Herald - until well after the ‘trial’ had begun. She eventually sent an email to Chatfield, which said in part, ‘We didn’t run Ginger Meggs on the weekend as part of a small trial on our comics page. We are reviewing the costs associated with our cartoons, as we seek to make savings across the business.’ She added, ‘We would like to keep Ginger Meggs in his hero slot on our comics page. Would there be an opportunity to renegotiate the cost of the strip?’

It was a strange way of doing business: starting discussions after the event. But it was not the first time Meggs had been the victim of an editor’s whim. After not appearing for two weeks, readers of The Sun-Herald were told Ginger’s absence was caused by a ‘production mishap’ - which was rectified in time for Meggs to make a reappearance the following week. Even better, Bushy Tales was retained and replaced one of the older, irrelevant syndicated legacy strips from America.

In May 2021, a new Ginger Meggs book was released in advance of the strip’s centenary, written by children’s author (and former actor) Tristan Bancks, who said, ‘I feel as though I’ve been working towards writing this book since I was six or seven years old and started reading Ginger Meggs. When I began writing the characters, I felt as though they were in my DNA.’ This isn’t very surprising, since his great great granduncle was Jimmy Bancks! Jason Chatfield supplied 104 drawings to accompany Bancks’ 20,000 words, and he is justifiably proud of the end result. The book was launched at the 2021 Sydney Writers’ Festival, with Chatfield appearing onscreen from New York City.

In June 2021, the Royal Australian Mint released a set of $1 coins to commemorate Ginger Meggs 100th birthday. The dollars were produced in two limited-edition coloured coin sets - one aluminum, one ½ oz. silver. The silver set was limited to 5,000 and came with a certificate of authenticity and feature artwork from Bancks and Chatfield. September saw the release of a new commemorative stamp set by Australia Post, with three designs featuring Ginger Meggs as drawn by Bancks, Kemsley and Chatfield, as well as a range of collectibles,

including First Day Covers, Postal Numismatic Covers and a special edition of the new Ginger Meggs book.

Unable to return to Australia for the 100th anniversary date of 13th November due to concerns over the Covid-19 Delta strain, Chatfield accepted the offer of a mid-afternoon celebration, hosted by the Australian Consulate-General in New York City, which included a “fireside chat” between himself and comedian Ronny Chieng

‘We didn’t want to do a late night event with stuffy dignitaries and diplomats and bow ties,’ Chatfield said. ‘More of a future focused and youth-oriented event with a reading of the book.’

Chatfield acknowledged that the survival of Ginger Meggs in the 21st Century has been a battle, even with downloads, blogs and apps.

‘It has certainly been an eventful 14 years,’ he reflected. ‘And a huge challenge to keep a newspaper comic strip alive in the face of ridiculous odds.’

One thing is clear - the reading public still has great affection for Ginger Meggs and all that he represents. That he has been around for a century is no accident - he is as much a reflection of our current world as he is a throwback to a simpler, more innocent time. As long as there is fishing, cricket, good friends and wagging school, there will be Ginger Meggs.

Jason Chatfield looks forward to finally celebrating Ginger Meggs’ delayed 100th birthday with us all at the Stanley Awards and Conference, Coffs Harbour on 25th-27th February, 2022.

Australia Post minisheet, featuring the three $1.10 stamps with art by Bancks, Kemsley and Chatfield

Jason Chatfield: his eyebrows still work independently

Ron Vivian

Upon the sudden death of Jimmy Bancks in 1952, Ron Vivian was selected to assume the mantle of Ginger Meggs’ guardian.

A Fine Artist and a Gentleman

Ronald Charles Vivian was born in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs on 19th February, 1914. His mother was Vida Vivian and his father was Charles C. Vivian, who was a pioneer in the advertising world in Sydney. The Vivians were descended from King Edward 1 of England and lived in Cornwall in either of two stately homes - Pendarves or Trelowarren. One of their descendants came to Australia as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Marines in the Second Fleet to Sydney. They lived in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney and Ron’s Grandfather was the Town Clerk of Woollahra, living in what is now the Goethe Institute. Vivian Street, Bellevue Hill, was named after him.

Charles Vivian was responsible for introducing proper window displays of merchandise in department stores such as David Jones. He organized the first Miss Australia pageant, which was a true beauty contest in swimsuits held at Coogee Beach in 1926, which was won by Beryl Mills. In 1927, Charles was working for the advertising company, George A. Bond and Co.

Ltd., who organized and promoted the first commercial flight around Australia to investigate the possibilities of commercial aviation in Australia. Departing from Sydney on Saturday 25th June, 1927, the trip took 14 days to complete and covered 7,798 miles. The average air speed was 90 miles per hour and the plane was in the air for 87.5 hours. Charles was the photographer for the flight and later recorded the journey in the book Australia from the Air. The pilot was the young Australia aviation pioneer Keith Anderson and the mechanic was H.S. ‘Bob’ Hitchcock; in 1929, both these men would die from thirst after their plane, called the Kookaburra, was forced to land in a remote part of the Northern Territory while they were looking for their lost airman mate, Charles Kingsford-Smith. Smithy had been reported missing after he made a forced landing of his famous plane, the Southern Cross, in a remote part of Western Australia. Having grown up in a world of advertising and artists, it is no surprise that Ron would later become a cartoonist due to these influences.

On the occasion of the strip’s centenary, Vivian’s son-in-law, Dr. Philip Norrie, brings us the story of the hidden genius behind Ginger’s second lease on life

LEFT TO RIGHT: Bob Hitchcock, Charles Vivian and Keith Anderson prior to their 1927 flight around Australia

Vida Vivian was part of the Wooten family who lived a comfortable life in Centennial Park, Sydney. Ron lived in Hunters Hill, then Longueville and went to primary school in Chatswood, later attending the private high school called Sydney Church of England Boys School – commonly known as ‘Shore’. After leaving school, Ron studied at at East Sydney Technical College at the old Darlinghurst Gaol, which is now the National Art School, graduating in the late 1930s.

After graduating from East Sydney Technical College Art School, Ron worked as a cartoonist for the Daily News, and became the youngest cartoonist in Australia to have his own comic strip, called Jim Gale (above); it was named after the lead character and set in outback Australia and Papua New Guinea – the nearest exotic place to Australia. Promoted as an “all-Australian strip”, it was published in the Daily News from December 1938 until May 1939.The characters were Jim Gale, ex-RAF pilot, his fiancée Silvia, geologist Professor Wilton (who is also Silvia’s father) and Eddie Jackson, a bushman and prospector. Sadly, the Daily News struggled financially and in 1940 it was sold to Frank Packer’s Consolidated Press. As a result, by the beginning of World War Two, Ron was working as a cartoonist at the Daily Telegraph. Because the press was a reserved occupation, Ron was not allowed to join up and fight. During this time he drew a war-related cartoon called Winnie the War Winner, which appeared weekly on a page full of letters from servicemen in the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine (originally called “No Man’s Land”, but later called “Letters from our Boys”).

Winnie was originally created and drawn by Estonian painter and cartoonist Hardtmuth “Hottie” Lahm in 1940. Ron had befriended Hottie when he came to Australia and helped him to learn how to speak English. Hottie had also created another World War Two comic strip called Snifter about a little dog which spent the war finding which new person or thing he could ‘pee’ on, so, in 1941, Ron took over drawing Winnie for Hottie.

For a time, Ron lived a semi-Bohemian lifestyle on the fringe of Sydney’s Kings Cross, working as a society portrait painter. During this time he made friends with not only “Hottie” Lahm (who died in 1981), but also New Zealand painter Trevor Nixon, Australian painter and cartoonist William Edwin Pidgeon - also known as “WEP” - and associated with actor Peter Finch, before he became a famous film star.

In 1941, Ron also drew Private Willie in the Australian Women’s Weekly for a column called “Dear Mother – being the unique dispatches home of Private Willie, a young army recruit”. The column was written by Douglas Compton-James and Ron drew the accompanying cartoon of Private Willie in a humorous situation.

Winnie the War Winner was the typical ‘dumb blonde’ who made fun of the military in her own silly way. Today’s women may object to women being portrayed this way, but back in 1940 and 1941, at the beginning of the war when things were

A selection of Winnie the War Winner panels, with examples of both original art and print versions

going very badly for the British forces, people wanted to laugh and escape the constant bad news. To be fair, there were also cartoons portraying men doing stupid things, such as Willie and Joe, Sad Sack and Private SNAFU in America; The Two Types in Britain; Fred Clueless in New Zealand; Herbie in Canada and Bluey and Curley and Wally and the Major in Australia, so it was not all one-way against women; men were portrayed as being stupid as well in many more cartoon strips than women.

The Winnie the War Winner Radio

In 1942 Australia sent a large number of commandos, called Sparrow Force, to fight the Japanese in Timor. Most of these men were either killed in combat or taken prisoner, but a small force escaped capture and continued to fight a guerilla-style war against the Japanese. Their main problem was a lack of communication with the outside world, as they were cut off with no radio. They wanted to contact North Force HQ in Darwin and tell them that they existed, that they wanted to continue to fight and that they needed supplies urgently. To solve this problem, signalman Joe Loveless - who worked in radio before the war - cobbled together a radio in order to contact Darwin. This radio was called “Winnie the War Winner” after Ron’s cartoon character as everyone would have seen her cartoons in the very popular Australian Women’s Weekly

When the remains of Sparrow Force did eventually contact Darwin, they asked for the four most vital supplies they needed: boots, money, quinine to fight malaria and ammunition. Thus the “Winnie the War Winner” radio has become part of the Australian army legend and has become a national icon and symbol of bravery and resilience. It is now on permanent display in the Australian War Memorial, however the name is credited to Winston Churchill. In 2017, I pointed out this mistake to the Australian War Memorial and their historian has agreed with my explanation for the origin of the name. I received an email from Dr Brendon Nelson, the Director of the Australian War Memorial at the time, saying :

“The Memorial’s Head of Military Heraldry and Technology Mr Nick Fletcher advices that a name as specific as “Winnie the War Winner” is unlikely to have been used twice by coincidence. The main records left by veterans of Sparrow Force in Timor refer to Winnie frequently, however there is no specific explanation for the name. Very possibly, it was considered so obvious to Australians of that period as to require no further comment. Equally, by the 1990s, curators (without studying the Australian Women’s Weekly from the 1940s) would naturally have assumed that any Second World War reference to a ‘Winnie’ had to relate to Winston Churchill. Mr Fletcher agrees with your conclusions, and as such we have amended the database record here at the Memorial for the radio accordingly.”

The Theatre of War

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th December, 1941, with Japan coming into the war and directly threatening Australia, everyone was allowed to join up, which Ron did. He joined the RAAF on 20th January, 1942 and became a Leading Aircraftman. He ended up in Papua New Guinea with Number 4 Squadron, from 2nd November, 1942 until 24th January, 1944, servicing and arming the planes at Berry Airfield, which was 12 miles from Port Moresby; hence it was also known as “12 Mile Drome”. Berry Airfield was part of the larger Port Moresby Airfield Complex, consisting of eight airfields, variously three to thirty miles from Port Moresby, which not only protected the Papua New Guinea Campaign HQ and vital supply-line port of Port Moresby, but also provided a powerful spread-out base for planes to attack the Japanese in the rest of Papua New Guinea.

Ron had spent a total of 15 months straight in a combat zone without leave. Normally, servicemen would have been rotated several times during

Ron drawing Jim Gale prior to WW2

ABOVE: Cover artwork for the 1955 Ginger Meggs Annual, both in draft form and finished BELOW: The three Little Golden Books written and illustrated by Ron Vivian

ABOVE: In 1954, publisher Frank Packer had Ginger Meggs selling Bunnykins-style chinaware

this time, but somehow Ron had been forgotten. Once the RAAF realised their mistake, he was sent home for some well-earned leave. The RAAF also realized that Ron was an artist, so he spent the rest of the war at RAAF HQ in Melbourne doing all their promotional artwork, which included doing paintings of RAAF planes in combat, illustrating RAAF training manuals and illustrating the RAAF ‘Demob’ brochure at the end of the war.

After the war, Ron became the political cartoonist for the Daily Telegraph until he took over drawing Ginger Meggs. During this time he received many threats from trade unionists and others who felt offended by his political cartoons.

The Red-Headed Larrikin

When Bancks died unexpectedly of a heart attack on 1st July, 1952 at his home in Point Piper, Sydney, there was no heir apparent to take over drawing Ginger Meggs - Bancks was not supposed to die so young. So a competition was arranged between Australia’s leading cartoonists by Frank Packer, the head of Consolidated Press (which owned The Sunday Telegraph), to find out who could draw Ginger the best and thus take over the comic strip. Ron won that competition and drew Ginger until his untimely death. Thus, the rivalry between Ginger Meggs in The Sunday Telegraph and Sid Nicholls’ (1896–1977) Fatty Finn in The Sun-Herald could continue.

Whilst he was drawing Ginger Meggs, Ron was not allowed to put his name to the strip because the powers-that-be at The Sunday Telegraph wanted the cartoon to always be associated with Bancks and not some new person. So Ron had to attribute “Created by Bancks” to each strip that he wrote and drew, thereby becoming the phantom, the ‘unsung hero’ and ‘nonperson’ of Australian cartooning. Or, as Ron’s great friend and fellow cartoonist Alex King stated in Richard Rae’s Cartoonists of Australia (1983), “he [Ron] also accepted his own passport to professional obscurity.” Because of this “living in the shadow” of Bancks, Ron unfortunately never received the recognition that he deserved for his great cartooning skills.

During this period of working on Ginger Meggs, Ron also wrote the stories and drew the illustrations for three Little Golden Books about Ginger, but his name did not appear on the books. The three books were Ginger Meggs and Herbert the Billy Goat, Ginger Meggs and the Country Cousin and finally Ginger Meggs’

Meggs children’s pottery that Frank Packer promoted; similar to the Royal Doulton Bunnykins nurseryware series.

Besides being a wonderful cartoonist in his own right, Ron was also a great mimicker of other cartoonists; hence he was able to superbly copy Hottie Lahm’s Winnie the War Winner and Jimmy Bancks’ Ginger Meggs. Hopefully this thesis will go partway to rectifying this deficiency about Ron Vivian in Australia’s cartooning history.

After the war, Ron lived on a large property in Mona Vale, on Sydney’s northern beaches, that he had bought for his mother during World War Two. His main loves were his wife, Valmai, his children Belinda (my wife) and Virginia, his 1946 black

Ron Vivian hard at work on Ginger Meggs

MG-TC and the Tahitian ketch that he built in the 1960s, called Leilani, which he sailed on Pittwater with his family.

Alex King wrote that Ron was, “always affable and congenial, concealing his own problems, but deeply concerned for those of others. Nothing was a trouble to him if he could help in any way, and (had) a kind word for everyone. Unassuming and extremely modest about his craftsmanship and outstanding ability... but an inspiration to all who knew him and remember him as a fine artist and a gentleman.”

Ron suffered from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) from serving in Papua New Guinea for so long without a break.

Hence he could not go to the movies, for example, because he could not tolerate being confined in a dark room. He also knocked back an offer from Walt Disney to go to California and work for him, a privilege offered to very few cartoonists, because he could not fly in a confined plane or leave Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The only place Ron went to for a break, and to be at peace, was sailing his beloved yacht Leilani

Unfortunately Ron died far too young, at the age of 59, from a heart attack on 5th September, 1973, having drawn Ginger Meggs - anonymously - for 20 years. So ended the life of arguably Australia’s most diverse cartoonist.

Exclusive Preview!

WORDS BY NAT KARMICHAEL

It’s difficult in these modern times to recall a simpler, less-complicated time for people that live in Australia’s most populated city, Sydney. The running rampant COVID-19 virus seems to have stripped the humorous heart out of Sydneysiders, and indeed the country. People, everywhere, are increasingly anxious and fearful of the future.

Perhaps it’s time to look back at a gentler time, when there was a different sense of community and humour in the everyday. Cartoonist Emile Mercier was able to find such joy and shared it daily

with his cartoons in the Sydney newspaper The Sun from 1949 to 1968. There were no politics in his drawings, rather he highlighted the everyday places and people that are the soul of a city - the drunks, the privileged, the housewives, the alleys, the buildings, the sporting events and more. He also captured an inner-city Sydney now long-gone, with the terraced-houses, backyards, cafes and pubs.

Mercier was well-qualified to comment on the humour he saw in the city. He came as an outsider, from New Caledonia,

where he was born in 1901. His father threatened to cut him out of the family fortune if he abandoned his heritage. Emile remained determined; he wanted to carve out his own future when he arrived in 1919.

And he did. Mercier worked in a variety of occupations including being a spruiker at the Royal Easter Show, a deck hand, an office boy and many others, before he was encouraged to become a full-time freelance cartoonist. His cartoons and comic books reflected his love of people, and what he saw as

the strangeness of the Australian way of life.

Yet it was his “Gallic naughtiness” that endeared him to his middle-class readers - they felt he captured their streets and their homes, always with a humour that steered far from politics. After twenty years as the newspaper’s daily cartoonist, Mercier retired in 1968. He passed away in 1981, leaving behind a collection of his works and a cartooning legacy that continues to be recalled by many devotees to the craft.

For many years after Emile’s death, his son Michael had pondered what to do with almost 2,000 of his father’s original artworks. In 2018, he decided to donate them to the National Cartoon Gallery in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. The Gallery holds the largest collection of original cartoons in the southern hemisphere and seemed a fit and proper place to house them.

However, given Mercier had chronicled the everyday Sydneysider, it seemed a travesty to just to store them and leave them unseen. In these grim times, the world - and, especially, Sydney - is again in need of his humour to lift the spirits of people.

Member of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association and comic book publisher Nat Karmichael was entrusted by the Gallery to bring some precious gems from the Mercier collection into the light. Enlisting the support of a small

group of cartoonists, academics, and some everyday Australians, Nat and his team selected many cartoons for publication.

The result is a book, soon to be released, called Emile Mercier: A Selection of Cartoons. Karmichael launched a short crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter to raise funds for the project, which attracted 133 backers and broke the funding goal in the final 24 hours.

In a deliberate design choice, Mercier’s cartoons are presented in their “raw”, as-drawn state, complete with mark-up, scaling and caption instructions. Alongside is each cartoon as it would have appeared in print.

“My sincere thanks to all who supported

this project,” said a relieved Karmichael. “You really don’t know how thrilled I am!”

Emile Mercier: A Selection of Cartoons (ISBN 9780994362339) includes a short biography by the ACA’s official historian Lindsay Foyle, an introduction by Michael Mercier and never-before-seen personal family photos of Emile. Limited copies will be available from the National Cartoon Gallery or at all good bookstores. The book will be distributed nationally by Novella Distribution.

Nat Karmichael comicoz@live.com.au

Versatility is the Key for Marnie

Inertia Equates to Momentum for Bushy Tales

Western Australia’s Marnie Giroud (above), like most freelancers, has made wearing various hats at once an art form. Juggling illustration, cartooning, teaching and environmental crusading, she is a regular on two Perth-based TV shows: variety show The Couch, where she presents a segment called “Wild Things”, and home-based ideas show, Home in WA!

The Couch airs on Access 31 and (and on its webpage) then nationally on Foxtel Aurora Channel 173 on Sunday nights at 7.30pm.

I’m Not Lazy!: I’m Just Into Voluntary Inertia (ISBN 9780645275506) is the second book collection of the popular Bushy Tales comic strip by that plucky young Queenslander, Ian Jones (above). His first collection, Wombat Words of Wisdom and Other Oxymorons, was published in 2018. Bushy Tales is now published in more than twenty papers around Australia as well as a handful of papers in the US.

I’m Not Lazy! is 96 full-colour pages of predominantly Sunday strips from over the past ten years, as well as several pages of daily strips and other features, displaying the usual high standard of penmanship and witty wordplay that readers have come to expect from Bushy Tales. The book is available now for the not-unaffordable price of $17.95 (plus p/h) at: www.bushytales.com/gift-shop

Maggie Calendar Keeps Your Laughs on Schedule While Helping Food Bank

Phil Day’s mother had a good idea earlier in the year: namely, that Phil should produce a Maggie Cartoon Calendar for 2022, with the proceeds to support Tracey’s Pantry, a food bank based in his home town of Beaudesert, Queensland. The food bank was named after his sister Tracey, who passed away a couple of years ago from cancer. She was a very caring and giving person so the food bank was named in her honour.

“The calendars are back from the printers and we couldn’t be happier with the end product,” said Phil, who reports that they are now available at $10 each, plus postage.

NSW Arts Minister, Don Harwin, has unveiled the State’s first Blue Plaque for places of historic significance at Nutcote, the home of May Gibbs. Gibbs is considered to be Australia’s first professional female cartoonist who was inducted into the Australian Cartoonists Hall of Fame in 2011; her comic strip, Bib & Bub, celebrates its centenary in 2024.

“I used to do calendars many years ago, back in the late 80s and early 90s, and they were always popular.” Those keen to get their hands on one - and at the same time helping a very worthy cause can send Phil a message through his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/PhilDayCartoons

Strewth! Are You Ready for Aussie Comic Book Day?

Inspired by Free Comic Book Day, Batman Day and Spider-Man Day, Dean Rankine has come up with a day focussing on Australian Comic Books and their Creators. Saturday, 20th November (the third Saturday in November) has been designated the inaugural Aussie Comic Book Day.

“Fiercely independent, Australian comics creators have a long history of just getting their ink-covered hands dirty and making the stories they want to create,” Rankine says. “And not waiting for permission from anyone!

“That same spirit is going into Aussie Comic Book Day. Creators don’t need permission to be a part of it. All that’s required is a willingness to do so.”

Rankine suggests that cartoonists choose that day to perhaps launch a comic title, exhibit their work, offer a discount on their comics, or even write a review of a favourite Australian comic book. The main thing is to get involved and initiate a dialogue that discusses and promotes Australian talent.

From Dad Jokes on Kids’ Lunches to Success!

For Dave Blumenthal (right), what started out as a simple ideacarving little shapes into his eldest daughter’s school sandwiches - has manifested into a burgeoning collection of drawings and witty puns on brown lunch bags, with a growing band of followers on social media and a recent exhibition at the National Cartoon Gallery in Coffs Harbour.

Having amassed a collection of thousands of drawings, Dave has compiled the best of the bunch and put them into a new book, The Cartoon Chronicles of Sandwich Bag Dad, with 15% of profits going to the Leukemia Foundation.

Amusing, beautifully detailed, and whimsical, Dave’s art has become a joyous visual essay of his kids’ school lunch journeys and continues to delight a growing, worldwide community of dad joke aficionados.

The Cartoon Chronicles of Sandwich Bag Dad (ISBN 9780645204247) sells for $34.95 (including postage) and is available at:

www.sandwichbagdad.com/book

MOVING HOUSE? JUST MOVED?

Then update your address with us - we’d really hate it if you missed the next Inkspot! Get in touch with the ACA’s Membership Secretary today… it’s easy: secretary@cartoonists.org.au

Get Shirt-Changed for a Good Cause

When ABC Radio Sydney Afternoons host James Valentine posed the question, “if you could sum up this lockdown in one sketch or design, what would it look like?”, Sydney responded.

Listeners to Afternoons were encouraged to come up with a design and enter a competition where their ideas could be selected and printed on a T-shirt with proceeds from the sale to go to charity.

Matthew Martin decided to throw his hat into the ring.

“The fish in the mask in the bowl is just something a little bit absurd,” he said. “But hopefully it will make people smile, and hopefully people would like to wear it on a T-shirt and then the funds can go to that good cause.”

With each shirt sold, $12.50 will go to Community Care Kitchen, a grassroots charity dedicated to eradicating food insecurity. To purchase a T-shirt to assist Community Care Kitchen, head to: https://abcsydney.secure-decoration.com

Judy Horacek’s new collaboration with Booktopia, The Story of Growl (ISBN 9781922598097) was released on 9th November.

The 32-page book tells the story of a little monster who loves to growl. However, her neighbours stop her doing the thing she loves the most. It’s a book about emotions, community, neighbours, doing what you love, but also being considerate of others. It’s aimed at ages 3-5 (though there’s plenty to love about Judy’s work for all of us).

With a RRP of $16.99, The Story of Growl is available for pre-order at: www.booktopia.com.au

All the Way With MBJ in 3D

Matt Bissett-Johnson has racked up quite a bunch of awards for his short films over the last few months. His 2D film, By Rocket to Oblivion, was recently a finalist in the Swedish International Film Festival, while his 3D film, The Penguin, managed to do much better than expected.

“It won Best Animation in the Tokyo Shorts and Redwood Film Festival and was also a finalist in the Toronto Independent Film Festival of Cift, Beyond the Curve International Film Festival, and the 4th Dimension Independent Film Festival, “ Matt said. The Penguin was also a semi-finalist for the Berlin Shorts Award. In October, it won a Special Award for Best Animation from the bi-monthly Only The Best Film Festival in Miami and won Best Animation at the Los Angeles Motion Picture Festival.

“I was very stoked,” Matt said. “This is the third time I’ve won in the LAMPF, four if you include a silver for one of them.”

The story of The Penguin is about a hapless dude who thinks he’s going to get a free penguin. It was an experiment in 3D character animation... clearly a successful one!

Thorby’s

beard! John

by loki’s

To tell the story behind this drawing of Torkan, I’ll need to go into a bit of cartoon history. I can’t be sure of the year, but while I was Art Director at News Limited, Roger Fletcher would drop in each week, bringing his original Torkan and Staria strips into the office to be submitted for publication. This particular week, he arrived with three original Torkan strips for publication in the Sunday Telegraph comics lift-out. He and Marie were about to head off on a 3-week overseas trip to test the syndication market.

For the Sunday comics section, the originals would be sent from the Features Department to the Art Department to be assembled on or around Thursdays. The week after Roger had flown out, the strips arrived as usual and were published on Sunday as usual.

However, disaster struck!

Features had the Torkan strips out of order. Part 2 of the storyline had been published before Part 1, and on the upcoming Sunday they wanted to publish the third instalment; this would leave the third Sunday without a Torkan strip.

My early years as a cadet artist at K.G. Murray Publishing Company meant I was one of several who had to expand and adapt the American DC comics into the Aussie-sized publishing format. The lazy ones would just add to each end of the panel with new drawing, which often didn’t match; I would cut and expand the panels so there would be no joins.

I decided to do the same with Torkan: combine Part 1 (that had not been published) and Part 2 (that had been published the previous week), adding some of the past with the some of the future and finishing with a panel that would join up with Part 3 the following week, putting the strip back on schedule. Roger was the only one who picked it. There was no new drawing, just a deft re-arrangement so it all still made sense. Torkan’s third instalment was published just as intended: on week three. The following week, this piece of original Torkan art (left) arrived on my desk.

Thank you Roger!

John Thorby

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thanks to everyone for your amazing contributions!

NEXT ISSUE: Submarines!

Please send your contributions to: inkspot@cartoonists.org.au

ROBERT BLACK (Victoria)

PHIL JUDD (Queensland)

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CARTOONISTS ON SHOW

Jed’s Cartoons Brighten Burra

The regional South Australian town of Burra came alive during September and October with an exhibition of Jed Dunstan’s cartoons.

The show, at Burra Regional Art Gallery, featured a selection of Jed’s work from the last three years, including original art, prints and ceramic plates.

Horrible Harriet’s New Leigh on Life

It’s hard to believe, but 2021 marks Horrible Harriet’s 20th birthday. Her creator, former Australian Children’s Laureate Leigh Hobbs, has celebrated this landmark event with a new adventure in conjunction with Allen & Unwin.

Horrible Harriet and the Terrible Tantrum (ISBN 9781760878221) sees our titular protagonist on a mission to be good. This means goodgirl smiles, thoughtful gift-giving and playing nicely. Her teacher, Mr. Boggle, praises Horrible Harriet for her efforts. But the Terrible Tantrum, a three-eyed monster she keeps in her bedroom, threatens to undo everything.

Horrible Harriet and the Terrible Tantrum has a RRP of $24.99 and is available at: www.booktopia.com.au

CHRIS THOMAS (New South Wales)

GLENN ROBINSON (Victoria)

Phil Somerville’s Change of Direction

Since becoming a grandfather to three children over the last four years, Phil Somerville’s professional life has gone in a slightly different direction.

“I have a paid client or two, but I’ve put my soul into a paid subscriber cartoon business I run, via email, called Line of Thought,” he revealed.

Line of Thought is a topical/political cartoon drawn by Somerville and modelled as an exclusive paid subscriber service. The cartoons are published nowhere else (knowingly).

Once a client is signed up to one of two subscription types (there’s Standard, or Premium - which delivers bonus non-political cartoons) a cartoon is received as an image-embedded email every 7 to 12 days, as inspiration strikes. The cartoons are sometimes single panel, sometimes elaborate or multi-panel as the idea dictates. Get in touch with Phil for more information: phil.somerville@somervillecartoons.com

SNAPSHOT

Co-ordinated by David Pope, the regular ACA Covid Coffee Catch-Ups have been steadily growing in popularity. The latest guests were Fiona Katauskas on 18th August, Stuart McMillen on 22nd September and Eleri Mai Harris on 12th October. Why not join us? Details for the next Coffee Catch-Up will land in your email inbox soon!

Thanks to ongoing Covid-19 restrictions, the 2021 Comic Arts Awards of Australia were an online affair, for the second year running. Unlike previous years, there were a few changes, and not just minor ones.

Immediately after the 2020 Ledger Awards presentation, Gary Chaloner and Tim McEwen announced that they were stepping down as convenors of the Ledger Awards. Chaloner had been with the awards since their inception, in 2004, and it was he and Tim who relaunched the awards in 2014. Both Chaloner and McEwen had built the awards up, bringing in people where they needed them, and managed to make them the pre-eminent awards for Australian comic book creators.

Chaloner and McEwen announced that they’d be handing the awards over to Perth-based creator Bruce Mutard. Initially caught off-guard, Mutard took a month to deliberate, before moving to quell recent online controversy over the name ‘Ledger’ by rebranding the awards the Comic Arts Awards of Australia, or CAAA for short. Chaloner and McEwen elected to act as Patrons.

The Ledger Long List website, which now has the remit to catalogue and list every comic book published in Australia, or produced by Australian creators, remains with Chaloner.

Mutard had his work cut out for him - 2020 had been the first year that the Ledgers had failed to publish an annual. Work had begun on the annual in 2020 when articles were commissioned, but, once Covid hit proper, plans for both the annual and the award ceremony itself were placed on hold. Ultimately, the 2020 ceremony would be presented as an on-line event, hosted by Kings Comics in Sydney and run by Chaloner and McEwen. Determining to re-start the annual, Mutard commissioned new articles and had the 2020 ones updated. This resulted in a flip book, one side would have the 2020 annual, the other the 2021 annual.

The ceremony itself was planned to coincide with the Perth Comic Arts Festival, and there were hopes that it could be a physical event. Once again, the presence of Covid ensured that this couldn’t go ahead, so another virtual ceremony was planned. Those who had won Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum awards were contacted and speeches recorded to be played during the event. Instead of hosting the entire event himself, Mutard tapped long-time CAAA/Ledgers MC, Bernard Caleo, to host the event and I was asked to prepare and present a speech inducting June Mendoza and Hart Amos into the Ledger Hall of Fame.

WORDS BY DANIEL BEST

Bruce Mutard

Daniel Best

Bernard Caleo in action!

Inkspot

The entire show was livestreamed, with Mutard in Western Australia, Caleo in Victoria, and me in South Australia. As the greetings came in from winners across the country, ranging from presentations done in cars to studios to backyards and more, it became a truly unique ceremony.

The award winning comics themselves were a mixture of professionally-published and independent productions. The Gold award went to Nicola Scott and Greg Rucka for their book, Black Magick (Image Comics).

Silver awards went to Home Time by Campbell Whyte, Elizabeth Marruffo, Fionn McCabe, Hien Pham, Stuart Medley and Owen Heitmann, Under-Earth by Chris Gooch and a Bronze for The Grot by Pat Grant and Finn McCabe

Bronze awards went to Tom Taylor’s Suicide Squad: Bad Blood. Landing With Wings by Trace Balla (Allen & Unwin), Action Tank: Book 2 by Mike Barry (MikeBarrywashere) and the on-line strip, Why Black Lives Matter Resonates with Black People All Over the World by Claudia Chinyere Akole rounded out the Bronze winners.

The Platinum Ledger (for outstanding contribution to Australian comics) was handed to Glom Press. Glom Press is a very worthy recipient of this award. Operating out of a share house in Preston, Victoria, they have formed a collective that prints and publishes comic books. They occupy a space between the self-published mini and independent comics and the high-end published

graphic novels. A true cottage industry, Glom Press have gained inroads into mainstream bookstores and comic bookstores across the nation and overseas (although not in Adelaide or Hobart - lift your game, lads and ladies!) and are committed to publishing those projects that otherwise might never see print.

While the award ceremony closed out on a squeal of feedback, it was the only hiccup in an otherwise stellar evening. One can only hope that, as the pandemic gets under control, that a

physical ceremony can be staged once more, but, for now, Bruce, along with Gary Chaloner and Tim McEwen, have shown that these events can be staged, successfully, online as live events. But nothing beats the socialising.

All in all, this years Comic Arts Awards of Australia ran smoothly, and Bruce has shown that he is more than capable of herding the dozens of cats involved.

Hart Amos’ daughter, Christine, posted to social media:

“My dear Dad has won this wonderful award! So sad he is not alive to see this! I am so proud of his life & achievements & I miss him greatly. He would never have imagined this, it’s so amazing that he is still remembered by his peers after all this time!”

Daniel Best

Nicola Scott accepts her Gold award for Black Magick Volume 3: Ascension (right)

Revisiting the Modern Girl

I’m still trying to work that out, but here goes. From 1983 my little cartoon strip Hermoine the Modern Girl ran on Fridays in The Sydney Morning Herald, and in The Eye magazine. Other work appeared in The Cane Toad Times and Dolly (spoiled for choice for varied media outlets in those days!). I got my leg-up by being a cadet journalist for The Age, by 1984 stationed in The SMH building where I met Matthew Martin and David Dale and nicked a few ideas from my pal Mr Martin (you can see in the early Hermoine cartoons I nicked his title and panel format; the person I stole from originally was my cartoon hero, Ronald Searle, hence the pointy noses).

Hermoine (a name I chose because it was unusual, then promptly accidentally misspelled and mispronounced and never corrected) became my staple “everywoman” character - she’s stayed with me - unimproved in line or character. I think many of the older men in the newspaper offices didn’t get why it was so popular or struck such a chord, but they could see it did. Young women had not seen much of their lives, or things they noticed or found funny, depicted in mainstream publications.

It struck me hard recently, going through some of my ‘80s and ‘90s columns and cartoons (drawn when I was in my 30s), that so many had a theme of sexual harassment. One typical example from the ‘90s published in The Age shows a flasher in the bushes and a jaded woman in full military gear calling in reinforcements: a satisfying fantasy. I think it’s safe to say no male cartoonist of the era was tackling subjects that women deal with all the time: I just wish there had been more of us given a better go.

“Whatever happened to Kaz Cooke?”

Kaz Cooke was last interviewed by Wayne Baldwin in Inkspot #14, way back in 1989! Inkspot

Drawing Under the Influence

I admired the work of Nicole Hollander (France), Mary Leunig, Jo Waite (Australia), and Lynda Barry (USA). So many of them were doing comic strips and graphic novels and being dismissed or held to the edge of the mainstream by men in charge who didn’t “get” it - often breaking through because of the better economic times giving opportunities to small print-run books and newspapers and magazines.

It was a bad hand women were dealt in the 80s and 90s - the potential of more of an opportunity to be cartoonists, just as the number of places where you could be employed or find outlets for your work began shrinking. And now the same thing has happened to male cartoonists too. The internet and platforms like Instagram have given many artists and designers new ways to display their work but sadly, not so many ways of making a living.

I was thrilled recently to see that Mel Stringer, who I met as a young student in a cartooning class I gave at the Express Media youth arts hub in Melbourne more than two decades

ago, has found an audience in the US and is making a living there selling her work on Instagram, from stickers to ‘zines and commissioned portraits, and being sponsored by drawing apps and others. It’s saucy and individual and all her own, and it would have given an ‘80s mainstream news editor a total conniption.

I think I was very lucky to finagle my way into cartooning when I did, and further fiddle with it so it could fit with a writing career. I benefited from huge circulation of The Age, frittered away by executives who thought the internet was no threat to classified ads: it gave me a name recognition for cartooning and writing that I’ve built a career on.

Breaks, Books and Branding

I caught some real breaks. I was really grateful to people like Peter Nicholson who encouraged me to write for his 3D cartoon puppets on the Rubbery Figures TV bits, to John Clarke for encouraging my writing, the independent feminist publishers McPhee Gribble, who gave me my first book contract when I was 24, and Sharon Connolly at Film Australia who commissioned me to

make a short animated film, which won the AFI award in 1992. I’ve worked with Circus Oz as a writer, and had fun with Judith Lucy on radio.

I’ve also been lucky enough to do well writing books and illustrating them with my cartoons - Up the Duff has been in print, updated each year, for more than 20 years. Likewise, its parenting sequel, Babies and Toddlers, and the books for pre-teens and teens in the Girl Stuff series. The pointy-nosed Hermoine is now my Twitter avatar, and a recognisable link with my work (a publisher once called it my “brand”. I threw a shoe at them. But they were probably right). I originally drew Hermoine with a spindly line using a practically hypodermic-sized Rotring refillable pen, then graduated to a more fluid dip-pen and ink (after Mathew Martin, a great pal, forgiving of my early thievery, took me

to the nib counter at the Pearl Paints art emporium in New York, which sold barrels, ink and different blacker-thanblack ink in pots: it was heaven). Lately, battling an old repetition strain injury and general fall-apartery, I’ve been drawing with a 0.6 Artline felt tip, which is now easier and bolder (who isn’t?).

I admire those who can still meet the daily or weekly political cartoon deadline and stay employed on newspapers, I always want to see what Wilcox and Kudelka, and Katauskas and Golding are doing. They’ve blended the best from the past - a quick mind and a cartoonist’s cheeky sensibility, and the new technology. I’m afraid I’m still very old school: I’ve only just worked out how to use a scanner without needing a good lie down afterwards. Soon, I’ll start to hand-draw the cartoons for a book on menopause I’m working on now. I’ve just started feeling excited about getting amongst it again, about

looking to translate the ridiculousness of life into a drawing.

For now, I have my hands full writing my own books, and sometimes doing t-shirts and logos for the odd environmental, women’s or generally ratbag cause. I have a book coming out in November which includes 300 photos and posters - none of them my work. But the cover of the book, You’re Doing It Wrong: A History of Bad & Bonkers Advice to Women, is pure cartoon sensibility: I collaborated on it with a couple of designers to make a Kardashian-type face on an old portrait painting.

Always a Cartoonist

In a different life, maybe I would have devoted myself to cartooning full-time, without the interruptions of motherhood and writing. I probably would have developed new, improved styles and perhaps even learned how to draw a

Kaz Cooke pictured at the 1994 Stanley Awards at Sydney Town Hall

foot. I’m aware of my limitations and marvel at the deft skills and talents of cartooning veterans who do it every day. Somebody said to me a while ago that I shouldn’t have “cartoonist” in my professional biog any more because it wasn’t my main job. I was surprised at how much that hurt, and how much I didn’t want it to be true. Once a cartoonist, always a cartoonist, I reckon. I still have the sense of the ridiculous, and I still have a pen.

I miss the comradeship, and the laughs (but not the sexism) of old-time newsrooms and media gatherings, and it’s weird but inevitable that a lot of cartoonists and illustrators now work from home, coming up with ideas alone: being cheeky, exaggerating, scribbling, talented, observant, glorious individuals. I’m admiring and envious of any of us who are managing to get paid for any of it, and of those who do it anyway, even when times are this tough. I still feel that there is a cartoonists’ camaraderie. I hope you feel it, too.

If my house caught fire I’d be running into the street in my undies holding all the Ronald Searle and Saul Steinberg books I can carry. Now there’s an image ...where’s my pen?

Kaz Cooke is an author and cartoonist. You’re Doing It Wrong: A History of Bad & Bonkers Advice to Women is available now.

Website: kazcooke.com.au

Instagram: @reallykazcooke

PHOTO: DAVID JOHNS

Part Two

Twist of Ginger

If one were to catalogue the graphic work, other than Ginger Meggs comic strip, originated by Jimmy , listing would include a booklet, titled Exclusive and illustrated by Bancks, published by Usher’s Metropolitan Hotel of 54 Catlereigh Street, Sydney. Ushers’ was one of Sydney’s more distinguished and exclusive hotels, playing host to international stars of screen and stage, as well as many of the rich and powerful families of Europe and America on their first trip to Australia.

On the flipside of cartooning, a series of “bits and bobs” about Australian cartoonists never before recorded A

In its sixteen 18cm x 12cm pages bound with silken cord, are eleven recipes for cocktails with full colour illustrations by “Mr J. C. Bancks.” These illustrations are an optical joy, cleverly fitting the cocktail names.

We have no record of the numbers of copies printed. It was evidently offered free for there is no indication of price. Research has revealed that a copy of the booklet was on offer in America, priced at $US375 ($493 when converted to Australian dollars at the time of writing).

A copy of this 1936 booklet was purchased in Melbourne during 1991 for $60 - it’s not yet an antique but on its way!

Reviews

Best Australian Political Cartoons 2021

edited by Russ Radcliffe

Published by Scribe Publications, 2021

Available from www.booktopia.com.au

$26.90

192 pages

ISBN 9781922310996

Reviewed by Ian McCall

Russ Radcliffe has been compiling his annual Best Australian Political Cartoons books since 2004, featuring the work of some of Australia’s finest cartoonists. For his efforts, Russ was awarded the Jim Russell Award for his Significant Contribution to Australian Cartooning in 2013. This latest edition, published by Scribe, hit the shelves in November. In short - it is a fantastic collection and summarises succinctly, in cartoon form, all the world’s major political events from 2021 with a uniquely Australian point-of-view.

The year began with Donald Trump refusing to step down after his chaotic election loss as shown by David Rowe - Trump resolutely sitting on his throne, phone in hand, while Washington burns. The continuing saga of Covid-19 inspired many interesting cartoons, including Cathy Wilcox’s What Kind of Vaccination-Hesitant are You? and Peter Broelman’s We Don’t Trust What They Put in Vaccines. The chapter entitled Delta Blues featured some fantastic cartoonists including Johannes Leak and Matt Golding

David Pope’s cartoon about the behaviour of some of the men in Scomo’s parliament is fantastic and it was great to see Cathy’s 4 Corners cartoon. Because the book was published so late in the year there were also a lot of great cartoons about the way the Government handled the evacuation from Afghanistan. There is amazing work by Moir, Spooner, Knight, Le Leivre and many more. I was really pleased to see entries by Badiucao, whom we met at Canberra in 2019. The book features so many amazing cartoons from all over Australia and so many different publications. It’s wonderful book. Well worth buying a copy.

Ian McCall

Die Laughing: The Biography of Bill Leak

by Fred Pawle

Published by the Institute of Public Affairs, 2021

Available from www.dymocks.com.au

$49.95

350 pages

ISBN 9781922669032

Reviewed by Lindsay Foyle*

Fred Pawle has written a book about the life of Bill Leak (1956-2017). It is a beautifully-written book and has been well researched. He spent three years working on it, interviewing many of Leak’s friends to gather information and it shows in the detail he has uncovered.

It takes a very right-wing view of Bill’s life. That is to be expected as it reflects Fred’s own political leanings. Also, it would not have been published by the Institute of Public Affairs if it had leaned in any other direction. It fits with Leak’s views over the last 9 years of his life.

None of that detracts from the very many stories about Leak, which Pawle details. There are some wonderful insights. Some are about his private life. Some are about the successful side of his life. Others are about his unsuccessful periods, of which there are many. Leak was a womaniser, an alcoholic, a wonderful artist, a great cartoonist, had the talent to become an exceptional piano player and could write almost as well as he could draw.

Early in the book, Pawle says Bill was difficult to pigeonhole regarding politics. However, for most of the time he was cartooning, he did so from the left. It is when he won all of his cartooning awards (28 of them, between 1987 and 2002).

Leigh Sales is quoted as saying Bill was “probably the most vehemently anti-(John) Howard person I’d ever met”. She goes on to say that, “Bill developed an equally visceral antipathy towards the new Labor government in 2007”.

It was a change that followed his move out of the inner city suburb of Redfern to Hardys Bay on NSW’s Central Coast. It also corresponds to when he stopped working in the office and began working from home. Alone.

It was change many people noticed. Bill told friends he was only attacking Labor because they were in government, but would get back to attacking the Liberals once they won office again. He didn’t. The reason was, as Bill said of himself

in 2012, “I have become a rabid right-winger and a Murdoch toady.”

The subject of Bill’s political leaning is well covered in the book. Pawle describes Bill as a ‘classical liberal’, which is a description most of Bill’s friends would agree with. But, being a ‘classical liberal’ is not being a right-winger. Paul Kelly is quoted as saying, “Bill just wanted to call out frauds and phony elites”.

Pawle claims Leak was a champion of free speech and it was an area which came to cause him much bother. Chapter 15 of the book discusses the subject and the problems Leak had with it. It also details how Leak narrowed his political views and joined the Institute of Public Affairs and Centre for Independent Studies: both organisations well known for their very right-wing approach to politics. Pawle goes into much detail about the problems Leak had with a cartoon about an Aboriginal father and his relationship with his son. It is close to home. Pawle had pointed out early in the book that Leak, too, had neglected his sons after his marriage to Astrid broke up. This chapter is a very one-eyed view of what happened and ignores the fact, that while Leak - and those on the right - was demanding the right to free speech, Leak and his supporters were doing so as long as everyone else agreed with them.

After Leak died in 2017, Roger Franklin (the online editor of Quadrant ) was quoted as accusing Gillian Triggs and Tim Soutphommasane of wanting Leak silenced. It was a disgraceful comment. However, it is possible the stress Leak was put under in defending his cartoon, about a father not knowing the name of his son, could have contributed to his death. Die Laughing is by no means a perfect book. But it is a good book and it is doubtful a better one will ever be written.

Lindsay Foyle

* Lindsay knew Bill Leak for over 30 years and considered him a friend.

Opportoonists! A quick and dirty investigation into NFTs

It’s a fad! It’s the future of media! It’s your ticket to easy street! It’s a scam! The art world thinks Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a thing, but are they a thing for you?

ACA Deputy President, DAVID BLUMENSTEIN, took a look into them.

An NFT is a token (bit of code) on a blockchain (an online ledger) that provides theoretically unbreakable proof of ownership. If you’ve heard of NFTs, it’s probably through a breathless news story about venerable auction house Christie’s selling a piece of digital art by a guy called Beeple for US$69 million. Or you heard that the CEO of Twitter turned the first ever tweet into an NFT, and sold it at auction for around A$3.8m.

The idea is that by “minting” an NFT and attaching it to a piece of digital content, you create artificial scarcity for that digital object, meaning it’s somehow more than just a JPEG or other bit of code (which is infinitely copyable).

If you do a painting of a duck, is it worth anything? Sure, if a client has commissioned you to draw it for them. But that’s the end of the transaction. What if you’re Andy Warhol? Now lots of people will pay for your duck painting. But there’s only one. So you print up one thousand “limited-edition” prints.

They’re only “limited” because you said they are – but you’re a hot commodity, so they are too. Now a thousand people can buy your duck, and you made some good money. Later, they resell their ducks for a huge profit. But you don’t get a piece of that.

Because legal “smart contracts” can be embedded in NFTs, any piece of digital media (say, your duck painting) can now theoretically be considered “unique”, be monetised and be trackable – and, when resold, automatically pay resale royalties back to the creator (in cryptocurrency, of course – we’ll get to that shortly).

This monkey called Carl is one of the “traits” populating the Toddlerpillars project. “Profile picture” projects like this randomly combine different graphic “traits” to create the NFT images people are buying. Art: Tim Molloy

The main way NFTs are being used right now is to “mint” digital collectibles. Want to buy a token that says you “own” a “limited edition” digital version of Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1831)? The British Museum will sell that to you. Do you like watching “classic catches” on Sunday cricket broadcasts? Expect to see Cricket Australia and Channel Seven auctioning off videos of

those catches as NFTs to wealthy collectors pretty soon.

Because NFTs are relatively new, there’s a casino full of techno-utopians, opportunists and out-and-out scammers trying to cash in, quickly, before the hype dies down. You barely need to peel up the surface to see they’re powered by “boiler rooms” of enthusiasts “pumping” NFT projects

– pulling in as many prospective buyers as possible, slavering after the interest of influencers and celebrities, and hoping that once the project launches, the price shoots up and early NFT-holders become wealthy. If you’ve been around since the early internet, you’ve seen tech bubbles like this before, and if you’re an ACA member, you’ll probably remember the Dutch tulip bulb mania. This is a similar situation.

What’s interesting about NFTs from our perspective is that illustrators are at ground zero of this mania.

Some hope that the technology will “legitimise” digital art, and make it culturally possible to ask serious money for digital artworks. Some are already doing it. One artist I spoke to told me he will “never have to think about doing client work again” thanks to the money he has made from this stuff in the last two years. The same may happen for my colleague Tim Molloy, a New Zealand comics and gallery artist who, as I write, is about to launch his NFT project, Toddlerpillars, with his friend and collaborator Jon Beinart.

“Art’s been my side hustle, but it became my main job because of the pandemic,” Tim told me. Having lost his day job, Tim started selling his (actual, physical) paintings on Instagram. Because of his exposure to the “serious” art world through the Beinart Gallery, Tim recognised the arts ecosystem at play around him – high-end art is full of scams and hype too – and felt that NFTs might be worth trying, especially with a canny business-minded friend helping him through it.

NFTs are theoretically a “decentralised”, “democratic” way of selling art, with a low barrier to entry. So why not launch an NFT?

Aside from the scene being full of scammers – nobody I’ve spoken to denies this – and the weirdness most of us feel at the idea of selling a JPEG as a “limited-edition collectible”, the big issue is that the computing required to make this technology function consumes electricity at astounding rates, contributing noticeably to carbon emissions. Artists currently launching NFTs can expect a fiery backlash on social media, which has caused some of these projects to

“rethink”, or even shut down, in fear of reputational damage. A local game developers’ community has just announced they are banning the posting of any blockchain, crypto and NFT-related jobs due to their environmental impact. So let’s try to answer the burning questions around this stuff (my opinions purely):

Q: CAN MONEY BE MADE WITH NFTs?

Yes. But if you aren’t conversant with the technology and have no particular passion for it, you’re more likely to waste a lot of time than to stack up any cash. As with most industries, the people who get in first, and who build, run and own the sales platforms, have the best opportunity to cash in on them. In other words – it’s a casino, so you’d better know how to count cards.

Q: IS THIS REVOLUTIONARY TECH?

Techies think so, but techies benefit by puffing their tech up to make it look big. Blockchain and cryptocurrency are still of niche appeal because they’re largely seen as an investment vehicle (an unstable one). I think NFTs are the latest way they hope to entice “normal people” into using this stuff. At the same time, the NFT projects they create are so full of in-jokes and complex rules, and so steeped in performative libertarianism, you need to be a tech bro (or “bro-sympathetic”) to get involved. When the emissions problem is solved, everything could change, but the culture around NFTs might still be a barrier.

Q: ARE THERE TRUE BENEFITS FOR ARTISTS HERE?

Short answer: not yet. NFTs still seem to me like a solution in search of a problem, at least as far as artists are concerned. Slightly longer answer: artists are good at adopting new tech and doing interesting things with it. That only happens when artists direct the projects, though. Right now, I think most NFT projects are the domain of the techs who understand it and the venture capitalists who fund it. When more artists have their hands on the levers, things could change, and you’ll see the same pattern with NFTs that we saw with the Web, MP3s, YouTube, podcasting, crowdfunding, etc: early adoption by people doing interesting experiments, artists figuring out how to draw an audience, the public catching on, the scene stabilising as artists learn how to make money from it, corporates and celebrities sweeping in and the scene becoming homogenous because it’s now big business.

Q: SHOULD I GET INVOLVED IN NFTs?

If you should be involved, you probably already are. I’m pretty excited for Tim’s project to do well, because, frankly, Tim is an amazing artist and deserves the success. For Tim it’s been a roller-coaster. In a short couple of months he’s gone from a struggling artist working alone in his home to potentially presiding over a mini arts empire. NFTs aren’t responsible for that, though. Tim’s skills and Jon’s business mind are.

If any of this genuinely sounds interesting to you beyond the promise of financial reward, go for your life. Just remember that the hype is everything. If you’re not successful in your art practice currently, and you don’t have a Charles Saatchi to bid up your NFT art to $69 million, you may not come out of this casino ahead.

David Blumenstein

“Because NFTs are relatively new, there’s a casino full of techno-utopians, opportunists and out-and-out scammers trying to cash in, quickly, before the hype dies down”

Pope’s Posters are a Blessing For Threatened Species

The Canberra Times’ David Pope quite literally drew attention to the forgotten heroes of Kosciuszko National Park in two posters released for Threatened Species Day during September. Depicted on a quest across the high country, the corroboree frog, mountain pygmy-possum and broad-toothed rat are among the lesser-known creatures of Kosciuszko whose numbers are under threat.

The posters - a follow-up to his highly commended South Coast series - were prompted by a call from a fan, the late Dr Graeme Worboys, who approached Pope after seeing the work he’d done on the mountains and the coast when they were ravaged by 2020 bushfires. Dr Worboys - a celebrated conservationist and Kosciuszko activist - sadly died before he could see what that prompting has inspired. Pope said the late professor had really wanted to celebrate the “little animals who are not visible” and bring them to attention. He said the challenge with drawing small creatures like the guthega skink and the flame robin was how to highlight them in the vastness of the Kosciuszko National Park.

“I ended up putting them all together in this large vistas like they were on some type of journey and they ended up looking like film posters,” Pope said. “Now I want to win TattsLotto so I can make the film.”

The posters, including those from the previous series, are available for purchase online at David Pope’s Redbubble store: www.redbubble.com/people/hinze/shop

October’s Birthday Boys

Top of the Tree

Congratulations to Jules Faber on receiving a 2021 Kids Own Australia Literature Award (KOALA) for Weirdo 14: Vote Weirdo, by Anh Do, which won the Fiction for Younger Readers category.

KOALA is a non-profit organisation run by primarily by teachers and librarians. Every year, young readers from all over New South Wales judge their own literary awards. By voting in the KOALAs they reward the books that have most engaged them.

“So amazing to receive our eighth consecutive KOALA today, as voted by the kids of NSW,” said Jules. “Thanks to everyone involved, it’s a huge deal!”

Can you spot the difference? ACA Patron Vane Lindesay turned 101 on 2nd October - his second lockdown birthday! If only we could all look this good moving into our second century. Whilst in Sydney, The Sydney Morning Herald’s John Shakespeare celebrated turning 60. His SMH colleagues Simon Letch and Helen Pitt cajoled 60 of his friends (it ended up being 90) to each draw a caricature for a special video presentation. Many happy returns to you both!