Cartoonist Bill Leak: a witty, fearless satirical artist

OBITUARY: Through almost half a century of artistic endeavour, Bill Leak inspired his beloved country with equal measures of wit and courage.

THE sky is a bleak and featureless grey over Sydney today. That sky matches the mood of the place for those who know a little colour has just been lost from Bill Leak’s home town.

The renowned artist and iconic cartoonist for The Australian has died in hospital from suspected heart attack, aged 61, leaving behind a legacy as one of Australia’s most fearless and accomplished political and cultural satirists.

Through almost half a century of artistic endeavour, Mr Leak skewered and inspired his beloved country with equal measures of wit and courage, using nothing but the tip of a swift-moving paint brush.

Bill Leak’s last editorial cartoon, published overnight.

A fierce advocate of free speech with a mind as rich and colourful as his paint palette, he will be remembered now through a staggering lifetime’s worth of cartoons and portraits that made us laugh, gasp, cry, rage, think and feel. The artist’s passing will ripple today through all corners of a nation that, for much of his six decades on earth, he so skilfully satirised, so bravely polarised and so frequently made keel over in daily fits of belly laughter.

Art is long and life is short, but it shouldn’t be this short. Reflections on Bill Leak. https://t.co/yWPU1fbPAV

— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) March 10, 2017

The Australian’s Editor-in-chief Paul Whittaker described Leak as “a giant in his field of cartooning and portraiture and a towering figure for more than two decades” at the newspaper and said he was “simply irreplaceable”.

“We will miss him dreadfully and our hearts go out to his wife Goong, his stepdaughter Tasha and his sons Johannes and Jasper,” Whittaker said.

Cartoonist Bill Leak and Les Patterson at the launch of Leak's book "Trigger Warning" in Sydney.

Bill Leak won nine Walkley awards and 19 Stanley awards for his extraordinary work, and was twice awarded News Corp’s cartoonist of the year. Throughout that stellar career he was threatened, abused, pilloried and praised, and not once did he consider putting down his paint brush.

The news of the master satirist’s passing comes just days after the joyous launch of his latest book of collected cartoons drawn from his defiantly challenging and thought-provoking works in The Australian.

At that launch, guest speaker Anthony Morris QC spoke of Bill Leak’s eternal battle against political correctness, “the fight of our time”.

“There is nothing more serious than comedy, and there is no genre of comedy more serious than political satire,” he said.

Bill Leak ... “There is nothing more serious than comedy”.

Mr Morris, the lawyer who represented QUT students in a case concerning section­ 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, launched the book at Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies and heralded Leak as a champion of free speech.

“The biggest challenge to freedom of speech, and particularly freedom of the press today, is ­section 18C and it is a great ­honour to know one of the men (Leak) who has stood up against the intrusion on the freedom of press that 18C represents.’’

Last year, Mr Leak gave a stark insight into his approach to work and life through a column in The Australian last year addressing criticism over a typically controversial cartoon that showed an Aboriginal child being handed back by a police officer to an apparently drunk father who cannot remember his son’s name.

The Bill Leak cartoon that sparked controversy last year.

“By enabling tantrum-throwers to re-establish their feelings of moral superiority they can walk away purged, but it doesn’t get to the root of their problem: Chronic Truth Aversion Disorder,” he wrote. “The CTAD epidemic that is raging unchecked through Australia’s social media population is rendering impossible any intellig­ent debate on serious social issues, such as the rampant violence, abuse and neglect of children in remote indigenous communities.

“The reactions of people in an advanced stage of the condition to anything that so much as hints at the truth, while utterly irrational, are also so hostile that anyone ­inclined to speak the truth understandably becomes afraid to do so.”

Originally published as Cartoonist Bill Leak: a witty, fearless satirical artist