Mercury cartoonist John Farmer reflects on his 40-year career
“I’ve stopped drawing cartoons now, and I’ll never draw another one,” legendary Mercury cartoonist John ‘Polly’ Farmer reflects on his 40-year career.
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After a 40-year career spent ruffling the feathers of society’s powerful and proud, award-winning Mercury cartoonist Polly has hung up his brush.
Walking into the Hobart daily’s advertising art department in 1985 to begin a job illustrating ads, John “Polly” Farmer went on to fuse his natural creativity and eagle-eyed perception to become one of the most incisive and influential political commentators in the land.
But after maintaining a comfortingly familiar presence in the Mercury’s opinion pages well after his voluntary redundancy from the newspaper in 2016 – and never missing a professional beat throughout a recent period of intense personal trauma – Farmer is finally done with cartooning.
“I’ve stopped drawing cartoons now, and I’ll never draw another one,” Farmer said from the sunny courtyard of his Hobart home.
Funnily enough, Farmer never set out to be a satirist.
All through school, the kid from Lindisfarne actually had no idea about which career he wanted to pursue.
But with watercolour painter and gallery curator Robert Campbell as a grandfather – and librarian parents who were passionate about calligraphy, history, and book collecting – Farmer always had art running deep in his DNA.
“When I left college, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he recalled.
“But I was always able to draw – it’s just a family thing.
“So when I was 19, after trying uni and then briefly working in property management, I started drawing just because I had not much else to do.”
A man of Farmer’s natural talents was never going to be out of work for long, and the young man was soon enjoying a well-paid gig sketching ad “roughs” for the once-voluminous Yellow Pages telephone directory.
Next stop was the Mercury, after a recommendation from an old family friend, who just happened to be the masthead’s legendary cartoonist, Kev Bailey.
Farmer’s first job entailed drawing products such as houses and shoes, at a time when newspapers used illustrations instead of photos in ads.
But when the Mercury went to seven days a week with the Sunday Tasmanian, its bosses needed an extra cartoon a week.
“So Kev said to the editors ‘there’s a bloke downstairs who might be able to do it for you’.
“I told them that I’d never drawn a cartoon in my life, but was told to just have a go.
“When that first one got published, I just thought that would be it and they wouldn’t be using me again.
“But they did, and that’s how it all started for me.”
Although a proud Tasmanian, Farmer credits a two-year stint on the Gold Coast Bulletin in Queensland for facilitating developmental strides in his craft.
Now drawing at a newspaper full-time, the Hobart lad quickly learnt the work rhythms required to succeed in producing caricatures, illustrations, and political cartoons under deadline pressure.
Farmer returned to the Mercury in 1989, and quickly developed into a commentator of national regard – skewering and lampooning leaders and newsmakers from home and across the globe.
Three decades and 10,000 cartoons later in 2019, the now-legendary illustrator selected his best 500 pieces of work for the published collection, A Minute of Your Time: 30 years of cartoons.
So what exactly makes a good cartoon?
Farmer said there were very few topics he considered off-limits, and that he was never afraid to sit back and watch a story develop before diving in.
“It wasn’t only politics – it was sport, entertainment, and pop culture,” he said.
“I did cartoons on pretty much anything that was going on in the world.
“The only two things I was always told to be careful of were death and religion, although you would occasionally go there.
“I probably preferred the drawing side over the writing, but I think a really successful cartoon is when you get a good combination of the two.
“I always thought if I drew one cartoon every two weeks that I was happy with, that was a pretty good strike rate.”
The 60-year-old said that while he found work something of welcome distraction during his wife Tracy’s near-12 month battle with ovarian cancer, putting ink to paper in the wake of her passing last April had proven impossible.
Describing his late wife as a fun-loving force of nature, and a “terrific” mother to their son Jake, Farmer said his life would never be the same without her.
“In 2023, Tracy got cancer for her birthday,” Farmer said.
“She spent the last year of her life fighting cancer, and never got the chance to enjoy a retirement.
“The way she handled the last 12 months of her life was the bravest thing I have ever seen.
“When I lost Tracy, the world changed.
“And I realised I just didn’t want to be a cartoonist any more.”
Farmer plans to take some time out as he tries to make sense of his new life.
Something to look forward to is Jake’s wedding to fiancee Georgia in Las Vegas in April.
And while he will certainly not miss the cartoonist’s daily grind of news bulletins, deadlines, and a constant need to generate fresh ideas, Farmer is not exactly sure what comes next.
“I have to make some decisions that are going to be difficult but need to be made,” Farmer said.
“One of those will probably be moving house.
“I’m sure I’ll find something creative to do at some point, I’m just not sure what yet.
“But it won’t be cartoons.
“I’ll just have to wait and see.”
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