Drawn to the edge

Cartoons don’t just express political concerns but also serve the purpose of converting anger into laughter.

"Non commission officers embarking for Botany Bay", 1786 John Boyne. Picture: Australian Cartoons National Library of Australia

t is impossible to visit an exhibition devoted to cartooning in Australia without reflecting that it is almost three years since the death of Bill Leak. The cartoonist for this newspaper in his final years was famously hounded by a self-righteous digital mob outraged that he had drawn attention to a social problem that they would rather have ignored. It was also the high-water mark of hysterical assertions that feeling offended was tantamount to being assaulted.

The situation, apart from its tragic dimension, was replete with ironies. In the first place, the very same people who were appalled by the way Leak drew attention to parental neglect in Aboriginal communities were indignant at the attempts of the Catholic Church to cover up its history of wrongs. One category of abuse, apparently, had to be laid bare and the other brushed under the carpet.

The other notable irony was that at exactly the same time that various people were coming forward to say how shocked and offended they felt by Leak’s work, the National Gallery of Victoria was holding a survey of the work of Brook Andrew, an artist of partly Aboriginal descent, titled The Right to Offend is Sacred (March 3 to June 4, 2017). As I observed at the time, the right to offend was clearly not equally sacred for all.

More recently, the question of freedom of speech has surfaced again, and its enemies have tried to argue that opinionated commentary about Islam in the populist media helped to encourage or justify the Christchurch murders. But that is no more true than to argue that every impassioned Islamic sermon helps to justify jihad and terrorism. There is a crucial gap between noisy opinion and violent action.

Kevin cleans up, 2013 by Cathy Wilcox.

The law should indeed prohibit the incitement to violence of any kind. But it cannot prohibit the expression of narrow-minded and bigoted views, first of all because it is not the state’s business to tell people what to think, and secondly because such attempts are ultimately ineffectual and even harmful. For when we try to suppress opinions and beliefs, we drive them underground, where they fester and grow more poisonous. The internet has made matters worse, because it allows extremists, racists and low-life of every kind to congregate with others like themselves, and to wind each other up into an increasing state of exaltation.

This has always been the problem with censorship, which in the contemporary West takes the form of what is called political correctness. What is meant by political correctness is that certain views must be publicly espoused and others denounced, and above all that certain language must be used to demonstrate adherence to the approved views. When this started in the 1980s, I remember being surprised that an acquaintance was capable of a flawless performance of non-sexist speech in public, while still expressing repugnantly misogynistic opinions over a drink in all-male company.

It is profoundly naive to think that training people to chant the same slogans will make them think accordingly. The totalitarian experiments of last century made that clear. Most people are actually intelligent enough to say whatever those in power want to hear while privately considering it nonsense. And long before modern totalitarianism, generations learned to repeat the catechisms of churches in public, while thinking very different thoughts in their own hearts.

But the danger of repression is that it builds a pressure-cooker of resentment. In this sense the alt-right on the populist airwaves and the alt-left that increasingly rules the world of university campuses are engaged in a futile cycle of mutual radicalisation. And this is not helped when each side refuses even to listen to the arguments of the other.

Humour, of course, is helpful in these cases; laughing at each other and at oneself is always preferable to anger and resentment. Extremists of all kinds, however, are agelasts, non-laughers, in a word that Milan Kundera borrowed from Rabelais. Extremists are always in deadly earnest, and laughter is an insult to the gravity of their cause. Witness the murderous fury ­directed by religious zealots against the universally irreverent Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

Laughter is a depressurising and cathartic experience, which is why so much humour is close to subjects that cause us deep distress. And that is one of the most important functions of cartoons: to allow the expression of political concerns, but also the conversion of anger into laughter. Think of the difference between France and Britain in the early 19th century: the French suppressed cartooning and the freedom of the press, and had revolutions in 1789, 1830 and 1848; the British allowed a radical press freedom and Britain evolved through peaceful reform.

This was a golden age of cartooning, with a licence for ridicule as unbounded as Aristophanes enjoyed in 5th-century Athens. But the genre of the cartoon has a longer history, going back to the beginning of printing in the 15th century. No doubt one could find precursors even earlier, in the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii and other ancient cities, but the mass reproduction of printing is inherent to the form as we know it today.

In this sense, precursors include the many pamphlets produced during the Reformation violently attacking Luther, the pope and so on, according to the designer’s point of view. Another less obvious source, no doubt, can be found in the emblem books of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which drawings were used to illustrate moral ideas and pithy sayings. Later exemplars include the great moral prints of Hogarth in the middle of the 18th century, and the first flowering of the modern cartoon in Britain still takes the form of individual prints, just before the genre finds its predestined home in the newly expanding daily press.

This exhibition includes several examples of late 18th and early 19th-century British cartoons, particularly those connected to the foundation of Australia. One satirises Sir Joseph Banks’s knighthood, showing him as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Another dates from two years before the First Fleet and imagines sending off the dissolute prince of Wales and his political allies to exile in the new continent. The prince’s mistress and two evidently Jewish moneylenders are seen on the left, begging them not to leave.

The trope of the Jewish moneylender lives on and indeed appears in a more sinister form over a century later, in Livingston Hopkins’s A Jubilee (1905), in which a little boy plays with a ball that gets bigger and bigger until he can no longer push it uphill and can barely stop it rolling back down: it represents the growth of state debt. On the left the little boy looks up at the first sliver of a waxing moon, and on the right he is silhouetted against the full moon. In each moon we recognise the modern and now racially defined caricature of Jewish features that seems to have developed in France in the previous generations and would soon be used by Nazi propaganda.

Slightly less obvious are the Jewish features of capital in Will Dyson’s Labour wants a place in the sun (1913), reminding us that the standard left-wing cartoon personification of capital as an obese figure in a top hat is often also a caricature of the Jew; the left’s anti-Semitism, as we can see in Australia, and especially in England, has deep roots. The imagery in all these cartoons is distasteful, but once again, would anything have been gained by prohibiting it? Attitudes, as we can see, can survive even when their literal expression in images has become unthinkable for most of us.

The Mongolian Octopus - His Grip on Australia,' The Bulletin, 21 August 1886 Phil May 1864 - 1903

Another striking example of racial stereotyping is in Phil May’s T he Mongolian Octopus, which already in 1886 expresses fear of Chinese immigration overwhelming the colony. Cheap ­labour was the first cause of anxiety — workers feared they would lose their jobs to low-paid workers brought in by ruthless capitalists — but, interestingly, organised crime, bribery and corruption also seemed to be concerns, as well as opium, gambling (Fan-Tan and Pak Ah-pu), prostitution and disease. The Bulletin promoted the image of the Chinese menace regularly in the years leading up to Federation.

A number of cartoons reflect important episodes in the early history of the colony, like one of the Rum Rebellion (1808), showing the mutinous troops arresting governor William Bligh. The NSW Corps appears in a somewhat better light in an earlier incident, the defeat of the Castle Hill convict rebellion — largely composed of Irish political exiles — in 1804. The caption to the print reads: “Major Johnston with Quartermaster Laycock, one Sergeant and 25 privates of the NSW Corps, defeats 266 armed rebels.”

This watercolour drawing is not strictly a cartoon, nor was it published at all, so it cannot be regarded as a propaganda image sponsored by the government. The catalogue suggests it may have been privately commissioned by one of the officers involved, no doubt as a memorial of the most significant military action yet carried out in the new land.

Norman Lindsay’s infamous image of an ape-like German Hun about to seize the globe with bloody hands is not a cartoon either, but in this case a piece of psychological propaganda meant to make the masses think of the German people as a subhuman menace to mankind. The poster was put up secretly by night as part of a last-ditch recruiting campaign in 1918, not long before the Armistice; even in the circumstances, it struck many as going too far, and questions were asked in parliament.

After these dramatic images, most more recent Australian cartoons have been relatively innocuous caricatures of politicians. Some have cleverly encapsulated political ideas, often very economically, like Ron Tandberg; others have been intellectual and allusive, like George Molnar; energetic, like Bruce Petty; or meditative and whimsical, like Michael Leunig. It would have been nice to have had a larger selection for each of these significant figures, and one could add many others to the list.

"He drew first”, 2015 by David Pope.

It would also have been good to balance the more gentle or perennial humour of some cartoons with the more biting but also subtle tone of others — one favourite of mine, partly because of its clever use of an art-historical subtext, is the Peter Nicholson cartoon of August 9, 2008, based on Annibale Carracci’s Choice of Hercules (1596), but in which the prime minister tosses a coin and says, “Heads I go the easy way, tails I don’t go the hard way”.

David Pope’s cartoon in honour of the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo murdered by Islamist terrorists in Paris in January 2015 stands as a fitting coda to the exhibition and vindication of the principle of freedom of expression, even of opinions with which we disagree. A crumpled corpse lies on the ground on the right. On the left, a gunman masked in black protests: “He drew first.”

Cartooning Australia, National Library of Australia, until July 21.