Bill Leak: We’re here to ‘push, prod and offend’

Bill Leak’s death on Friday has prompted grief and tributes from his fellow cartoonists and a former editor-in-chief ...

Leahy's tribute to Leak

What was the meaning of Bill Leak’s life and work? I wrote this piece many times in my mind eight years ago.

It was a Saturday night, October 18, 2008. A call came in from the wine merchant at Hardy’s Bay, a coastal hamlet colonised by staff on this newspaper, Bill included. Leak was in a helicopter being flown to Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital and might not even survive the trip. Could I let his girlfriend and family know?

He had fallen from a balcony headlong on to a path below as he admired the cockatoos at John Singleton’s Strawberry Hill Stud at nearby Mt White on the central coast north of Sydney.

I tracked down his girlfriend and as many others as I could and the vigil began.

In a strange way all his brilliance in the years since that night and the happiness he enjoyed with partner Goong and stepdaughter Tasha were a miraculous bonus. He was proud of his boys Jasper and Johannes and always wanted me to hear the latest jazz CD from Jasper.

Bill knew that fall could have, should have, killed him. He was in a coma, had severe brain damage and a 15cm hole in his head as wide as his thumb.

He suffered debilitating headaches for the first few years back in the cartoonist’s chair. He struggled through the fog of heavy pain relief to get his thoughts together each morning for the day’s cartoon.

After starting back a couple of days a week, in time he came back to full- time work. For the second time in the first decade of the new century he justified my decision to make him the paper’s main daily editorial cartoonist, after many years of the Saturday Bleak Picture and illustration work.

It was a decision many in the company did not initially support, yet I was clear why I wanted Bill, and the company went with it.

I wanted the paper to reclaim some of the larrikin personality that marked it out from the then stodgy Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of the 1960s. We launched the daily Strewth column and a daily comedy piece called The Wry Side. I hired John Durie from The Australian Financial Review and for a while called his daily business column Martin Collins, another nod to the original genius of the paper launch by Rupert Murdoch in 1964.

Bill and I had become friends when he was still drawing for Fairfax Media. I knew his first wife Astrid and often sat with them at the annual cartoonists’ night of nights, the Stanley Awards.

Bill knew he was unloved by SMH editor-in- chief John Alexander and rang me not long after The Australian’s editor-in-chief Paul Kelly appointed me editor in early 1992.

I spoke to Kelly about Leak and they went to dinner and did the deal. Bill fitted the paper like a glove. The Australian had none of the factionalism or private school snobbishness that marked Fairfax at the time.

Yet it was really as a daily political cartoonist that Bill was able to make his mark, cementing the laconic Australian cynicism of authority that I wanted for the paper. Talking it all through with him before the appointment he knew instantly what was needed.

There could have been no one better. As Barry Humphries said lamenting his death last Friday, “Bill was the best political cartoonist in the world”.

A brilliant portrait painter with a background in fine art, Bill was raised in the central western NSW country town of Condobolin. He was quintessentially Australian and as his friend Warren Brown wrote in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday, Bill could talk to any one propping up the bar in any hotel in Australia and be just as happy chatting with a prime minister.

A generous, funny and self-deprecating man who never shied away from risk — whether in the surf, with his drinking and other activities or in his cartoons — Bill could see the essence of a face in an instant and draw it faster than anyone I have known.

He could see the punchline — and often two of them — just as quickly. In his early days in the role, he often had three rough drawings, on three different subjects, done before morning conference, so we could choose the best.

Some critics, particularly at the ABC, have tried to imply in recent days that Bill moved to the right politically after his fall. That is rubbish, as any look at his cartoons in the years before the accident makes clear.

It is just that where once poking fun at authority was the domain of the left, the modern social media progressive tribe does not do dissent. The Left now polices thought using ­social media to out the politically incorrect. As a natural contrarian and dissenter, Bill was a constant target.

How else to explain the outrage at his brave cartoons about radical Islam in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre? He persisted with these despite death threats and having to sell his beloved and raffish Hardy’s Bay waterside shack to move to a place the ­Australian Federal Police felt was safer. Anyone wanting to understand how serious the danger was should read Miranda Devine’s brilliant piece in The Sunday Telegraph yesterday.

And how to explain the confected outrage at the cartoon he drew in the wake of the Four Corners Don Dale detention centre revelations last August? Bill was more stressed than I can discuss that the Human Rights Commission was trying to drum up a case against him. Boiling it down to its essence, in typical Bill fashion, he said he was being punished for ­telling the truth. Truth. It’s a word Gillian Triggs and Tim Soutphommasane at the HRC, do not seem to understand.

Because Bill grew up in the bush, he had plenty of Aboriginal friends, unlike all the Twitter twits who branded him a racist. Aborig­inal mates were ringing Bill telling him his cartoon was an accurate portrayal of the problems of family dysfunction in outback indigenous families. And then he was branded a homophobe because he took the mickey out of the Sydney gay Mardi Gras, which included a Bill Leak float in protest against Bill’s cartoon supporting the rights of people who did not support gay marriage to have their say in a plebiscite. Imagine that. The bugger thought ordinary Australians should have their say.

As he said in a terrific interview with Andrew Bolt on the night of his book launch in Sydney last Wednesday: why no float protesting against ISIS for killing gay ­people across the caliphate?

No it would take a Bill to make a brave protest like that.

Despite the hundreds of possible examples of his genius I will relate just one tale illustrating how brilliant an artist he was.

It was in the 2011 Budget lock- up. I had an idea for a splash head across the top of page one on a budget in which then treasurer Wayne Swan had promised to make deep cuts to dix the ballooning budget deficit, but had squibbed it. “That’s not a knife, Treasurer” was to be the banner across the top of page one but I had no cartoonist in the lock-up.

I got a message to the Sydney lock-up that as soon as they were released at 7.30pm they needed to ring Bill at Hardy’s Bay and get him to call me on the mobile. By 8.30 be had a full-colour page one cartoon back to me. It was genius: Swan with bushman’s hat and open jerkin a la Crocodile Dundee. Instead of a knife he had a small oyster shucker in one hand and a soft toy crocodile in the other. Less than an hour to produce the best, most immediately relevant, page one budget cartoon I have seen.

So farewell Bill, old mate. I close by repeating a par that brought you to tears when you read it back to me last year. It was a column defending his Don Dale cartoon on August 15 last year. “Je suis Bill. Seriously. Anyone who has signed up to the “Je suis Charlie” meme needs to know the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo week in and week out published material that offended Muslims and insulted their religion. This is what real cartoonists do. They push, prod and offend in the world of contested ideas. if your favourite cartoonist is just publishing work to get the applause of like-minded readers, he or she is not doing their job. Je suis Bill.”