Vicious smears cannot erase my father Bill Leak’s spirit

Artist Bill Leak.

The timing of the vicious and deliberately hurtful comments made by Fiona Martin is remarkable. Published in The Australian and The Daily Telegraph, they come almost two years since the cartoon she refers to as racist was published in this newspaper.

This anniversary was pointed out to me on Saturday by my father’s friend and staunch defender throughout this episode, indigenous psychologist Anthony Dillon.

In the email sent to me and a group of friends, he remembered the reaction of his father and Australia’s first ever Aboriginal police officer to the cartoon. They both contacted my father to congratulate him on tackling such a difficult subject courageously and powerfully.

They both instinctively understood it was motivated by my father’s genuine, ongoing concern for the welfare of the types of kids who were winding up in places such as the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.

They knew the point my father was making was directly in line with statements being made by prominent Aboriginal leaders such as Noel Pearson, who said “blackfellas have got to take charge and take responsibility for their children. That part of the message really struggles to get traction.”

University of Sydney's Dr Fiona Martin.

Interestingly, Dr Martin cites the social media hate-campaign directed at my father following the publishing of the cartoon as an example of the “possibilities of counter-speech on the internet”. From where we stood, it was more like the embodiment of all that is wrong with social media and the internet — a mindless pile-on by virtue-signallers and spiteful conformists who either never saw the cartoon in context or never bothered to understand what it was about, but who revelled in an orgy of self-righteousness and confirmation bias from behind their computer keyboards.

My family feels grateful to and supported by those friends who really knew my father and what he stood for, and who have remembered him that way — people just like Anthony and his father, and a lifetime’s worth of friends from all walks of life, all political persuasions and every background you can imagine.

Within the family, we all know who the real man was, and how much we all love him. So when I read the latest mindlessly uninformed yet nasty assessments of my father and his work, it is not with any kind of burning rage that I respond — rather it is with a sense of deflation that the level of so-called “debate” on university campuses has descended to this level of debasement … of simplistically vicious smears directed at a man who cannot defend himself by an alleged academic who never met the man and who bases her inaccurate, hateful opinion of him on a cartoon she has deliberately misunderstood. Which thereby eliminates any prospect of real debate or discussion about what the cartoon was really about in the first place.

Weighed up against the email I received on Saturday, the rantings of Dr Martin and her ilk fade quickly into obscurity where they belong.