Leunig far more awake than the woke, thankfully

The Age cartoonist’s views haven’t changed. The world has changed, and not for the better.

Cartoonist Michael Leunig. Picture: Sam Cooper

In my study at home I have a cartoon by Michael Leunig pinned up on the door of my file cupboard. It is a cartoon that pokes gentle fun at the presumption of female columnists who, while furiously dissecting every issue under the sun, also occasionally insert “charming vignettes of their home life” into their tracts. It is a kind of memento mori for those of us who might get too big-headed.

When I first saw it, not long after becoming a columnist for this newspaper, I laughed out loud. Leunig was a contrarian and enormously popular when his talent was firing on all cylinders.

However, apparently lately, I was one of the few who could appreciate his anti “woke” cartoons. He has been sacked from The Age after working for that august publication for almost 50 years.

Now I am not a Leunig acolyte, although there are many, especially those who buy his calendar, which is still being sold by The Age. His cartoons were variable in quality. Some are impenetrable, others are just soppy hippy-dippy pseudo “philosophy”, sprinkled with flowers and ducks.

However, at its best, his work definitely went against the fashionable grain, and made a sometimes startling point that no one else was game to touch. For that he should be admired, not sacked. To go against the grain is what a cartoonist should do, as our own late, great Bill Leak often did.

For instance, Leunig had a reputation as a sly critic of feminism, especially the strident variety that mistook equality for economic equity and ignored motherhood.

For those old feminists, moth­erhood was regarded as mere drudgery in favour of the bleak doctrine that the only form of self-fulfilment was through work, leaving baby stuck in childcare.

His notorious cartoons of a baby trying to make sense of its impersonal surroundings and its lack of mothering in a childcare institution were devastating. Naturally, some mothers who were forced into work wouldn’t have appreciated them.

However, the loudest critics were not hard-up mothers in difficult situations forced to work. The loudest critics were usually the ideologues for whom work was the sole avenue of self-fulfilment, and childcare as the means to it was, and still is, an article of feminist faith. Those ideologues were often at the pointy end of Leunig’s pen.

Leunig’s vaccination cartoon.

He had a reputation as an armchair romantic ecologist. The woke brigade could put up with that. However, what they could not put up with was his almost quaint suspicion of the electronic media and especially social media, on which they thrive.

His cartoon of a mother staring at her phone, immersed in social media while baby falls out of the stroller, was priceless. Of course, he wasn’t having a go at mothers, he was having a go at all the people who think that the online world is more real than the real one.

But it was easy for his critics to play the feminist card. Lately, he has almost cultivated a reputation as a boneheaded anti-vaxxer. Not because he was against vaccination, as he made clear in a 2017 television interview, but because his cartoons – like the one that had him sacked – were questioning the enormous pressure of the state which forces the individual into submission.

So, Leunig’s sacking is a free-speech issue, whether you agree with some of his positions or not. But there is another point about his sacking that a few people – including Leunig – have picked up.

This goes to something that I have written about in previous columns. It is the disappearing old left-right ideological divide. It has been replaced by a series of schisms.

Leunig is an “old leftie” and the new green Left are much more authoritarian (to the point of fascism) than the “old” Left. They insist on sticking to the script, whether the script is about feminism, domestic violence, vaccination or whatever.

This new strain of “woke” Left don’t like a lot of his anti-authoritarian, old-fashioned individualist working-class views. Those views are also more pro-family an a bit more attuned to the bleeding obvious than the new “woke” would like.

Leunig cartoon "The Cup".

Leunig is a classic product of the old-working class Australia – someone whose life experience and background has formed him.

He grew up in inner suburban Melbourne, did not go to university, and his father worked in the meatworks, as he did himself.

His individualism meant that he resisted conscription during the Vietnam War which, unlike many of the preoccupations of the woke, was a real issue that affected young lives.

Consequently, he now no longer fits the so-called Left, who are well-educated pure armchair theorists. They Twitter and Facebook on everything from climate to gender to the pandemic.

According to the editor of The Age, its readers are now too far ahead of Leunig to appreciate some of his more broadly humane cartoons or his pro-individualist stances.

They have left him behind. It is a pity, but then, thankfully, for those of us who appreciate his thoughtfulness, Leunig doesn’t want to catch them up.