Bruce Petty: From the mind of a cartooning master

Australia has produced many brilliant cartoonists. But for my money the greatest of all is Bruce Petty, who turns 93 next month.

Cartoonist Bruce Petty. Picture: Adam Yip

Picture in your mind this New Yorker cartoon. It’s dark and we see the lights of Manhattan in the far distance. In the foreground, having rolled all the way from the city and come to a halt beside a remote farmhouse, is a Ferris wheel. A passenger climbs out and asks the bewildered people who live there, “May we use your phone?”

And that, almost 70 years ago, is how I first encountered Bruce Petty. Australia has produced so many significant cartoonists. An official Hall of Fame would include Stan Cross, Will Dyson, Bill Leak, Emile Mercier, Alan Moir, Michael Leunig, Pat Oliphant, Paul Rigby, Cathy Wilcox, Ron Tandberg, Les Tanner, Patrick Cook, Peter Nicholson, Ward O’Neill, John Spooner, the Hogarthian David Rowe and more. All drawing brilliant conclusions. But at the pinnacle – and I’m sure many of the living on the list would agree – is the maestro, Bruce. Petty by name but not by nature.

A Bruce Petty cartoon for The Australian, 1972.

Yet when Bruce arrived back in Australia after considerable international success (The New Yorker was just one of the big mastheads he worked for), he couldn’t get a job. Editors here would say, “My kid can draw better than that.” So he finished up working part-time in an ad agency when TV was just beginning. Whereupon we collaborated on one of the first animated TV ads – his squiggles to my lyrics. A jingle for Mobil Oil. I can still sing it: “Big cars, bubble cars, trouble trucks and aeroplanes... steamrollers, rollercoasters, trams and trains”. Well, I was only 16. And I can still picture it, with Bruce’s variety of vehicles. This led us to collaborate on Hearts and Minds, a film on the Vietnam War that won a major AFI Award. By then there was no stopping him. He went on to win an Oscar (for best animated short film – Leisure, in 1976).

After filming in Vietnam, Bruce came back profoundly changed. He didn’t need an entire film to tell the story; he did it in one great cartoon – in a new newspaper called The Australian. It showed two Vietnamese kids huddling in a landscape blasted by bombs. One kid says to the other, “What are you going to do if you grow up?” If.

Petty in 2001, in front of a tapestry of a sketch he drew depicting Melbourne in 1901 at the time of Federation. Picture: AAP Image/Julian Smith

We’d grown up a just few miles from each other – me on a small farm in East Kew and he on one in Doncaster. And our lives would keep intersecting. He persuaded legendary editor Adrian Deamer to give me a job at The Australian – and decades later I would return the compliment by having another legendary editor, Graham Perkin, offer Petty political-cartoonist asylum at The Age. Over the years I’d write intros for a Bruce book and he’d illustrate one of mine. Quite a few Pettys hang on my office wall. Including costume designs for a Shakespearean production at the Old Vic.

As criticism of the Loans Affair rained down on Gough Whitlam, Bruce Petty looked at the credibility of European criticism. The cartoon appeared in The Australian in 1975.

Bruce’s body of work includes other award-winning films – on art, Australian history and Karl Marx. He also built unwieldy, wondrous and wobbly machines, all interconnected cogs and levers, to dramatise the connectedness between people and policies. Political and environmental. Why this column now? For the simple reason that Bruce turns 93 in November – he’ still drawing – and I knew you’d want to know. To hell with state funerals – we should have state birthdays. And not only for royalty.

Before letting you get on with your day, a memory of another Petty masterpiece. This time wordless. Drawn in honour of The Dismissal, it’s a simple sketch of Parliament House (the old one) with a huge fan on top. What’s that hitting it?