Cartoonist Mark Knight: ‘They wished I was dead’

Mark Knight’s Serena Williams cartoon saw his family terrorised and months on, he’s still shunned by his own. So who is fair game?

Cartoonist Mark Knight in his studio. Picture: Jake Nowakowski.

Those who’ve been wounded by a perfectly serviceable nose drawn as a monstrous hairy beak, or a modest pot belly blown into a button-popping deformity, or pilloried unkindly by the sharp stroke of a satirist’s pen might relish news of cartoonists under siege. Though victims of caricature often snap up the original art work for their “me wall”, despots and terrorists are less forgiving. These days, laughing with knives may get your head chopped off. Tricky enough to be funny. Tougher still to block those pesky voices in your head, censoring an unsayable nugget of truth for fear of the repercussions, chiselling any rough edges that might cause offence. Now these jesters must hold steady while the Twittersphere’s predatory claws hover at their elbow hoping for roadkill.

Any scraps of bloodied fur have been cleansed from the pebbled drive of Herald Sun ­cartoonist Mark Knight’s house in regional Victoria when I visit him three months after the furore over his caricature of tennis legend Serena Williams losing it at the US Open. He was branded a “white supremacist”, “sexist”, “racist”, “misogynist” and worse. For a boy who grew up in the multicultural suburb of Lakemba in southwest Sydney, his best childhood friend Chinese Australian, the accusatory vehemence of strangers stunned him.

Mark Knight’s Serena Williams cartoon. Picture: Mark Knight.

Ridiculously, he initially thought there’d been a mix up. That he could sort this whole mess. The first tweet he saw from US sports commentator Julie diCaro, asking where were the men who’d broken racquets, Knight answered pronto, smugly posting his send-up of Nick Kyrgios’ tantrum days earlier. That was his only attempt at replying as social media went ballistic. Celebrities including Harry Potter creator JK Rowling (he’s kept the screen shot) and Australian entertainer Eddie ­Perfect rebuked him. Nastiest were the threats of violence from strangers. “They traced my wife and children through Facebook. Our son’s a pilot. There were messages that said, ‘I hope your son’s plane crashes into your house and kills you all’. They wished I was dead, there were threats, aggressive horrible stuff against the kids, like ‘We hope someone gets you, gets your family’. I was a ‘racist arsehole’. I work in the media, I know what to expect, but my family doesn’t and it hit them really hard. My wife Sophie was scared, very scared.”

Security guards stood sentry for a week at the Knights’ bush farm, all of them young men from Chinese, Turkish, Indian and Serbian backgrounds, working extra jobs to get ahead. “One of them poked his head into my studio. He said to me, ‘So you’re an artist.’ He was perplexed. ‘Why do you need security?’” Why indeed?

When balaclava-clad jihadists gunned down ­cartoonists and staff in the Paris office of the small satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, four years ago last week, satirical humour suffered concussion. The left-wing weekly had published provocative depictions of the Prophet Mohammed. The late Bill Leak, cartoonist for The Australian, responded to the deadly terrorist attack in characteristic up-yours fashion by immediately firing off another parody of the prophet. His salute of solidarity prompted Islamic web chatter so frightening that the Australian Federal Police insisted that Leak shift to a house with a fortified bedroom door and panic buttons.

Knight had not inflamed terrorists. He’d ­lampooned a black female tennis champion who serves at speeds of 200km/h while kicking ­stereotype to oblivion with her athleticism and reported net wealth of over $180 million. Australian readers were unfazed by his portrayal of Serena’s antics spoiling the hard-won victory of Japan’s Naomi Osaka. The cartoon was published on a Monday morning, and the paper’s reader hotline ran quiet all day. But that evening Knight put his cartoon on Twitter before an international audience, including those in the US with a different sensibility, forged by a painful past of segregation and slavery. Many saw Knight’s exaggeration of Williams’ physical features – the essence of any cartoonist’s art – as racist and demeaning. The reprisal was swift and menacing.

“It was as if the poison had come down the driveway, inside our front door and into our house, and one of the things I’ve always prided myself on is leaving work to one side to live a normal family life,” he says. “So that was scary.”

Galvanised by the global outrage, local media descended on his rural retreat. “First question, bang, was ‘How do you feel about your cartoons being compared to the slavery era?’ They kept ­hitting me on this point. ‘Why did you draw her as a gorilla?’” Knight defended himself. “I wasn’t thinking of black racist images. I was thinking of Serena as a child having a tantrum. Serena is a very powerful person, incredibly rich and successful, but because she’s black and a woman she’s seen to be marginalised and downtrodden.” He’d drawn her before, just as big and strong. This was about her behaviour, not the colour of her skin or her gender, he argued. He shut out the white noise and plied his craft, searching out humour on the public stage, puncturing pomposity, peeling back the layers of political spin, drawing blood.

Cartoonist Mark Knight in his studio. Picture: Jake Nowakowski.

Cartoons do not court diplomacy or politeness. They trade in exaggeration, peddling seditious ideas as satire, requiring imagination, wit, draughtsmanship, with a spunk once tempered chiefly by the drag of defamation or editorial ­censorship. Cartoonists mostly toil alone, striving for originality. Not only are their numbers shrinking but ­artists fear the last unspun space for commentary is shrivelling as well.

The Serena Williams furore subsided almost as quickly as it had flared. Last month, inside his ­studio, a converted three-car garage, the family’s horses grazing nearby, wood chopped and stacked for next winter, Knight says this sanctuary saved him. Dressed for the office in jeans and sneakers he’s determined not to get the yips. “You shouldn’t be afraid to say things. I’m not some loony loudmouth who likes to ram opinions down people’s throat. I see myself as an observer of things and I take note of them and I put them in my cartoons. It would be a shame if you have to look at things through a particular prism. I couldn’t do it,” he says. His boyish face almost pales at the thought.

Former president of the Human Rights ­Commission (HRC), Gillian Triggs, enjoyed warm applause inside the HC Coombs Lecture Theatre at Canberra’s Australian National University last October at a talk promoting her memoir, Speaking Up. Though she’d made some enemies during her tenure she was startled by a curve-ball question from the audience. Bill Leak’s older sister, school teacher Lynne Kowalik, rose from her chair to resolve something that had been troubling her since her brother’s death from a coronary in March 2017: “Why did you feel it was necessary to sue Bill Leak personally?” Flustered, Triggs strenuously denied ever entertaining such a thought and expressed sympathy for her loss.

Kowalik still gets teary talking about her ­ebullient brother. A week before he died he’d been bereft at rumours the HRC was about to launch another salvo in the long-running dispute over his incendiary cartoon about dysfunctional indigenous dads. She felt she had to ask Triggs the truth of it. In fact, it was the newspaper, not Leak, that had received a letter from Triggs’ lawyer demanding a correction over reporting of the case, but he’d dreaded being swept up again after two years of sustained assault on his character, his craft and his personal safety.

Since 2015, when police detected a jihadist plot to kill Leak, with his photo and address identified in online chat forums, he’d been terrified for the welfare of his family. Sober for seven years, he was smoking heavily. His cartoonist son, Johannes Leak, recalls his father so on edge he once answered the door with a dumbbell in his hand.

Barely a year later he came under verbal attack when he weighed into the debate over indigenous juveniles in detention with his cartoon of a scruffy youth beside an indigenous cop who’s telling an indigenous dad with a beer can that he’d better talk to his son about personal responsibility. “Yeah, righto…what’s his name then?” the father asks. The Australian Press Council, in response to 700 complaints, declined to rule on the cartoon, ­noting that satire and cartooning had long been afforded great latitude “in a free and vigorous press’’. It reached agreement with The Australian to run two opinion pieces providing “Indigenous perspectives” on the cartoon.

The late Bill Leak.

Three people lodged formal complaints with the HRC under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, triggering an investigation that swirled for months before these were withdrawn and the case closed. Leak called for the repeal of 18C at a parliamentary inquiry, likening the HRC to the jihadi terrorists determined to execute him. “As a cartoonist I run the risk of ‘offending’ someone, somewhere, every day,” he explained, acknowledging his tool kit of “confronting, hard hitting and pointed imagery”. Affront, disagreement, ­controversy, were occupational hazards he could wear, he explained. “Cartooning, by its very nature, is always a controversial business… this after all is what a good cartoonist does.” He insisted his indigenous cartoon “aimed to expose the truth of appalling levels of violence endured by Aboriginal women and children” and was not intended to malign on racial grounds. He was “publicly vilified as a racist by anonymous ‘social justice warriors’ on social media” and he was also “persecuted by an agency of the state”, he complained. His son describes his father’s life as a “living hell” for a while. “You can’t imagine the stress he was under. The level of nastiness and misunderstanding, when half of society turns on you… his reputation was dragged through the mud.”

Leak worried at the “chilling effect” on the bit of a cartoonist’s brain that speaks the rough truth, as English novelist George Meredith expressed the aim of caricature. At the launch of his final book, Trigger Warning, days before he died, Leak told a crowd gathered at Sydney’s Centre for Independent Studies that our sense of humour had been poisoned by political correctness. When he’d started out 30 years ago, an old timer, cartoonist Bill Mitchell, had advised him that while he only had to be funny once a day it was a hard gig. “He had no idea how much harder it would be for me than it ever was for him,” Leak said. Instead of looking for laughter, people now hunted for offence, to “parade their moral superiority in 140 characters or less scratched on the dunny door of social media where every other humourless halfwit… can join in the fun”. On cue, Barry Humphries gate-crashed the event, lurching through the door as the drooling, lecherous Sir Les Patterson, a character conceived well before the #MeToo movement. Imagine if downtrodden housewives from Moonee Ponds had objected to Dame Edna!

Flick through an album of Australia’s black andwhite art and there’s cruel, crude racism embedded in our cultural past towards the ­Chinese, Jews, and most derisorily, Aboriginal people. Sydney artist Mick Paul’s 1926 sketch is particularly ­grotesque; an indigenous house girl with huge bare feet and the face of an ape ­confesses to the white “missus” that maybe her “Jackie” did pinch the cooking wine because “that fella that drunk las’ night I see him double”.

Leak was right. Mitchell, who retired in 1994, held sway when print ruled, employing many more cartoonists and illustrators, while cranky readers had to write a letter, stamp an envelope and walk to the post box to get heard. The community was less fragmented into groups protecting identity, turf, and rights. Global platforms and software technology are points of light for cartoonists grappling with job losses through digital disruption. But online activity carries greater risk of being misunderstood.

Professor Robert Phiddian, one of Australia’s few serious scholars of political cartoon history, suggests Knight’s image of Williams was unintentionally tone deaf to the “hypersensitivity” of an American audience. “Cartoons used to exist in metropolitan markets. Now there is no local ­context,” he says. After years in Washington DC I remember wincing when a man on the New South Wales coast boasted he’d caught a “nigger fish” (slang for luderick, or blackfish). Our streets seemed so white by contrast with the black neighbourhood where we’d lived. Michelle Obama reminded a British audience on her recent book tour that it was still tough for black women. They become “a caricature”, with people co-opting things they like, such as “the size of our hips, our style, our swag”, but then they demonise them.

Loss of context amplifies the potential for ­misinterpretation in arenas where audiences may be unfamiliar with a cartoonist’s voice. After the Serena saga Knight had to refresh his memory of the Jim Crow images but his portfolio of 30 years, like Leak’s voluminous output, demonstrates a gift for treating everyone equally unfairly. Knight says he loves that readers can’t pick his politics.

He’s less fond of fractious nitpicking. Sudanese community activist Nyadol Nyuon accused him of racism a month before the US Open, over a ­cartoon with African youths running amok at a Victorian railway station. Nyuon’s Twitter feed demanded: “Where is the cartoon of 100 gangs of white youths in Torquay… when white youths riot it’s anti-social behaviour, when black youths riot it’s a gang crisis.” Knight had sought to skewer state transport minister Jacinta Allan’s ­banning of Sky News on train station screens as a low priority amidst reports of black teenagers on the rampage. Days before he’d ­condemned three white hoodlums caught on CCTV bashing a bystander. Nyuon possibly missed that cartoon. As Leak warned at his book launch, images are increasingly being “deconstructed” in isolation by groups alert for dog-whistling references to race and gender.

Australian cartoonists have been held most often to account by the Jewish community. ­Former Age editor Michael Gawenda refused to publish two cartoons about the Middle East that he considered inflammatory. Phiddian believes a global reach has imposed another layer of restraint far beyond the power of an editor’s veto that may cruel and temper expression. “There is no knowing what is going to go off,” he says.

A Charlie Hebdo cartoon last August after the collapse of a bridge in Italy – “Built by Italians, cleaned by migrants” – presents a “Sambo” black man with a broom. It passed without flak, perhaps because the figure wasn’t personalised.

“Everyone is happy about satire they agree with,” Phiddian muses. “I do wonder whether the enthusiasm for sympathy on all sorts of topics means that satire is being blackballed? Satire always marks the edge of taboo. That’s its job. The really big change is that now people from subjugated groups are getting a bigger say in how they are represented.” Heightened touchiness coincides with the rise of the “selfie” as folk curate their online presence, enfeebling a self-deprecatory streak that nourishes humour.

The Australian’s illustrator Eric Lobbecke ­welcomes “a new conversation about what we can and can’t say, becoming a little more civil in the way minorities are approached. We can be civil and funny at the same time; we don’t have to be derogatory.” He’s embraced social media, warier now that he’s watched Knight’s roasting. Cautious, too, since “you never know if I draw Mohammed whether some nutter is going to come through the front door and shoot”, he says. “The closer you get to the truth the more vitriolic it becomes.” Lobbecke acknowledges his gentler jib. “I haven’t been threatened, thank God. I’m prudent in the way that I draw things. Braver people than me draw ire.”

Cartoonist Michael Leunig. Picture: Sam Cooper.

In search of another perspective I knock on thedoor of a converted inner-city Melbourne warehouse where veteran cartoonist, poet and philosopher Michael Leunig, now 73, still harbours a winkle of mischief despite his foreboding at society’s “punishing impulse” and its silencing muzzle. Leak called it a “psychic infection”. Leunig conjures up Orwell and the witch hunts of McCarthyism. “Humour is in trouble,” he says. “A ­cartoon is only a drawing. It’s not an act of parliament. There’s no power in it, yet it’s treated as if it’s a proclamation.” He describes the cartoonist’s square as “a little grey area where you can touch on things” that otherwise can’t be broached. “A joke is a prayer sometimes, it’s reminding us of our humanity, but it’s also naughty, cheeky, because it’s like the underdog speaking truth to power.”

In the 1970s he recalls standing beside a former colleague at The Age, the late Les Tanner, as he opened a yellow envelope containing an unusual homemade device. Security experts later told them if the bomb had exploded it could have maimed their hands and faces. Tanner suspected it was sent by an Englishman incensed by his cartoon razzing “Pommy bastards” at the cricket.

“What has got worse is that you can’t say the things you once could. You can’t enter into certain areas,” Leunig worries, pointing to the rise of identity politics and editorial timidity in a climate where fear and volatility fence off civil discourse.

He’s not yet fully recovered from the hatred hurled at him for his 1995 cartoon wondering how institutional child care might damage a generation of youngsters. A thought-bubble from a baby in the cartoon goes, “I can’t believe my own mother… font of all goodness and warmth dumps me in this horrendous crèche… the failure is mine. Clearly I haven’t got what it takes.”

“There was a lot of finger pointing, hurtful insults, calling me sexist, brutal, patriarchal. There’s a wear and tear, you don’t quite understand what it’s doing to you, but if it keeps rolling in, discrediting you, words do eventually lodge in you like a poisoned dart. I was struck off a lot of lists. You get excluded and boycotted and that’s not just a paranoid feeling. People told me I hadn’t got a hope if I was applying for grants for my art because I had transgressed in a way that was unforgivable, and it was identity politics.”

Even as we talk he draws. Not the whimsical curly figures that inhabit his visual realm but taut triangular lines patterned like the scales of a ­flounder, pressing his pencil into the paper as he describes the second-guessing that impedes ­freedom of thought. “The mob has an infectious dynamic. Nobody is answerable and that’s a chilling lesson about human nature. When it plays out on Twitter, someone throws the first stone and the next second the air is full of bottles and missiles.”

His teetering pile of hate mail collected over 40 years now rests in Victoria’s State Library. “There’s a certain fanaticism, a fundamentalism almost, when identity politics, advancing one’s own cult, becomes more important than the common ideal of tolerance, of putting things on the table and examining them… This has affected our culture, our emotional temperament; it’s as if we’ve developed an observable personality disorder.”

When Knight’s cartoon of Serena Williams was published, Leunig looked at photographs of the grand slam diva on court that day. “That’s what she looked like. What’s Mark meant to do if he wants to draw Serena having a tirade? It’s his job to cross-examine power. I don’t think it was extravagant. She was in a state. You can’t un-see that.”

Williams’ husband, Alexis Ohanian, dubbed Knight’s image “racist and misogynist”, belting the Herald Sun for its front page banner headline rebuttal: “Welcome to PC World.” His wife’s international brand is built on tennis brilliance and executive smarts. She calls the shots. The only Australian interview she granted in the wake of the US Open, to Channel 10, was strictly conditional on no discussion whatsoever of that match or that cartoon or else she’d walk.

Cartoonist Cathy Wilcox Pic : news

Inside Canberra’s old Parliament House, graphicartists from around the country and their partners gathered in November for the Australian Cartoonists’ Association’s annual Stanley awards, named in honour of Stan Cross, who won world fame with his 1933 gag about a labourer on top of a skyscraper who’s checked his lethal fall by clutching his work mate’s duds, thereby exposing a pair of scrawny bare legs – “For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious” encapsulated the vicissitudes of life and modesty’s curse.

Knight went along with his wife, both of them sensing a frostiness towards him, despite collecting Best Political Cartoonist for 2018, an honour particularly sweet in the circumstances. They bumped into Fairfax cartoonist Cathy ­Wilcox, one of a very few women in this game, who serves on the association’s committee. She’d joined the Guardian’s Andrew Marlton in killing off a motion of support for Knight because of their reservations about the Serena cartoon. Her encounter with Knight grew testy when she queried News Corp’s robust certitude in the face of criticism. Another cartoonist in the room that night, David Pope, had given this pig a poke in print, copying Knight’s cartoon, only instead of Serena chucking the wobbly News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch raged, while the umpire begs: “Can’t you let him win?”

Wilcox, who says she realised the power of ­satire the day she alienated a group of school friends with caricatures of them, believes Serena’s antics deserved comment. “The big problem for Mark’s cartoon was that it landed in this whole other area… I thought there was some justification [for treading carefully] in that here is a depiction with enormous historical ramifications and echoes.”

She also cringed at Leak’s portrait of neglect in dysfunctional indigenous communities. “Justifying a cruel cartoon to members of a disadvantaged community that needs help… I don’t reckon that’s a good hill to die on. Call me PC.” Though she’s endured nasty social media and editorial censorship she’s been spared aggressive personal threats.

What irked her when she met Knight on the stairwell was how he stood his ground. “I thought there would’ve been some room to say, ‘I can see how it came across’ but he’s not budged an inch.”

Knight jokes that at least nobody booed him when he collected his gong. We’re sitting in the kitchen of his house, two dogs underfoot. His wife Sophie joins us. When Knight leaves the room briefly she tells me she felt he needed the equivalent of big hugs that night. “When I first met Mark, when he was starting out, they [his fellow cartoonists] were really supportive. It’s changed. Everybody’s a little on edge in that cartooning world. Everybody’s got a little bit of thumb over them. It’s worrying. And Bill’s death, that shook everybody. I think Mark feels he was pushed to an untimely death.” Leak’s sister, Lynne Kowalik, reveals her brother felt his colleagues’ disaffection keenly. “That really upset Bill. People who had been his mates turned their backs on him. The loss of that camaraderie deeply affected him.”

Leunig frets at the strictures cramping editorial licence. “Once you start to become inhibited – ‘Is it OK to say this? Is it OK to say that?’ – people transgress unwittingly; they’ve used a word that’s been struck off the list, an improper word, inappropriate words,” he says, shaking his shaggy grey head of curls, mystified and mortified. “The creative process involves a lot of inappropriateness, putting things together that don’t belong together.” His wistful cartoon of “Inappropriate Proverbs” declares: “If it ain’t inappropriate, don’t fix it.”

Knight taps into the same curious thought. “I try not to listen to those voices. ‘Mark Knight, what an appropriate cartoonist’,” he laughs, grimacing. “Wouldn’t that be damning. I’m 56 now. They can run me out of town if they like. I just know this is a very loud minority that seemingly are bending the majority to their will through the power of social media… and this is the thing with some cartoonists these days. Are they political cartoonists or are they ­virtue signallers? Do they really cartoon what is happening, what people are thinking?” Is it getting worse? “Yeah,” he sighs. “I think it probably is… We all love humour that points out our failings. You can’t do that anymore. I’m not letting it turn me down. I can’t.”