Mercury cartoonist John ‘Polly’ Farmer releases collection of his life’s work
The book of his life features cameos from some of the most famous names in history and it’s all in a day’s work for John ‘Polly’ Farmer.
Tasmania
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CARTOONIST John “Polly” Farmer has always enjoyed his relative anonymity. A keen follower of news and current affairs, he makes a point of always observing from the outside, avoiding mixing with the people he needs to satirise if at all possible. And by cartooning under the pseudonym Polly, he adds an extra layer to his privacy, and can happily walk down the street without being bothered.
Even the Mercury’s current editor, Chris Jones, says he always assumed Polly was a woman until he finally met the man behind the pen.
So while Farmer, 55, has never exactly tried to keep his identity a secret, he is certainly happy to coast through under the radar, while making precision strikes against powerful people and big issues that catch his attention along the way.
“I’ve always steered clear of politicians, I never engage with them socially,” he says. “I don’t want to get to know them because it would only make my job more difficult, especially if I ended up liking them!
“Fortunately, given how I sign my cartoons, I was fairly anonymous for some time and wasn’t abused in the streets. I do get angry letters from time to time though.”
Growing up in Lindisfarne on Hobart’s Eastern Shore, Farmer came from an artistic family. His maternal grandfather was painter and gallery curator Robert Campbell, his mother is a calligrapher and calligraphy teacher, his father was a book collector and an authority on the history of printing, and his brothers are both musicians.
His parents were also librarians, so he developed a love of reading very early, and when he first discovered the Asterix books around the age of seven, he started developing an interest in drawing and cartooning as well.
As a kid, Farmer was also friends with Tim and Scott Bailey, who lived around the corner, sons of iconic Mercury cartoonist Kev Bailey, so naturally he began to take an interest in Bailey’s work as well that of Larry Pickering and Geoff Hook.
Despite all this, Farmer says he spent most of his school years not really knowing what he wanted to do for a career, and was more obsessed with playing football than anything else.
But it was while he was playing for the Hobart Football Club as a teenager that he started drawing his first caricatures, and it was around the same time his teammates gave him the nickname Polly, after the legendary Geelong ruckman Graham Farmer, whose nickname was also Polly.
After a brief stint drawing the artwork for ads in the Yellow Pages, he started work at the Mercury — thanks to his friendship with Kev Bailey — in the paper’s advertising art department.
In 1985, publication changes meant it was going to be difficult for Bailey to produce a cartoon every day and someone else would be needed to draw one for Monday and Tuesday each week.
With an encouraging nudge from Bailey, a nervous Farmer produced his first editorial cartoon, signing it with JF.
“I shudder when I look at those early ones now,” he says. “My stuff, in its infancy, was crap. But they published it, so someone obviously thought it was funny!”
He continued working in the Mercury’s art department until 1987, when he relocated to the Gold Coast, becoming the resident artist and cartoonist for the Gold Coast Bulletin. It was during this time that he started using Polly as a pen name.
Later he moved back home to the Mercury’s art department and when Bailey retired in 1994, Polly became the Mercury’s principal cartoonist.
Farmer says the most common questions he gets asked are where his ideas come from and what an average day is like for a cartoonist, and there is very little glamour or gloss in the answers to either.
“Being creative to a deadline and doing it every day is really hard work,” he says. “Creativity generally is something that shouldn’t be forced and, when it is, it creates peculiar pressures, especially if you’re creating humour. You spend a lot of time in your own head trying to work out what you’re going to do, going round and round in circles.”
Farmer found the best mental state to be in for his creativity was one similar to being on the verge of falling asleep, that semi-awake state where your mind freely chases down every random thought and idea that pops up.
But that kind of silent meditation can be difficult to achieve in the environment of a busy, noisy newsroom. And it comes with other pitfalls, too.
“I have actually nodded off a few times and then woken up wondering what I was thinking about, because by that point I’d lost it,” he laughs. “And even if you don’t nod off, you can lose good ideas because your brain doesn’t just stop musing once it hits something good. You might hit upon a fantastic idea but before you can grab it your brain moves on and suddenly you’ve lost the thread — it can be hard to consciously control.”
Cartoons need to be concise. A cartoonist’s position on often complex issues must be condensed into a single drawing that people will be able to look at and understand instantly.
Farmer reckons he has between 10 seconds and one minute of a reader’s attention each day, so he tries to make it count. Sometimes, though, there is backlash.
“You can get a skewed perspective of what people think of your work because generally only angry people bother to write letters,” he says. “It doesn’t happen too often, though, and when it does it can be on a cartoon which you weren’t expecting to upset people.
“In the 1990s I did a cartoon about the Balkans Conflict which was very critical of Serbia. The next day I got a call from some bloke with a really thick European accent who said ‘I have gun, I know where you live,’ and then he hung up. That was a bit unsettling.
“Another one that caused me some trouble was a fairly nothing cartoon criticising violent footy supporters. I got a call from a really angry Collingwood supporter who threatened to come in to the office and beat the crap out of me. I think he made the point way better than I did in my cartoon.”
As sharp as his political commentary may be, Farmer says he makes a conscious effort never to make any of it personal.
“I’ve never attacked someone for personal reasons, if I’m criticising anything it is always for reasons of bad policy or bad judgment, never anything personal.
“And I hope it isn’t taken personally, either, because that is what we are here to do in the media, to hold people in power to account, and what I do is a part of that.
The act of putting a book together was a good excuse for plenty of self-reflection as well, as Farmer trawled through some 10,000 cartoons dating back to 1985.
“In the end I selected 500 for the book. You can’t put everything in, and luckily I was able to knock a lot out really quickly because, looking back, there was a lot of rubbish.
“I tried to keep a focus on including the big issues, events people will remember and recognise, things that were talked about. So it’s quite broad.
“But if there’s some big issue or event that you don’t see represented in the book, it could be that I didn’t work that day, or maybe the cartoon I did was rubbish and doesn’t deserve to be seen again.”
You might have guessed by now that Farmer tends to be his own worst critic, but in the relentlessly world of newspaper deadlines, he learned a long time ago not to be sentimental or self-congratulatory about his work.
“I try not to look back too much. Once I’ve drawn it and sent it I stop wondering and worrying and move on. Whether I’m happy with it or not, it’s done, and tomorrow will be something totally different.
“I’ve never been someone who looks back and reflects on what I’ve done, but I felt putting this book together was a good way to justify to myself how I’ve spent the last 35 years.”
These days Farmer still lives in Hobart and contributes two cartoons a week to the Mercury and one to the Sunday Tasmanian, sharing the cartooning workload with Jon Kudelka and Christopher Downes. And rather than the pencil and ink on paper that he used when he started out, these days he works digitally, drawing on a tablet.
But as convenient and intuitive as modern art technology is, Farmer feels like he has lost something in the translation to digital cartooning.
“The tablet is great, you can clean up the dodgy lines and make everything look really sharp and clear. It’s really easy to work with — but I feel like there is a kind of sterility to the drawings when they are cleaned up so much.
“Looking back at old cartoons — not just mine but those of all the guys who were doing it with ink and paper — I think there is so much more life to them, something really organic and real, that you just don’t get digitally.”
After a little over three decades in the game, Farmer says his favourite period for cartooning was the reign of Labor premier Paul Lennon from 2004-08. He says this turbulent period of Tasmanian politics was a gift to cartoonists, not just because of the upheaval taking place in Tasmania at the time, but because Lennon himself was so much fun to draw.
“Lennon was always my favourite to draw, always a great caricature, with the bristling moustache and the red hair. And also because he had a confrontational personality which allowed you to have fun with him.
“I’m not sure how funny he found it, but it was fun doing it!”
A Minute of Your Time: 30 years of cartoons by John “Polly” Farmer, is on sale now at selected bookshops, newsagents, and online at johnpollyfarmer.com.au for $49.99
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