Political cartoonist of the year? ‘You must be joking’

When Megan Herbert got the call telling her she had been voted Australian political cartoonist of the year, she had the most vocationally appropriate response imaginable.

“I didn’t believe them. I thought it was a joke. Ha-ha. I said, ‘Do you want to do a recount?’ but they said, ‘There’s no mistake, and it was unanimous.’ I was like, ‘What? Wow’.”

Credit: Megan Herbert

There’s no feigned humility in this. Herbert is relatively new to the game. Her first paid work didn’t appear until 2021, in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, where she is now published every second Monday.

And while cartooning is a passion, it is but one part of a dizzyingly broad employment palette.

“There’s no way you can support yourself on a cartoonist’s salary,” she says. “I’ve got about 10 different jobs that, when you tie them all together, equal a career and a sustainable income.”

Cartooning is a passion for Megan Herbert.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The main one is on Neighbours. “I started with them as my first job out of university in 2000, as the photocopy girl, and I’ve worked my way through every position, up to script producer, and now I’m a freelance scriptwriter.”

Nor is her work typical of the realm of political cartooning. Her style is very much in the vein of The New Yorker, a magazine to which she has submitted mounds of work without success, and into whose storied pages she still hopes to be admitted one day.

“I’m not doing this sort of classic Australian political cartoon where you do a funny drawing of the politician with a big nose,” she says. “That’s not really my style, and sometimes I get flak for that. The trolls take aim, they don’t find any of my cartoons funny.”

How would you describe your style, then?

“It’s more looking at the issues rather than the people making the soundbites because at the end of all the policies that are coming out every day, there’s somebody who gets affected by them.

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“I always try to look at what does this actually mean for somebody in the world – this announcement or this new law, or this cancellation of something, or an interest-rate rise - what does that mean for the person reading the paper? And then, if I can put that point of view across, perhaps people in charge of making the laws will go, ‘Ooh’.

“That’s wishful thinking, maybe, but that’s the aim – to find an empathetic angle. Sometimes they’re funny, but that’s not always my very first thought.”

Herbert’s work will be on display for the next year, alongside that of 39 of her peers, in the Behind the Lines exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy in Old Parliament House in Canberra.

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It was praised by the five-person judging panel for demonstrating “a sophisticated range of visual techniques” and for commenting on a broad range of issues “in an even-handed way that connects with and involves her audience”.