By Jordan Baker
Australian wartime prime minister Billy Hughes hated cartoonist David Low and tried to get him conscripted into the army. Adolf Hitler hated him too, and put Low on a list of people to be killed once Germany took over Britain. Low mercilessly mocked the powerful from left to right and pioneered freedom defended by political cartoonists in the democratic world ever since; that they should be free to satirise as they choose.
The Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes was able to work like that for two decades. But in January, she submitted a drawing to her editor featuring billionaires – including her newspaper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – offering bags of money to US President Donald Trump. The paper wouldn’t run it. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at ... until now,” she said, and quit.
Ann Telnaes’ original cartoon that was rejected by the editor of The Washington Post.
A chill ran through the hearts of her colleagues worldwide, including those in Australia. The art of political cartooning was already fighting for survival, weakened by shrinking newspaper budgets, a struggle to appeal to readers in an online format, and a polarised community with waning tolerance for ideas that challenged them. Now, the editor of a major newspaper – the key defender of cartoonists’ freedoms, the person who should be a leader in holding truth to power – was bowing to it instead.
Artists retaliated with their most potent weapon. “There’s been a huge number of cartoons made in homage to [Telnaes],” says Eleri Harris, who is among a new generation of Australian cartoonists who are finding alternatives to traditional media. “It feels like a real moment.”
They mocked the Post, which is the paper that broke the Watergate scandal; one showed Bezos and other tech billionaires hurling money into Donald Trump’s Deep Throat, while another had Richard Nixon wishing he’d lived in the Bezos era, too.
Mocking cartoons in response to The Washington Post’s refusal to print Telnaes’ cartoon.Credit: Reddit
Satirical cartoons have long been one of the most colourful features of Australia’s media landscape. It’s a rare skill, combining artistic talent with political nous. “The best ones don’t just make you smile; they make you think,” says Robert Phiddian, an academic at Flinders University and author of an upcoming history of Australian cartooning. As this masthead’s Cathy Wilcox puts it, “Cartoons can exaggerate the hell out of things while at the same time being truer than true”.
There were once dozens of full-time artists at the country’s newspapers, back when readers with ink-stained fingers would turn to the political cartoon after browsing the headlines. In Australia, they began in weekly magazines such as The Bulletin and shifted to daily news pages when printing technology improved. The Sydney Morning Herald hired its first political cartoonist in 1943; The Age followed in 1967.
Low, a New Zealander who moved to Australia and then to the United Kingdom after the First World War, is one of history’s most famous cartoonists. “He’s the one who established the idea that the cartoonist is an independent commentator, that they have a right to draw what they want to draw, and that the editor has the right to refuse something but doesn’t have the right to tell you what to do,” says Phiddian.
David Low, one of history’s most famous cartoonists, in 1939.Credit: Fairfax Archives
It has always been a fraught job. Good cartoonists push boundaries and upset people; sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes to great acclaim and occasionally with tragic results, such as the massacre in 2015 of 12 people at the headquarters of French paper Charlie Hebdo, which had mocked the prophet Muhammad.
They test the limits of free speech, which are often blurry. Age cartoonist Michael Leunig’s whimsical character delighted readers for decades, but his opinions eventually began to offend, too. A cartoon depicting a mother more interested in her phone than her baby sparked outrage. His relationship with The Age became strained after the paper rejected a cartoon he’d drawn in 2021, which compared resistance to vaccine requirements to the “Tank Man” in Tiananmen Square.
Many publishers back away from the risk. “In America, a lot of newspapers actually ditched their editorial cartoonist because they were terrified of the reaction that some cartoonists would generate,” says Mark Knight, a veteran cartoonist who now works for News Corp’s Herald Sun in Melbourne. “It would polarise readers, which in turn affects advertisers, which in turn affects revenue. We saw political cartoonists being considered not worth the trouble, which is terrible, especially in supposedly the world’s greatest democracy.”
Their freedom is not a blank cheque. Cartoonists have had to evolve, and their use of tropes is one example. Some – National Party MPs chewing wheat, billionaires sucking cigars, John Howard’s eyebrows – survive, but others are deeply loaded with decades of tragedy and cross an invisible line, even if the reference is inadvertent. “We need to be aware of the history, such as the depictions of Jews during the Holocaust,” says Wilcox.
Knight learned this the hard way when he drew a cartoon of tennis star Serena Williams spitting the dummy after an on-court tantrum in 2018. “The cartoon didn’t utter a mention here; I put it on Twitter, it went to America, and it dropped into racial politics in America,” he tells this masthead. Among the critics were Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and The Washington Post, which said it reflected “dehumanising Jim Crow caricatures” (the Press Council ruled it did not breach media standards).
A topical cartoon from Mark Knight, one of the last of the cartoonist “old guard”.
In the halcyon days, there were dozens of full-time cartoonists in Australia. Their ranks began thinning with the digital transition about 20 years ago. News organisations still struggle to make cartoons work online. The printed cartoon sits on the opinion pages, surrounded by letters and editorials. Regular readers understood the context. “If you’ve read yesterday’s paper, if you’re in the news cycle, you could see [the meaning] immediately,” says Phiddian.
Without wide knowledge of current affairs – to a dip-in, dip-out digital reader, for example – cartoons can be hit-and-miss. “To get a joke you’ve got to have the context in your head, that’s why looking at cartoons from 20, 50 years ago takes an awful lot of explanation,” Phiddian says.
Knight says the digital era brings challenges but also benefits. If a cartoon goes viral, “my work is seen by more readers than ever before”, he says.
Another challenge for modern cartoonists is the cacophony of furious opinions about their work, which can lead to vicious, personal attacks. “The ability of social media to take a cartoon way outside of its intended audience, often for the express purpose of inviting a pile on, has certainly been cause for many cartoonists to decide that social media is not worth the pain, or that maybe they won’t touch a subject,” Wilcox told a recent cartoon symposium.
Cathy Wilcox at work in her home studio.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Knight has lived this. “Years ago, with the Serena thing, my job came into the front door to my family,” he says. “I’m very wary of that now.”
The late cartoonist for The Australian, Bill Leak, refused to self-censor (he once hit back at “sanctimonious Tweety birds” who criticised a cartoon of an Aboriginal man carrying a beer can as racist) and “that got Bill into all sorts of strife,” Knight says. “Bill was targeted by Muslim extremists [for a 2015 cartoon about prophet Muhammad]; he had to move house and go underground.”
At the cartoonists’ symposium late last year, many of those present agreed the period since the Gaza conflict began had been the most difficult of their careers. Accusations of bias, racism, and stirring of hatred have intensified beyond anything they have experienced, even during their coverage of the Middle East in the past. “The customary response to cartooning on this topic has been magnified,” says Wilcox. “Many of my colleagues declare to have had great difficulty having cartoons published at all.”
The trend towards media outlets aligning with particular ideologies has also curtailed cartoonists, says Phiddian. “They have been divided up much more into left and right,” he says. “Having an unpredictable court jester has become a lot rare; how often are you surprised by a cartoon?”
Despite all this, Wilcox says her liberty is the envy of many of her overseas colleagues. “I believe I enjoy enormous freedom, as has been traditional in my newspaper,” she says. Knight says the same. “People say a lot of terrible things about Rupert [Murdoch] and our organisation, but I draw cartoons criticising Trump, criticising our prime minister and premiers,” he says.
A cartoon from Cathy Wilcox published last December.Credit: Cathy Wilcox
Wilcox and Knight are the last of an old guard. When Wilcox started in 1989 as a young cartoonist ripe for mentorship by more experienced staff artists, there were more than 20 people working in the Herald’s art room. Now, she’s one of only about a dozen full-time cartoonists remaining in the country. She has faith that young artists will work out a way to keep drawing. Her greater concern is preserving the provocative role of political cartooning. “It’s an important spirit of rebellion,” she says. “You have to be able to criticise the government and the institutions and the powerful, so people aren’t just dulled and compliant.”
Some argue memes are the new cartoon, although Phiddian is not convinced. “They’re too easily used in propagandistic ways within a sort of narrow zone, where everybody agrees with each other,” he says. “One of the real benefits [of cartoons] is that public space that has to talk to a range of people, it’s not a subset of people loudly agreeing with each other. A good meme is like a cartoon. But memes can be used … just to abuse people. A good cartoonist can’t just abuse people.”
Australia is producing a new generation of political cartoonists, but they have to find different ways to publish their work and new ways to fund it. A few get newspaper gigs; the 2024 Political Cartoonist of the Year, Megan Herbert, is published regularly in this masthead. Many have Patreon or Substack subscription platforms. Brisbane artist James Hiller – also known as Nordacious – has a thriving online shop.
Still, most don’t have the security of a salaried job, the wide audience offered by mainstream publications, or the protection of an editor. The pressure to satisfy paid subscribers to earn a living means, says Phiddian, that “people are going to get too much of what they already agree with” instead of a cartoon that must set out to reach a broad range of people.
Jess Harwood was a “politically nerdy” kid who grew up drawing John Howard’s bushy eyebrows during the Iraq war years. The career path that was open to Wilcox had closed for her, so she’s putting her cartoons on social media and Substack. She believes the new model is changing the nature of cartooning. “The commentary [of the next generation] is different,” she says. “We’re more likely to be outwardly political and say what we think should happen. It’s hard to buy a house; the reef is going to die. That’s regarded as being more activist.”
Cartoonist Jess Harwood.
She’s not so worried about the subscriber model narrowing subject matter. ”I think the whole world is going that way at the moment, not just political cartooning,” she says. The greater challenge is making it pay. “For most of us, it’s not our main job,” she says. “We’re just doing this because we’d like to draw, and we have something to say.”
These challenges may be too much for the political cartoon to survive in its present form, but Phiddian is optimistic. “There’s an awful lot of cartooning going on,” he says. “The cartoon function is alive and well and probably always will be, but the host organism [newspapers] is dying. I’m sure it will survive newspapers. I just can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to look like.”
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