If the political cartoons in our daily newspapers accurately reflected reality then John Howard would walk around with a rat’s tail, Mark Latham would have Frankenstein-like bolts sticking out of his neck and the Foreign Minister would constantly be prancing about in stockings.

The creators of these indelible images weave their magic spurred on by a sense of outrage about the way governments operate, by a faint hope that their drawings will affect public debate and, yes, by the fact that it helps pay the bills. Their audience benefits from having intricate political matters condensed into simple, and often chuckle-inducing, images. The lampooned politicians are left with the consolation that they are at least worthy of being talked about.

Encumbered only by their own sense of ethics and - to varying degrees - their editors’ decisions as to what is appropriate, political cartoonists have a wide range of subjects to choose from. The Best Australian Political Cartoons 2004, edited by Russ Radcliffe, is a compilation of works by 28 cartoonists from across the country and it shows that the dominant subjects of last year were the federal election campaign and the turmoil in Iraq.

There were more than a few raised eyebrows when the 2002 Graham Perkin Award for the Australian Journalist of the Year went to John Spooner, illustrator and cartoonist of The Age newspaper. Can a cartoonist really be called a journalist? Bill Leak, editorial cartoonist for The Australian, says his lot are “just pumped up, trumped up journalists who know how to draw”. Chris Kelly, cartoonist for the Green Left Weekly, also thinks a good case can be made for art as journalism. “[Spooner] addressed an issue, he’s communicated the essence of it… in a beautifully succinct form so that people are better educated [for it]”, Kelly says.

In 1996, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer wore a stocking on one of his legs to be photographed as part of a ‘guess the leg’ competition for a children’s charity event. The country’s cartoonists have never let him forget it, with most choosing to depict him in that attire at every chance they get. Leak – who has that particular photo of Downer pinned up among others above his work desk - says the joke has become something people expect when seeing the Foreign Minister. “It’s like if I draw him and suddenly don’t put the stockings on – it doesn’t look like him!” he says.

Leak relates the story of how The Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Alan Moir has taken to drawing Howard with one eye – “when he became one-eyed towards the Americans” - and the complaints people wrote in with when Moir one day absent-mindedly drew the PM with two eyes.

But Leak says there are only a certain number of such attributes that can be attached to politicians for their entire career. He makes the distinction between Downer’s trait and his own temporary depiction of Howard with a rat’s tail. That was based on the mid-election campaign kerfuffle caused by a Liberal party official claiming that a current Liberal Senator, George Brandis, had called Howard “a lying rodent”. Brandis denied it, but then muddied the issue further by reportedly saying he has referred to Howard as “the rodent”, as a term of endearment. Leak started adding the tail to his cartoons of Howard but stopped after the election results came out.

“[Downer’s characteristics] have stuck because he did wear the fishnet stockings. You know, it’s his own fault, and the fishnet stockings are essentially just very funny but I think that every time you draw the Prime Minister by putting a tail on him you say ‘the man is a rat’. People are going to forget that it comes from this story involving George Brandis… It was funny but was only funny then and I think once people lose sight of the context of something as insulting as the image of drawing a bloke as a rat then it just looks like I can’t criticise him or I can’t actually deal with what he’s saying. I’d just have to keep saying ‘the man’s a rat’ and I just think it’s a bit of a lame way to do cartoons, really,” Leak says.

Political cartoonists can often get away with ruthless depictions of public figures - in ways that writers could only dream of - thanks to legal rulings that have said drawings are open to interpretation. Unlike users of the written word, who can be successfully sued for defamation even in cases where their statements are true, artists’ depictions can be more ambiguous and interpretations are subjective. “The judge might say, ‘you reckon it defames you, it certainly looks to me like it defames you, but the artist has said he believes [otherwise]’,” Kelly explains.

There are still some limits, however. But Leak, as he stands in his office drawing the cartoon that will appear in the Christmas edition of The Australian, freely admits to not knowing quite where the line is. “There are of course moments when I’ll go over the top and do a cartoon that’s clearly defamatory but it will be clearly defamatory to the lawyers, it won’t be clearly defamatory to me,” he says. “They’ll say ‘that is totally defamatory, totally outrageous’ and Blind Freddy can see it except that I can’t.’”

The law is one thing, ethics quite another. Are there any taboo subjects? Leak says there aren’t. Kelly says he is wary of being insensitive about personal matters. Both declare that religion is a dangerous topic to broach. “People get so serious about their own pet subjects,” Leak laments.

But Leak says the feedback from readers can also be positive. “One of the encouraging things about this job is that there are so many people out there who may have absolutely antithetical political points of view to your own, that might not approve of a single thing you say in your cartoon, but if they are intelligent, aware people with a sense of humour, they’ll still write you a lovely letter and say ‘didn’t agree with a word of that but [that was] a terrific comment’ and it’s because they appreciate that what you’re actually doing is trying to stimulate debate. You’re not trying to make enemies. You’re not trying to be divisive”.

While not all editorial cartoonists will always make use of humour, they say it is the thing that makes cartoons most memorable. So it can be a difficult time for cartoonists when the rest of the newspaper is full of stories that are anything but funny. The cartoonists’ responses to the devastation wrecked by the Indian Ocean tsunamis, for example, have been sombre and reflective; Moir, in The Sydney Morning Herald, had a tiny raft carrying a flag with the words ‘humanity’ floating precariously among massive waves; a cartoon by Mark Knight that appeared in The Advertiser had a looming wave towering above huts labelled ‘human lives’, ‘economy’ and ‘tourism’. In his typically irreverent style, Leak has filled his space on The Australian’s editorial page over the last few days with a series of a man caught up in the tidal waves, sitting in a tree reading a newspaper and wondering about the fate of the Sydney-to-Hobart race participants. The newspaper published one letter to the editor the next day complaining that it was in poor taste.

For all their apparently brash attitudes and often outrageous caricatures, cartoonists can feel a sense of regret about the drawings they have had published. Like writers, they can base their opinions on false information, or take a stab at a subject they are not entirely sure about, and end up with egg on their face. Leak says that on the rare occasions where he has got it just plain wrong he has sent off letters of apology.

Kelly knows what it is like to be on the other side. As a housing manager at the University of Tasmania he was once the subject of a student tenant’s “very good cartoon” making fun of his position. He recalls himself initially thinking how unfair it was, given that he had only been in the job for a week. He says he was in the fortunate position of being able to retaliate with a cartoon of his own, and the two sparring artists got on quite well after that. Most caricatured politicians however, Kelly says, have either developed a thick hide or are just impressed that they have made it on to the editorial page.

The Best Australian Political Cartoons 2004’s heavy targeting of the government of the day, complete with an introduction by Phillip Adams, means it is unlikely to have been a stocking-stuffer over at Kirribilli House this Christmas. Yet Latham wasn’t safe either, still being depicted as the aggro taxi-basher and – courtesy of The Courier-Mail’s Sean Leahy – a creation of Dr. Frankenstein. Asked if there have been any good right-wing cartoonists, Leak nominates the late Bill Mitchell, of The Australian, and Larry Pickering, who has worked at several newspapers. Cartoonists are a diverse bunch and “come from all sorts of angles,” Leak says.

With an audience of hundreds of thousands, a mischievous sense of humour and an opportunity to draw almost anything they like, surely it must be tempting for cartoonists to occasionally slip a coded message or in-joke into their cartoons. Leak admits to having done it in the past but admonishes himself for such “silly” acts because he says the cartoonist’s “main job is to be talking to a hell of a lot of people out there… I’ll do any idiotic thing, for fun, but not if it’s going to jeopardise whether the cartoon’s going to work or not. Because ultimately that’s the only thing that really counts. It’s just got to work.” And it usually does.

Image courtesy of Chris Kelly. www.chriskelly.net.au.

Michael Mehr is in his final year of a Media degree at Sydney University.

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