Two Australians, Clive Robertson and Michael Leunig died recently. I enjoyed both of their senses of humour.
Michael Leunig was a cartoonist and a philosopher. While there are many cartoonists who are clever and can find an interesting angle on a situation, Michael seemed to have a perspective that was almost always unexpected. He was always anti-war and during periods that Australia would participate in the wars invented by the United States of America, Leunig's cartoons could become dark and almost depressive. He worked for one newspaper, The Age, for decades, but when he died, I searched for tributes and articles about him in that newspaper but could find very little. Probably the first cartoon of Leunig's that I saw was one were a man is playing the guitar or ukulele to his son in a very dirty and ugly car scrap-yard. The son says to his father “Gee dad, you're fantastic!” .
Once, when I was traveling in rural New South Wales, I found a battered copy of one of his books in a second-hand bookshop in Tamworth and it had a foreword by Helen Garner. I can still remember the tone of that foreword. It had phrases like “His cartoons cut from the newspaper and stuck to our” fridges, slowly turning yellow, were an important backdrop to our lives" (Obviously Helen Garner expressed it better than that).
Clive Robertson was a radio journalist who started his career in small country towns, where he said that he used to ride a bicycle 30 kilometers to work everyday. Then he had a series of radio programs on different stations in Australia. At one point he was appointed to read the late night news on one of the commercial television stations (it seemed a very odd choice by the station executives). I used to sit with my brothers and watch this because it was so unusual. He would intersperse the news with asides, sighs and cynical comments. Before one commercial break he said “And shortly we will be back” with more of the death and destruction which is the nightly news".
I think both of these men were important to me because they displayed a different sort of masculinity, they weren’t tough sportsmen or handsome movie stars; they were just creative men who were able to speak honestly about how they felt.
In a low-key sort of way, both of these men were an important part of my culture. “Well done” to you both.