Inside Leunig's head

March 13, 2010
Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig is coming to Nelson next week. He talks to Geoff Collett about psychotherapy, war, being a living treasure and his problem with being Australian. --------------------
Tuesday afternoon at Michael Leunig's place in some quiet corner of rural Victoria, and inspiration is coming slowly to the legendary Australian cartoonist. He is working on something for the papers to do with that country's Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, but the subject hasn't fired him up much.
"I'm not highly inspired. It's one of those days when the news is a bit flat, " he admits on the phone.
No matter. There is no shortage of other things to talk about and he can still get a hearty laugh from musing out loud about Mr Abbott, a notoriously arch-conservative Catholic now leading the Liberal Party, whose most famous moment to date was making an ill-judged public appearance in his budgie-smuggler Speedo togs.
Leunig does the political cartoonist's trademark disdain for politics well: "It's just becoming more and more fake and stylised and slick. You can't believe anything any more, and there's something disgusting about it, " he grumbles.
But for all that, and his obvious distance from the sorts of things Tony Abbott stands for, one suspects that Mr Abbott's presence is far easier for the cartoonist to bear than that of another recent Liberal leader, John Howard. The wounds left by Mr Howard still run deep and raw with Michael Leunig, so that even on this gentle, flat- news-day afternoon, talking down a phone line between a peaceful bit of the Aussie bush and languid Nelson, the resentment wells up easily.
In Australia, Leunig is a legend - in fact, officially a "national living treasure", and known for commentary, poetry, philosophy, painting, collaborations with numerous other artists, occasional television appearances and frequent public- speaking engagements, as well as his principal gig as a political cartoonist for The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
Over here, he is more likely to be known for any of the 20 or 30 books he has produced, various collections of his decades of cartooning, any of which will quickly demonstrate that Leunig is not your garden-variety political cartoonist.
He realised when he started out in the business 40 years ago that he was not especially taken by the traditional "black and white caricature thing" and wanted to treat his own work as "little visual poems", off-centre musings on the more "poetic" realm of human behaviour.
On his website, he writes - and it's worth reading - of his first act of rebellion against the "deadlines, punchlines and politics" during his early years of newspaper work. He sent through a drawing of "a man riding towards the sunset on a large duck", wearing a large teapot on his head. Somehow, it worked. Somehow, it got past his editor.
It was soon followed by an increasingly bewildering parade - goats, chickens, dreamers, lost souls, explorers, the dispossessed, angels and a vast array of others - carrying Leunig's musings on the ceaseless strangeness of humanity.
Not everybody got them. "From the word go, a lot of people were a bit mystified, " he says, especially those who were still waiting for the punchline. But he always believed that art was only alive if it offered something beyond complete understanding.
"There's got to be a fair element of mystique in it . . . if you hear a poem and you don't quite get it, but it draws you back, it enchants you, it makes you want to stay with it."
Given his fascination with humanity's foibles and the fanciful way he explores them, it can be strange, almost jarring - at least from this distance - to realise that Leunig remains at heart a political cartoonist and a newspaper man.
"Newspapers are somehow in my blood - it's where I started. It's got a vaudevillian down-to-earthiness about it. I have to be robust and quick and honest, and there's really great value in that, you can't become too precious in newspapers."
But, he adds, "sometimes you get dragged down into the banality of party politics - you think, 'This is so tiny, this is so parochial, I want to fly a little bit', and I'm sure the public does somewhat . . . I've always seen my role in newspapers like that, to offer a funny little sparkle".
How effectively he has could be answered in all sorts of ways.
For one example, Leunig is in Nelson next week as a keynote speaker at a national gathering of psychotherapists (as well as appearing at a sold-out public engagement, and doing some book signing). It is not the first time he has addressed such a group. His frequent musings on the "so-called darker areas" of human behaviour have given him some common ground with the profession, he points out.
Then there's the whole "living treasure" and "philosopher" thing, labels which have come to define him as much as "cartoonist" in later years. He is self-effacing about that sort of stuff.
He knows better than most that favouritism is fleeting in the public mind. "In Australia, if you have been working for 40 or 50 years, you become just part of the furniture, which is a bit of a problem, but it's sort of sweet, because you become just a domestic artefact. You're no longer some fascinating thing.
"But it also means that people can maybe listen to some of your more preposterous ideas or improbable ideas. It cuts both ways."
His ideas on being Australian have become, however, mixed, and there is sadness here.
It gets back to that John Howard thing. Mr Howard was the one politician, he says, who encouraged him to revert to the more familiar type of the political cartoonist, of unleashing vicious, personal observations on an individual, "who I think did an appalling thing that I couldn't live with, which is take us into a most terrible, unjust and obscene war".
Australia's involvement in the invasion of Iraq was a deeply depressing watershed for Leunig.
"I curse the day - as do many people - when one minute the nation was sailing along with normal business and suddenly we're in this war, and I felt so dismal about that at that stage of my life. It was as if I had been conscripted into it in some way, and it was so sordid and horrible . . . "
He felt compelled to use his various platforms to speak out. "I mean, if you're not unbalanced by war, what are you unbalanced by? And if you're not totally appalled and lose your cool over the slaughter of the innocents, what sort of human being are you?"
He found not everyone shared his outrage. "When a nation goes to war, a lot is revealed about the values of a country, by what people feel they are entitled to say." It included hate mail and threats.
The bitter, brutal experience "tipped me sideways", he says, and seven years on from the invasion, he hasn't so much moved on as "balanced myself". But the resentment is easily recalled.
"I became very alienated from a lot of Australia and retain that to this day - it was part of my detachment from the Australian system, and that will never return. It was a total loss to me. I didn't ride it out well in the end. I think I lost a bit of my country in a way."
But not all of it. After all, there are still plenty who are prepared to forgive him for being around forever, his lack of punchlines, his self-confessed self-indulgences, his various "great mistakes" and his occasional shrieking controversies.
Increasingly, he lives life how he wants in his quiet little corner of a big, brash country.
Chatting about his impending time in New Zealand, he seizes on the point that we like to play things a bit low key in these parts.
"That's what New Zealanders are famous for, and that appeals to me, " he enthuses. "It's the bombastic, brash Americanisation of Australia I loathe and so many people who live in the rural parts of Australia can't stand. The old Australia is still alive and well, but it doesn't get much publicity."