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Petty's Parallel Worlds
Bruce Petty
Bruce Petty is the closest we've ever come to producing our own Picasso and I love him.
— Bill Leak  Format: hardback Extent: 192pp Size: 200mm x 180mm RRP: $39.95 High Horse, September 2008
For nearly half a century Bruce Petty's anarchic and brilliantly incisive art has enlivened the pages of our newspapers and magazines. This rich compilation — much of it previously unpublished and edited by Russ Radcliffe — showcases the range of Petty's artistic styles as well as his intellectual and moral concerns. Whether in the directness of his editorial cartoons, the immediacy of his street sketches, the ambition of his films, or the sophistication and beauty of his recent printmaking, Petty is an acute observer of our ambitions and our follies who has never been afraid to engage with the big ideas of our time and the complexity of our condition. From the inanity of the internet to the genius of Mozart, from the chicanery of Australian domestic politics to the global manoeuvrings of superpowers and the clandestine world of international finance, from first world consumerist excess to global environmental degradation, Petty's unruly pen traces the deep and unexpected interconnections between things to reveal the inner workings of the world. Bruce Petty is one of Australia's most loved artists. Though he is best known in Australia for the political cartoons he has contributed to Melbourne's Age since 1976, Bruce's work has appeared regularly in some of the world's most prestigious magazines such as The New Yorker and Punch. Bruce is extraordinarily prolific in a wide range of artistic pursuits from etching to filmmaking. He won an Academy Award for his film Leisure in 1977, and several AFI awards for his satirical documentary Global Haywire in 2007. Bruce's previous books include An Australian Artist in South East Asia, The Money Book, and The Absurd Machine. Bruce lives in Balmain and has 4 children. Available in good bookstores everywhere Don Watson's Launch Speech Thank you for coming, especially on the night the beach volleyball gold medal is decided. That you find this event more awesome says a lot about you as Australians. That it gets you more stoked is totally awesome. Bruce Petty is an Australian marathoner — and a legend. He is in danger of being an icon. He is awesome, totally. He crept into my consciousness about the time of the Tokyo Olympics — Petty came in as Betty Cuthbert went out — he wrapped his line around my psychic interior and soon became a necessary daily hit. A few years later I bought his book — Petty’s Australia Fair and Australia never seemed the same again. We were in Vietnam with the Americans. White Australia still prevailed, along with our own varieties of McCarthyism and literary censorship. Aborigines couldn’t vote. The past is another country as we know, but it never seems so at the time. Petty helped us to see that we might be living in an anachronism. Australian conservatism was crumbling. Menzies was gone, though the puffed up Anglophile ghost remained. Each succeeding government and PM seemed a little odder than the one before it, as if we were witnessing the end of a dynasty whose in-breeding had caught up with it. Petty drew them round the Cabinet table much as Ambrose Bierce might have — with ‘all their vices and follies … expounded with imperfect tenderness.’ How would we remember Les Bury, if not for Petty drawing him with his chin resting on his knees? Or Hasluck, with his little eyes peering over the table rim? Or McMahon, or Gorton? The thing about Petty is the marriage of an original mind with an original line. No one draws like Petty — and I can’t think of another cartoonist whose images I can still recall after 40 years. Les Tanner’s Bolte is the one exception. No one draws like him, and no one thinks like him. Before we get into any serious analysis we should register this: the man is funny. He makes you laugh. We’ve never had a more subversive artist and no artist of ours was ever funnier. I suppose it is inevitable, but the one Petty caricature of which I can speak with experience, is the one that contains all his genius. His Keating got the man in all the constituencies of his personality and soul: the hooded, enigmatic Robert Mitchum solipsism; the Hamlet like awareness and intelligence, the ever present sense of absurdity abounding. One day he drew him figure skating brilliantly around the ice while Alexander Downer lay sprawled on it — and it captured not just the political moment but how Keating was that morning, that very moment. But in an outrageous departure from the standard fare of op-ed pages Petty has always been bent on thinking himself into places beyond the 24 hours of politics just past, and the designated ‘issue’ of the day. He’s always poking around for connections — what joins policy to influence and influence to money and money to the cosmos or human character. He comes from the grand tradition of enlightened inquiry and no subject is too big — or rather, looked at properly, no subject is any smaller than another. He’s the Galileo of cartoonists — and the fact that he appears to draw from the centre outwards I submit as evidence for this claim. Like a naturalist who cannot look at a tussock without considering its roots, the soil in which it grows and relationship to other plants, Petty looks at Alexander Downer … and reckons there must be a reason for him too. I read an article yesterday about the 68 million gallons of human waste flushed into New York sewers every day. It described how it goes into immense cesspits, is stewed, strained, broken down by chemicals and heat, deodorised, shipped in unmarked barges past the Statue of Liberty. Some of it is spread on fields in Arkansas to help grow the nation’s food supply. So clever is the science becoming, the scientists say they will soon be able to extract from the cloaca some of its more desirable elements: not just the arsenic, mercury and dioxins, but Penicillin, temazapam and Chanel No 5. The corporates are moving in fast. I relate this because it illustrates the meaning of the word ‘Pettyesque’ — meaning: what goes on inside the world; bizarre, sinister, insane, true. He draws as Marx might have drawn, had Marx ever got beyond irony and allowed his absurdist streak to escape. Being a sort of Marxist-Absurdist is probably why Bruce Petty has survived all the changes in social, political and intellectual fashion. Really he has outwitted them. I have spoken too much in the past tense. He was prolific forty years ago and he’s probably more prolific now. I have not mentioned his films — one of them won an academy award, and another, Petty’s Australian History, should be watched by every budding student of the subject. I used to show it to my students every year. I’m not sure they got it — but they always laughed at the point where Queen Victoria’s bosom converted into two cannon and blew a sepoy’s head off. He’s still making subversive Pettyesque films, still rendering our leaders with ‘imperfect tenderness’ — and now there is this book, which it is my honour to declare launched.
Best Australian Political Cartoons 2007
edited by Russ Radcliffe
There's no better way to review this election year than to savour our politicians being nailed by some of our best cartoonists.
— Fiona Capp (The Age)  Published by Scribe ISBN: 9781921215568 RRP: $27.95 Our sharpest and wittiest political cartoonists turn their attention to a momentous election year. With Dean Alston, Michael Atchison, Mark Knight, Jon Kudelka, Bill Leak, Alan Moir, Peter Nicholson, Vince O’ Farrell, Bruce Petty, David Pope, Geoff Pryor, David Rowe, John Spooner, Ron Tandberg, Cathy Wilcox, and many more … An indispensible annual guide to Australian politics and society.
At the beginning of 2007, after a decade of grinding disappointments, four successive election defeats and the prospect of a fifth, even the Labor faithful were afraid to imagine that the light at the end of the tunnel might be something other than a Coalition train. But Kevin from Queensland really was here to help, and the punters seemed more than willing to give him a go. At last, the political pendulum seemed to be swinging back.
Available in good bookstores everywhere
Best Australian Political Cartoons - past editions
edited by Russ Radcliffe Published by Scribe, $27.95
An indispensible annual guide to Australian politics and society
The year-in-review as witnessed by our funniest and most subversive political cartoonists. With Dean Alston, Michael Atchison, Mark Knight, Jon Kudelka, Bill Leak, Alan Moir, Peter Nicholson, Vince O’ Farrell, Bruce Petty, David Pope, Geoff Pryor, David Rowe, John Spooner, Ron Tandberg, Cathy Wilcox, and many more…
Man of Steel
a cartoon history of the Howard years edited by Russ Radcliffe  Published by Scribe ISBN (13): 9781921215537 RRP: $29.95 After more than a decade in government, Australia’s poltical cartoonists have had plenty of time to examine in minute detail not only every aspect of John Howard’s philosophy and public policies,but also a goodly portion of his power-walking anatomy — from his quivering bottom lip to the swish of his rat-tail. War on the waterfront, the GST, Pauline Hanson, black armbands, East Timor, children overboard, Tampa, 9/11, war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, Bali, and IR reform — it's all there in this full-colour alternative history of John Howard’s premiership, as interpreted by Australia’s finest political cartoonists.
Bill Leak’s Rattus, with his snaking rat tail and Pinocchio nose, discloses what is perhaps the most dubious legacy of the Howard era: the decline and fallof notions of accountability and responsibility. The vaunted ministerial code of conduct of Howard’s first term was quickly abandoned, replaced by a parade of cabinet refuseniks led by the man of — apparently stainless — steel. Children overboard, countless immigration cock-ups, the so-called ‘intelligence failures’ preceding the invasion of Iraq, and the AWB scandal are only the most obvious examples. Dishonesty and dissimulation might have been electoral kryptonite at any other time, but particularly after 9/11 they seemed to impose no cost.
Moments of Truth
Bill Leak  Published by Scribe ISBN (13): 9781920769536 RRP: $39.95 Australia has had a long and proud tradition of political cartooning and Bill Leak, the daily editorialcartoonist for The Australian, is one of our most potent and exhilarating. This collection is a superbiconoclastic survey and counter history of the past five years, which Leak describes as an‘unprecedented period of bumptiousness, self-importance and stupidity’. This deluxe, full colour edition presents an extraordinary insight into the working process of one of Australia’s finest creative talents, as Bill’s unique images of Australian and international affairs take shape from rough ink sketches through to brilliant finished colour artwork. BILL LEAK is one of Australia's leading satirists and most respected portrait painters. He divides his time between ridiculing his subjects mercilessly in his cartoons or immortalising them in oils. Leak has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize on ten occasions; he has won eight Walkley Awards, and nineteen Stanley Awards including eight Gold Stanleys for Artist ofthe Year.
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