How cartoonist Bruce Petty documented the Vietnam War – and how his great satire keeps finding its moment
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星期一, 八月 28, 2023
His career as a political cartoonist started with a trip to London in the late 1950s, then a stint at young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon paper in Sydney, the Mirror.
Key Points:
- His career as a political cartoonist started with a trip to London in the late 1950s, then a stint at young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon paper in Sydney, the Mirror.
- He had a lead role as The Australian’s political cartoonist during the newspaper’s radical first decade, until it turned right during the Whitlam dismissal and Larry Pickering was promoted to favoured cartoonist.
- Petty then moved to The Age in its glory days, where he was the acknowledged godfather of the troupe of brilliant cartoonists there at the time.
In the vanguard
- Among them are these five particularly vivid cartoons published in The Australian between May 1966 and September 1967.
- Petty was in the vanguard of a small but vocal opposition, drawing the war as a deep tragedy for the Vietnamese and a reckless farce perpetrated by the West.
- The jagged black blob, which covers about half of the box, colours the movement from farce to tragedy arrestingly black.
- Are Johnson and his adipose generals conscious villains, or merely fools being driven by murderous ideas and scarcely sublimated self-interest?
Intimate sympathy
- Is this the moral fecklessness of consumer society projected onto women, or is it the dawn of concern for the people ravaged by a needless imperial war?
- A large part of the power of these cartoons comes from Petty’s deep engagement with people forced to live with the war.
- His first book, Australian Artist in South East Asia (1962), is a graphic account of his journey through seven countries.
- – but he is doing it with an intimate sympathy born of real knowledge.