For 55 years, Michael Leunig’s illustrations helped make sense of a sometimes crazy world. Now he is gone.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Much of Michael Leunig’s prolific output was created, he once said, while “sitting alone, feeling lost, alienated from the world”. It was a state that he believed was essential to his creative process.
Leunig liked to describe himself as a “cartoonist, writer, painter, philosopher and poet”, whose work “often explored the idea of an innocent and sacred personal world”. His musings – some of which he styled as “prayers” – were votive offerings to a largely secular readership. He invoked the idea of God, but not in an institutional or corporeal sense.
He narrowly avoided being conscripted to the Vietnam War by dint of being deaf in one ear. Instead, he went to a different killing field, finding work in an abattoir.To the filmmaker Burgess, he wondered if this hadn’t been a key, if unlikely, influence on his artistic practice. that included fellow luminaries such as Ron Tandberg, Peter Nicholson and John Spooner, Leunig became far more of a brand name than any of his contemporaries. A one-man factory, his works were collected in books , printed on mugs and T-shirts and tea towels, seconded for calendars and Christmas wrapping paper distributed viaLeunig contributed to this masthead until August, when his contract was terminated as part of a redundancy round in which a many journalists also departed.
On occasion, Leunig deployed his curvilinear style to tackle the most sharp-edged of subjects, and sometimes found himself in the crosshairs of public opprobrium. Appalled by Israel’s actions towards Palestinians long before this latest round of bloodshed, he drew a parallel between the Nazi labour camps and the West Bank with a two-panelled cartoon referencing the “Arbeit macht Frei” slogan that hung above the gates of Dachau, among other places.
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