I swear, sometimes the convergence of life’s disparate elements is amazing.
Of the many fetid Facebook slime-pits where I inexplicably continue to waste my precious time, the Midnight Oil Fan Community is possibly the least offensive. If the gallery of near-total strangers modeling their band shirts and hosting gatherings I will never be able to attend are of no direct relevance to me personally, neither do they do me any particular harm. In fact, they occasionally do me well, as when I was able to show off my Midnight Oil poster and accompanying pun to great fanfare - the only place in the world I might have been able to do so (yes, I am still a fanboy at heart, worn firmly on sleeve).
More recently, a chance posting by one of the aforementioned near-strangers (as in United-in-Oil, though naught else) allowed me to solve a childhood mystery.
The post in question was simply the image of the band’s 1990 single “Forgotten Years”, which is not only a great song, but also the song they closed with on their very final show in Toronto, making it the very last song I will ever hear them play live. So, associations are positive, if bittersweet.
What struck me about the most about the post though, was the image on the cover, which I had not seen before. It was not the standard picture of the band, or accompanying vista of the Australian landscape the band tends to prefer, but a cartoon of a jet plane coming apart mid-air. The words “Who Cares” (or “Who Care” technically, as the final “s” cut off by missing tailfin) were written in bright pink across the fuselage. They were so prominent, one might have thought that was the name of the single. It was a cute, eye-catching image, playful while somehow ominous, and in no way frivolous, that well suited the raucous tone of the song and the tempered-by-but-not-trampled-by-realism idealism of the band.
Thing is, I’d seen that somewhere before. Not the whole picture; just the pilot. The pointy nosed, wide-eyed cartoon character. I knew that character, and that style. Where? A rusty cob webbed door of memory slowly creaked open.
In the early 80s, my uncle kept a strange cartoon book in his cottage. On the cover was a headless naked body chasing three flying heads with a butterfly net. The comics inside were just plain rude. I vividly remember one cartoon of a chef taking a dump in one of his soup pots, as posh diners cluelessly carried on in the next room. Another was of a urinating man inadvertently pissing in his own face when he tried to watch a butterfly. Yet another had a man using a periscope to examine his own bum (with evident disappointment). You get the idea. They were crass and scatological, the kind of drawings that would certainly have been confiscated at school and got you sent to the principal’s office. The appeal to a five-year old could well-be imagined. To find every dirty schoolyard joke given form, drawn, bound, and published by a grown-up was just, well, too hilarious to believe. It was big piece of subversion, carefully hidden from Mom and Dad, mischievously revealed to Grandma (who was obligingly indignant), conspiratorially shared with my uncle, and eagerly sought out every time we visited his cottage. It regrettably vanished when he sold the cottage and got married; my pious aunt would definitely not have appreciated its humour.
I was too young to remember the artist, so could not look it up in any library (who probably have refused to carry it anyway). I came across nothing like it in any second-hand bookstore. For all I knew, the book would be relegated to that overstuffed cabinet of the brain which stores the near forgotten fever dreams of childhood.
But now we’ve got the internet, and our Borg memory can remember anything. Here I was confronted with a crashing airplane, on a Midnight Oil ep cover of all things, and I was certain it was that guy. Who drew it? Again, the near-strangers of the Midnight Oil Fan Community helpfully informed me this was the Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig.
Leunig. Leunig. Of course.
Leunig was apparently quite the figure in Australian media, named a “Treasure” by the National Trust of Australia, and seller of many books. He drew for the Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne’s The Age, and a pile of other publications. He was a vociferous opponent of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and, less admirably, an equally vociferous opponent of masking and vaccines during the pandemic. He got canned from the Age after comparing an anti-vaxer to the tankman of Tiananmen Square (classy, eh?). He died in December of 2024.
That book in my uncle’s cottage was The Second Leunig: A Dusty Little Swag. Unlce must have picked it up on one of his travels; to my knowledge, Leunig never made terra-firma in North America. I certainly never came across him until now.
Finding the artist and looking him up though only made me wonder again whether I’d hallucinated the whole thing. The samples of Leunig’s work I’d initially been able to find online (admittedly a small one) were clean, Hallmark level earnest, and infused with heavy religious overtones. Nothing at all like the vulgar etchings I remember. Granted, The Second Leunig was published in 1979; his last cartoon was published just before he died in 2024. More than enough time for an artist to evolve. Still, the gulf was jarring. Was it the same guy? No doubt: that was absolutely the book. By what tangling path does one get from that Point A to that Point B?
I examined the available cartoons a little more and dug deeper into my memory. Tenuous
connections began to emerge. The “new” ones (or more recent anyway) were not as innocent as they seemed at first, especially once he got into the anti-war stuff. But they were still earnest beyond earnest, and did not seem at all in keeping with the crudities of old. Yet, there may have been more to those than met the 6-year-old eye.
It wasn’t just the dirty jokes that drew me to those cartoons. There was a weird ambience about them that I found enticing. They were surreal, dreamlike, and a little ominous. They did not take place in any recognizable world, but in impressionistic landscapes, often empty and dreary, where night always seemed to be falling and things only made sense within the borders of the panel. Opening the book rather felt like falling asleep, and so not unlike the hallucinatory escapades of Halloween is Grinch Night, the Magic Shadows theme, Winnie-the-Pooh’s encounter with Hephalumps and Woozles, or Dumbo’s drunken visions. There was always a little darkness creeping in around the edges – literally and figuratively. I liked to dip my toes in that darkness. Just enough to see how it felt. I still do. I like to lift the rock of the subconscious and look at the little slugs hiding underneath.
The characters were wide eyed, big nosed, kid-friendly creations in a seemingly permanent state of confusion or mild-disappointment. The occasional happy ones (keeping in mind I’m relying on Google images to bolster 40+ year old memories here) usually sat blissfully unaware in environments otherwise suggestive of bleak despair.
A recognizable philosophy emerges.
Context helps. Reading them now, and seeing how involved Leunig got in socio-political issues, lends the older images meanings that were not previously apparent – to me anyway. I notice things now that I didn’t back then. Life experience will do that to you. An English degree and a teaching degree will also do that to you, not to mention showing other people how to recognize symbolism for almost a decade.
Perfect example, this one here, the only one I’m certain was in the Second Leunig I’ve been able to find:
I remember grumbling that this one wasn’t funny. I didn’t like the idea of being held up on a stick. I figured the grown-up behind was just trying to be edgy, and turned the page. As a kid, I didn’t get it.
As a middle-aged man, I definitely get it. When someone points to a dark void and says “face the future!”, it can only mean one thing. Many adults use children to ward of fear of that one thing. They see children’s lives as mere extensions of their own.
Whatever you think of my interpretation (and who knows what specifically Australian context I might be missing) this is not merely an edgelord scrawl: it is rife with meaning, and almost certainly polemical. Looked at that way, the previously mentioned cartoons take on a new significance. The shitting chef could be seen as contempt for the bourgeoisie (or possibly a critique of Australian’s culinary scene, I’m just speculating here). The pissing man got pissed on when he tried to look up from the ground and follow something beautiful. And the periscope? An indictment of self-examination. How often does it reveal something not worth seeing? Even a half-remembered multi-panel sequence about a man who lost his underpants was something of a Kafkaesque tale of wandering naked and alone in the desert.
It would seem that nothing was as it seemed.
This Betooga Advocate described Leunig's cartoons as “bordering nihilism” (and him an "old shit stoner"). I’m not sure that’s fair - about the nihilism. True nihilists don’t take principled stances against war or poverty (and say what you will about the idiocy of his mask/vax stance, in his own mind it was a matter of principle.) I would say they’re existential. Explorations of life, musings on the meaning of existence. Attempts to clear off bullshit (sometimes quite literally).
I’m not so invested in Leunig to be too disappointed that he turned out to be a crank (though it is dispiriting that yet another one went down that road). Yet, his work was a piece of my childhood, and all my predilections were formed in childhood. A tendency to navel gaze? A fondness for storm-clouds, shadows, and broken windows? Whatever came later, reading existential cartoons at the age of 5, 6, and 7 did its part.
Come for the bums; stay for the existentialism.
