Leunig
Talitha
Fraser conducted the Spiritual Reading Group session this month on the
cartoonist, artist, poet, and spiritual teacher Michael Leunig. Here are her
opening words.
So...
Leunig... one of the questions he is most often asked and is always baffled by,
is what does a particular cartoon mean? “People will
say, ‘I don’t know what it means but I like it.’ Leunig replies... “I don’t know either but I like it too.
I’m not trying to say anything but I hope it awakens something in you.”
Michael
Leunig was raised listening to Oscar Wilde stories on the radio. He read Enid
Blyton, Biggles and Children’s Encyclopaedias... he went to Sunday school and
always said he found it, “not full of God but full of stories.” It was
lyrical and what was lyrical made him happy – Leunig heard Psalms and asked of
himself “What can I do like that?”
Though born in
East Melbourne in 1945, Leunig grew up in Footscray, going to Footscray North
Primary School and Maribyrnong High School. Many of Leunig’s friends, and many
of his teachers when he grew up in the 1950s were war refugees or were the
children of people from Germany, Russia, Poland. It was a very industrial area –ammunitions
factory with machine guns firing, meat works, cannery... it smelt awful and
drained into the river... for Leunig this wasn’t bleak but held lots of peace
and space. Not a lot of nature around,
but then you appreciate and give more significance to what you have... a duck and
the moon.
A duck bought
from the market while doing the family shop imprinted on Leunig following him
around everywhere, coming home from school he’d turn the corner and the duck
would see him and come running. So he always got ducks after that considering
them playful and good-humoured and innocent with those rounded beaks.
A formative misadventure at eight years occurred while playing at the
rubbish tip. Leunig stepped up to his thighs in hot coals and wires - receiving horrible and incredibly painful
burns with fear of gangrene and amputation
- for five months he couldn’t walk and had long periods of feeling cut
off from others and lost.
From
paper boy to making sausages at butchers on Barkly St, Leunig didn’t do well at
school, repeating his last year, and came to work in the meatworks
himself. This was great thinking time and
Leunig advocates manual work that keeps your hands moving and your mind free. He
said: “Working
in such places either toughens or sensitises you” and it sensitised
Leunig... he became a humanist (is now nearly vegan) and finely honed his earthy
working class sense of humour. Leunig
was conscripted for the Vietnam war in 1965 – he was going to fight it, a
conscientious objector, but was rejected regardless when found to be deaf in
one ear.
In
Curly Stories, Leunig talks about it “Being an advantage to grow up without art
consciousness... nothing to aspire to but things to find and create”.
Homeschooling his own four children would have allowed him to foster a
similar environment for them believing “Natural ideas exist within children... their play should
be “utterly free” and they must be allowed to be bored - they feel free to
explore and discover and the world is new to them and there’s this sense of
wonder” Leunig refers to children’s ability to ‘blank out’ looking
at a teapot spout or light through a window being present to what is right in
front of them, commenting: “The loss of
that beauty is appalling... how do I
address that as a communicator? How can I express what everyone is feeling?”
The prophet expresses the grief of the people. The artist expresses what is
repressed.
Walking
out of his 3rd year at Swinburne Film and Television School, it was 1969 when
Leunig first began to work as a political cartoonist at Newsday. While the
factories might have taught him to use humour – intellectual, witty, cynical –
to deflect serious things, Leunig says “I was sung sentimental songs. Part of my first language.
Fluent in that emotional language” His Grandma used to tell him: ‘All
the world is bad, except for you and me, but even you’re a little strange.’ ...perhaps
this is where we meet The Creature... The Holy Fool– scribbled in the margins
since school - amusing to his slightly hungover Editor, with a teapot on his
head and riding a duck into the sunset, the image was put to print. Subhuman, primal, foetal, without gender.
Leunig is somehow able to speak to our soul.
To take small things and make them large, domestic things and make them
sacred. For his own discipline he talks
about the paradox of art theory – rules to follow, teachers to emulate - how this
stifles creativity. It’s about earning
money, systematic success, built for efficiency, for velocity but you lose much,
Leunig believes: “[You] cannot love or appreciate beauty at speed. How do you talk
about it in ways that are unsuppressed and real? Might make a bridge with love,
make a sandwich with love – it’s passed on to others. Love is what we go to bed thinking about.”
Since
his first book in 1974, Leunig has produced 23 more – books of newspaper
columns, poetry and prayer in addition to his prints, paintings and
drawings. Leunig shares intimacy with us,
personal and confessional - e.g. The Kiss. We are invited into the privacy of
his love life, his soul searching... Leunig makes the private public. He takes the small dark fearful things and
brings them out where we can look at them “crying with the angels for a world that is different –
this is not fatalistic but hopeful”. Perhaps it is because he has
offered his own soul first that we are willing to listen to him expound on many
themes:
>>
loneliness >> the 9 to 5 grind >> war >> sex >> consumption
>> love >> god >> media >> religion >> politics
It
was being asked to contribute a cartoon to a new paper in 1989, The Age, that
Leunig started writing prayers to the horror of his friends... Rather than
born-again Christian Leunig’s interpretation lay in the realm of John Keats’s
"negative capability", a word for the unsayable and profound in life.
He wanted to say the words publicly as another way of addressing the problems
of our time, of our society, of our psyche, of people’s personal suffering {1998}
His friends reactions sort of egged Leunig on, wanting to see how much he could
push believing that “until a man discovers his emotional life and his gentle,
vulnerable side, until he gives it expression, he never will find his women or
his soul, and until he does find his soul he will be tortured and depressed and
miserable underneath a fair bit of bullshit”.
From
Archbishops to Presidents, the Opera House, Australian Chamber Orchestra,
National Theatre in London to clay figure animations for SBS and remote
communities in northern and central Australia – Leunig has Gone Places and Done
Things. Declared a national living treasure by the National Trust in 1999 and
awarded honorary degrees by 3 universities for his unique contribution to
Australian culture.
The
‘war on terror’ following 9/11 was a watershed moment in Leunig’s cartooning work where, opposing the war and
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he was at odds with many editors,
commentators and members of Australian society – there became less gentle and
lyrical themes and he stopped drawing the whimsical characters Mr Curly and
Vasco Pyjama as often although the duck and the moon have still faithfully remained. Adding curls arose out of Leunig’s desire to
communicate that “What makes you feel so alone and strange is in fact normal. There’s a
lot of curliness in life and you can have a homecoming – there is a place for
you and for that aloneness, that eccentricity, and there’s a fulfilment of it
eventually, it’s no longer the cause of your outcastness. So that’s the curl.
It’s the curious, unique self and, if you find that, you find the connection to
the whole world because the world is curious and unique and authentic at its
best level.” You might say the war, not
understanding how people can fight other people this way, has been a breach to
Leunig’s sense of connection to Australian society and thereby rest of the
world.
These
days, Michael Leunig has 3 small dogs but no ducks. He enjoys talking to
strangers and going to bed at night. He
is a devout nature lover and spends his time between the solitude of the bush
in Northern Victoria and a home in Melbourne where he enjoys walking in the
local park, morning coffee in the café, chamber music in the concert hall, and
attending to work in his studio .
When
asked: “What is the meaning of life?” Leunig replied: “For humans as for all the plants and creatures: know
yourself, grow yourself, feel yourself, heal yourself, be yourself, express
yourself”... “I want to be a voice of liberation”. Leunig speaks not
only for the wealthy or the poor but both, not only those armed and those
without weapons but both, not only the pretty people or only the ugly people
but both – he enjoys this inconsistency and variety. As Barry Humphries says “through the vein of
his compassion and humanity and his humour – illuminating many a darkling
theme”
Like
Jesus with his parables and questions – Leunig doesn’t present us with
solutions or easy answers but an invitation. He sees his vocation as cracking
what is stoic and cold in society – to make us feel anger, grief, joy,
sadness... Leunig believes we have
something to discover in the wrongness... “Live without ‘knowing’, in mystery. Find things. Unlearn.
Get lost. Get primal, getinfantile. When you have lost all hope – start to
play. You have nothing to lose. Stay with it and don’t take it too seriously...”
I hope maybe it awakens something in you.”
