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“People no longer understand satire” - Johannes Leak
1.3k Plays2 years ago
Johannes Leak is the Editorial Cartoonist for The Australian. Like his father Bill before him, Johannes’ cartoons represent the soul of the newspaper. In this conversation with host Will Kingston, Johannes delivers a masterclass on the craft of political cartoons, as well as discussing how identity politics and cancel culture are encroaching on modern media and the arts.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Spectator Australia
00:00:00
Speaker
The Spectator Australia is a weekly delight for anyone who loves insightful analysis, contentious opinion and hard-hitting comment. With the finest writing on current affairs, politics, the arts, books and life, you will read regular columnists who delight, provoke and amuse, and editorial features of incredible breadth and depth.
00:00:19
Speaker
There is no party line to which its writers abound. Originality of thought and elegance of expression are the sole editorial constraints.
Subscription Details
00:00:28
Speaker
A digital subscription is just $16.99 a month and you get your first month free. Sign up today at spectator.com.au forward slash join.
Introducing Australiana with Will Kingston
00:00:51
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston. My guest today is Johannes Leek. Johannes is the editorial cartoonist for the Australian.
Johannes Leek on Artistic Influence and Legacy
00:01:05
Speaker
Like his father before him, Johannes's cartoons represent the soul of the newspaper. In my humble opinion, they say far more than any editorial column possibly could. Johannes, welcome to Australiana. Thanks Will, great to be with you.
00:01:21
Speaker
Most listeners will be aware that your father was also a celebrated artist and cartoonist. And when I think about this, it gets me thinking about the old nature V nurture question. How much of your ability and your interest in your craft do you put down to nature and how much do you put down to the time you would have spent with your father when you were growing up?
00:01:44
Speaker
Well, yeah, look, I've thought about that a fair bit myself, I suppose. And I suppose, you know, I've got a younger brother, he's three years younger than me. So you could sort of call it a kind of a controlled experiment of some sorts. You know, I'm out of the two of us. I was the one who probably.
00:02:01
Speaker
lent more towards the visual art side of things and he much more has gone down the music road and both of those things exist in my family, I mean much more so even the music. My dad was the sort of aberration as the one who sort of had this incredible visual aptitude and creativity. So I suppose there must be some genetic predisposition to want to express myself through drawing and painting.
00:02:27
Speaker
But it was not something that he sort of sat me down or sat both of us down and said, here's how you do it. To be honest, he was probably too busy to really do that. But I think growing up in a household where you just know and understand and take as completely normal that your dad
00:02:45
Speaker
He's an artist, and he makes his living by drawing cool things in the newspaper, making fun of people in the newspaper, painting portraits of people, and you're surrounded by it on the walls. People come and go to the house who work in similar areas. So it was always, to me, a fairly straightforward, legitimate career option, I suppose. I didn't come from a family where I had to fight tooth and nail to
00:03:15
Speaker
To become an artist, you know, and I really respect people who, who grew up in a, in a situation where perhaps their parents aren't all that encouraging for them to go down that route. They'd like to see them get a secure job and fair enough. But in my case, it's almost like the, the obvious thing almost for me to do was probably to, uh, to, to want to do what my dad did. Cause it looked like a great job to me. That's, that's interesting. That's the positive side of it. Have there been any drawbacks of following in your father's footsteps?
00:03:41
Speaker
Well, I suppose it's only really dawned on me since I really stepped into his very much his previous role. I mean, I'm literally doing the job he used to do at the Australian and it probably dawned on me quite late that
00:03:58
Speaker
You know, that would invite a lot of comparison to him. And that's sometimes something that I need to sort of try to push to push to one side, I suppose. And, you know, a lot of that comes from the admiration and the awe that I have for what he did and the volume of the work that he produced, the quality of the work that he produced.
00:04:21
Speaker
find myself constantly working my way through his collection. It's one of the things that I've done since he died is sort of work to itemize his work and get a handle on the breadth of the collection that we've inherited. And it really does. I'm sort of staggered.
00:04:39
Speaker
Every time I go looking through it, I sort of think, how did he have time to do all this? And his mind was sort of, I don't know, you look at the cartoons and the inventiveness and the ideas, you know, there's just so much in there. But of course, you're looking at the body of a person's work that accumulated over multiple decades. And you can get yourself into all sorts of trouble if you think, oh, well, I need to measure up to that. I'm at the start of my career.
00:05:04
Speaker
And I'm looking at his body of work from the point of view of somebody, well, looking at it at the point where he had finished his. So it's a different thing. But yeah, you've got to just put that out of your mind and think, well, the times have changed.
00:05:19
Speaker
and I'm working with different material and all of that sort of thing. But it's certainly, he set the bar pretty high and I see that as a massive challenge to try and meet that level of consistency. Following on from that, what were the most important lessons that you learned from him?
00:05:36
Speaker
Look, the more I think about that, the more I reckon that to be a cartoonist, at least the sort of cartoonist that he was, I think that it's actually, it's really the bullshit radar.
00:05:53
Speaker
that I like to think I inherited from him. And it's funny because it's a sort of a double-edged sword. Like you can go through life being cynical, and I am, and I'm skeptical, and I have this bullshit radar. And it's not necessarily a great way of looking at the world because
00:06:09
Speaker
everywhere you look, you see it. You know, you're sort of struck by the insincerity of people and you're looking beyond what they're saying. And sometimes I sort of envy people who take everything at face value and go through life not thinking the worst of everybody and not trying to sort of dissect everything to understand what people are really all about. But look, this is, I think, part of what it takes, I think, to be a cartoonist.
00:06:36
Speaker
if you're really trying to sort of go beyond what a politician is saying, what they're doing and pull out the sort of essential truth behind what it is they're up to. I think that that cynicism is actually a bit of an asset. That's a lovely little line there to pull out the essential truth behind what a politician is saying. And it leads me on to the question, this is your life's work. It was your father's life's work. This is obviously incredibly important to you.
00:07:02
Speaker
Why are cartoons, but then more specifically editorial cartoons, political cartoons, why are they important? What role should they play in society?
The Role of Cartoons in Society
00:07:11
Speaker
Look, I see my role at the paper. I like to think that I look at the news and the events of the day. I try in a way to see them through the eyes of the average reader.
00:07:26
Speaker
Because I am an average reader, I guess, too. And so what a reader wants to see in a cartoon is a reflection of the way that they instinctively feel about an issue. And then for them to see it in one little frame, hopefully that sort of sums up their gut reaction to whatever it might be. That seems to be what resonates with readers. You know, that's what they want to see. And sometimes it can have a clarifying sort of effect, I suppose.
00:07:55
Speaker
For them, maybe it really rubs them up the wrong way, which is not a bad thing either. It's all part of the debate, I suppose, but that's what the readers are responding to is when they see you capture the essence of an issue or something somebody said, or you reveal the truth behind it.
00:08:20
Speaker
cut them down to size or sort of encapsulate something that I think these are the things that people like to see in the cartoons. And of course, you know, it has to make them laugh, you know? I mean, there's a certain response there that you cut to the chase and you get it and people love that, you know?
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And if I was to pick out a really interesting way that you frame that, I think deliberately said, you want to reflect how people feel, you didn't necessarily say you want to reflect how people think. And that's what I see in your work and the work of political cartoonists more generally. And they elicit a visceral response, an emotional response, as opposed to perhaps
00:09:01
Speaker
purely an intellectual response that you would get through the written word. And that's something which a creative medium like cartoons can do in a way which a 500 word editorial column can't do to the same extent.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, look, I think that's right. At the same time, I think you're kind of, what you're aiming to do is sort of distill an idea or a debate down into that one frame, you know, and you, but you are capturing what people are thinking at the same time. I think it's a bit of both, but yeah, there's, there's definitely, there's something happens when, when, when people respond to a cartoon and I'm, I'm no psychologist, but, but I'm sure that it's a case of people recognizing something, recognizing their own interpretation.
00:09:41
Speaker
seeing it in a way reproduced through the eyes of somebody who happens to be able to draw and kind of move captions around and that sort of thing and I think people really enjoy that. Yeah I agree that's why I personally am fascinated by this as a craft because you have to be part creative you have to be part.
00:09:59
Speaker
political analyst, you have to be quite cynical, you have to be funny. It is very much this melting pot of different skills that come together and you have to distill something which is quite complicated with such clarity. I want to understand this craft better. So let's start chronologically. You do one cartoon a day, is that right?
00:10:20
Speaker
I'm doing three cartoons a week at the moment. I've cut back the three cartoons a week at the moment. I've got twin toddlers and while they're little, I've pulled back a bit to give me more time with them and make sure we sort of balance things up between us at home. Yeah, very wise. Well, when you sit down to draw a cartoon, what are you trying to achieve?
00:10:41
Speaker
Well, my process starts with reading, starts with listening. I'll listen to news. I'll read articles. First of all, I'll sort of get my handle on what I feel. And it's a sort of a continuous thing. That's one of the things that I've learned is you can't really switch off in this
00:11:02
Speaker
in this job, you need to be abreast of the developments every day of the week. So you never really leave the mindset or you're always in the mindset a little bit of listening and watching and taking in what's going on.
00:11:18
Speaker
You know, your brains actively jumbling things around to try and try and make jokes, you know, trying to make cartoons up in your head. So at the end of the day, I've also found that to be to to dive too deep into the detail of a lot of.
00:11:33
Speaker
the issues and the politics of the day can actually also sometimes take you too far into the nitty gritty. And you've got to pull yourself back and think, remember, it's about gut reactions here, I like to think. Readers aren't expecting me to break down the detail of things. They just want a clear, concise summary, if you like, of
00:12:01
Speaker
things that they've been reading or issues they're interested in. So it's a combination of, you have to understand the material fully, but you also need to not dive into it to a sort of granular level where you get bogged down in meaningless detail. You've always got to kind of keep that big picture and think, well, hang on. If I've just opened the paper, I want to understand something broadly and have that gut response. You've got to try and nail that, I think.
00:12:29
Speaker
You have your idea, or you have a topic, let's say. One thing which I'm trying to work through in my head, does your brain go to the creative first, what it will look like, or does it go to the joke or to the concept you're trying to build out first? What's the foundation that you work from?
00:12:48
Speaker
For me personally, and I think when I look back through my dad's work, I think we're similar in that a lot of the time, the jokes, they're often around language. In my case, I love clever use of language. So that is often the backbone of my cartoons. Whereas there are other cartoonists who think I, you know, and I admire them immensely for this is that they, their ideas, their jokes are much more visual, you know? And so there's a sort of,
00:13:17
Speaker
a different part of the brain going on there and and i suppose we all have to do what comes naturally but for me and i think in a large part the way my dad worked too was that you sort of my if you look at my notepad it's.
00:13:32
Speaker
The cartoon ideas are written down. Very occasionally I'll scribble them out. If I'm trying to work out the best way of framing it, the most effective way of getting the action into that frame, I'll certainly go through the sequence of drawings to get there, but they're underpinned by
00:13:50
Speaker
you know, a language, a little, a little twist of language here or, you know, I'm very focused on getting the caption right. For me, that's something that I will go back and change through the course of the day multiple times just to get that wording spot on. And I think my dad was similar.
00:14:06
Speaker
But then, of course, you know, a cartoon is not funny if it's if it doesn't look funny, too. So there is this visual component to it. The caricatures have to be funny. And that's just after a while becomes second nature. The way you draw in the cartoon, you know, in the cartoonist way, you know, there's a certain language that that we all understand is the sort of cartoon language. And of course, everybody has their own twist on it. But that's the that's the way you draw. But yeah, for me, there's there's a
00:14:33
Speaker
Quite often if i go back and analyze my work i think it look better they're often jokes that that could be written down with a you know the car to build around them that way. What are your tools how are you actually putting this to paper.
00:14:46
Speaker
I draw direct onto a sort of drawing interface, a graphics tablet, which is like, you know, you're effectively drawing straight onto a screen using, you know, pretty standard drawing software, Photoshop. And over the years, I've I really, in a previous work that I used to do as an illustrator, I certainly explored a whole range of tools available. I mean, the digital graphics programs are absolutely full of the most incredible tools.
00:15:15
Speaker
I've sort of pulled it right back to a sort of basic set that works for me. I like the look. I feel sometimes that when you labor the drawings too much, it takes away from the immediacy of the cartoon. So it's about a balance there too. Like you actually, I think that a drawing that happens effortlessly and that actually carries over to the viewer.
00:15:36
Speaker
And it's much more immediate, the response. I think there are sometimes you can get bogged down if you if the detail is too lovingly, everything's too lovingly rendered. It doesn't actually add to the joke, you know, some of some of my favorite cartoonists can barely draw, you know, so. But they're but they're but they get what they need to in the expressions and the drawing and sometimes the crudeness of the drawings actually adds to it for me.
00:16:01
Speaker
Yeah, so you put it down on what I was about to say on paper, figuratively on paper. Yeah. You hand it through to an editor. How would you describe the process of editorial
Collaborating with Editors
00:16:12
Speaker
oversight?
00:16:12
Speaker
I like to have a conversation with the editors fairly early in the day. I only really call them up when I've got an idea or a number of ideas to run by them. And it'll just be a phone call. And I sort of say, look, here's what I'm thinking. You know, what do you think? And, you know, is this generally speaking, it's I tend to, you know, you've got a gut feeling of what the, you know, the one, two, three, four big stories of the day are. And the ones that are going to be talked about the next day
00:16:40
Speaker
Hopefully on the letters page there'll be a bit of discussion around that's always nice if you can get the car to line up with the commentary the next day so that's really that's important you don't want to pick a story that most people haven't even read you know so it's gotta be something that.
00:16:56
Speaker
that you know has legs and people are responding to and engaged with. I'll run them by the editor and it's a good process. I always know when I've got an idea that I think really works and if I haven't got one that really works, I'll say, these are the ideas.
00:17:17
Speaker
I'm not wrapped with where they're going. So let's talk again in a few hours when I've just gone away and sort of walked around the block a few times with the dog and had a bit more of a think about things. So by the end of the day, there's generally no nasty surprises when I present something and the editors think, hang on, you know, I haven't seen this. I don't know what's this all about. Generally speaking, they know where I'm going with it. And if I change direction, I let them know, you know, we check in and make sure that we're all on the same page, so to speak.
00:17:46
Speaker
And as most people would know, that the Australian editor is a News Corp editor. Now in some circles, Rupert Murdoch is akin to the devil. And it goes to the question of how does the masthead influence the work, if at all?
Influence of Rupert Murdoch
00:18:04
Speaker
There's very little influence exerted upon on me about what I can express in my little frame there.
00:18:14
Speaker
So, yeah, the idea that Rupert Murdoch is on the phone to me telling me what I can and can't draw and all of that is just so ludicrous. It's hilarious. But I suppose I read the paper that I'm printed in. I read the Australian. And so I'm acutely sort of across where we sit on things or generally speaking, where our readers sit on things.
00:18:42
Speaker
And the truth is there's a happy sort of congruence that's naturally there. I mean, I think that I'm perfectly at home in the paper. The paper is not telling me how to think. I happen to think that way. And this is a conversation that I sometimes find myself having to people who are sort of incredulous that I would be taking positions on things that the readers of The Australian might take. The truth is we're on the same page and I'm happy where I'm
00:19:10
Speaker
I feel very much at home at the Oz and it's as simple as that. It's as simple as that. I don't think I'd be a natural fit at some other newspapers and nor would their cartoonists necessarily be a great fit at the Oz. And of course, it's perfectly fine to have cartoonists who sort of take a different line on things than the editorial line. And every now and again, I'll do that too.
00:19:34
Speaker
That's just the way it works. And there have been some great cartoonists at the Oz who have sort of done that. Even my dad, for a long time, took positions on things that were sort of contrary to the paper's position on certain things. But that's also the mark of a quality newspaper, is it sort of a multitude of viewpoints and all
00:19:58
Speaker
sort of sitting in the same paper that's I think a healthy situation but you know in my case it seems to be a nice situation where I share the views a lot of time that the readers have and so that's as simple as that. Let's zoom out to the arts more generally. You are a celebrated artist in addition to your day job. I'm reflecting on the arts generally in 2023. Is it harder to be creative?
Creativity vs. Cancel Culture
00:20:25
Speaker
given the social climate we find ourselves in, the age of woke, the age of cancel culture, does this make it harder to be creative in the arts?
00:20:35
Speaker
I think that if you are looking for the sort of affirmation of the fashionable art establishment, then in this day and age, there is a political slant to the art world. You've only got to look at the Archibald Prize to sort of see that there is a sort of
00:20:56
Speaker
undercurrent of a sort of fashionable world view that underpins a lot of the work. It's reflected in the work that you see there. And so if you're looking for acceptance and affirmation from that world, then it's a woke world. It just is. But I'm not looking for that. And they reject me anyway. So this is the sort of
00:21:20
Speaker
I kind of came to that conclusion a long time ago that I simply don't need that acceptance and I'm not looking for it. For me, painting has always been a much more personal, it has more sort of personal meaning to me. As a craft, as a pursuit, my relationship to painting is about the artists that I admire and
00:21:43
Speaker
the work that I've looked long and hard at and has inspired me. And it's got nothing to do with the artists that are deemed fashionable and great by the sort of the cultural elites. It's more about whose work do I like, what says something to me, and what sort of work do I want to produce that when I end, you know, when I'm an old man, I look back and think,
00:22:09
Speaker
I painted the way that was true to who I am and true to my belief of what constitutes good painting and what constitutes art. There is this external idea of what important art looks like, but that's not necessarily the way I feel. My own opinion is, what sort of art do I want to make? Well, it's the sort of art that means the most to me.
00:22:33
Speaker
You've got to be true to yourself. And so I can plug away and do the work that means something to me. I'm not dependent on that sort of acceptance and recognition from an art establishment. It's not going to make or break my career because I do the cartoons and then I can paint the sort of work that I like and that the people who are asking me to paint for them, they appreciate it. And that's really all that matters to me.
00:23:02
Speaker
The other thing about 2023 is it feels to me that we increasingly have characters in politics that are almost parodies of themselves.
Satire and Political Figures
00:23:12
Speaker
Trump is the emblematic example of that. I imagine that makes satire and political satire very difficult. How do you approach people like the Trumps of this world who are those sorts of larger than life characters who almost put the joke on a plate for you?
00:23:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's true. It's true. I mean, but at the same time, I mean, you also got to look at somebody like Trump and think he's kind of a gift to cartoonists as well. He's so readily identifiable, great fun to caricature.
00:23:46
Speaker
And I mean, there are cartoonists who all they ever did was just draw Trump in, you know, ever more grotesque sort of ways. And, you know, for them, for many years, that was sort of the key to their success, you know. So he, yes, they are often they're almost
00:24:05
Speaker
satirical creations before you get started but at the same time you gotta look at them and think well I've got a lot to work with here you know. Beyond satire I mean I don't know that anything's beyond satire as long as people are taking themselves too very seriously you can kind of pick them apart and have fun with it. That's very handy you've said that because that goes to another question on my list which is are there any topics which should be off limits for an editorial cartoonist?
00:24:32
Speaker
There's all sorts of rules that I suppose woke ideology has set up around things that we are not allowed to satirize, the trans debate, fundamentalist Islamism. A lot of these things, certainly there are cartoonists who don't want to go there.
00:24:52
Speaker
There shouldn't really be any boundaries around that sort of thing, I don't think. I mean, everything's worthy of ridicule and quite often it's really important that we send everything up. So, no, I don't really think there should be too many boundaries around where we can go. It's sort of well-documented, the sort of battles my dad had when he found himself on the wrong side of the sort of
00:25:15
Speaker
cultural commissars who decided that he had said something unsayable and he needed to be called before the AHRC or things like that. I mean, that's just so over the top. We are paid to and expected to go places where sometimes the writers can't go or
00:25:32
Speaker
You know, that's what people expect from cartoons, I think, is to go that extra step, take things to the extreme. And you have to trust that people can understand satire. I mean, this is a big problem, I think, today, is that people take things so literally and satire requires of the viewer or reader to just make that mental step into, okay, we're, you know, we're in satire territory here.
00:25:57
Speaker
you know this person is not now saying something so horrible that there's an understanding that your readership or the viewers are with you on this they understand that you're now you're parodying a viewpoint it's like barry humphrey said when when you have to.
00:26:12
Speaker
explain satire to somebody i mean it's it's it's over before you even start so that's it that's a real problem that's a real problem i think with this is this we've got generations now who have sort of grown up not really recognizing satire when they see it and so every little thing offends them.
00:26:29
Speaker
And they don't even realize sometimes that the cartoonist is with them on something, they read it so literally that they immediately sort of the implication is that you are some wicked person to frame something in such a way, but they don't realize that you're highlighting bigotry or you're highlighting a sort of horrible outlook.
00:26:48
Speaker
It might even be the outlook that they share, but they don't register. That's something that worries me. I sort of do worry about people's ability to actually digest and understand satire when they see it. You mentioned the problems that your old man had specifically around this point. In preparation for the interview, I was doing some reading. He wrote a wonderful article actually for The Spectator Australia.
00:27:14
Speaker
in 2016 after that notorious cartoon came out on the subject of Indigenous fairs. As an aside to all of our listeners, Bill Leake, just one of many wonderful examples of contributors to The Spectator Australia, definitely subscribe, 16.99 a month, spectator.com.au forward slash join.
00:27:38
Speaker
In that specky article, I'll quote your dad. He said, this is what happens when the very concept of free speech is so misunderstood by so many that Bill Shorten and Mark Dreyfus constook all political points by sneeringly referring to freedom of speech
00:27:54
Speaker
as though it meant nothing more than the legal right to hurl abuse at strangers on the bus. You don't fix a problem by closing your eyes and imagining it has gone away. We'll never make progress unless we're able to talk openly about the scourge before us. Why do you think we're less comfortable today not having those types of conversations than potentially say at the start of your father's
Political Correctness and Offense Culture
00:28:19
Speaker
career?
00:28:19
Speaker
Well, I guess it's the rise and rise of political correctness and the sort of creep of identity politics into everything and this sort of cult of victimhood that's so prevalent these days. You know, it's almost like we've gotten to a point now where people actually are looking to take offense when they open the newspaper and it's virtually at the end of the day.
00:28:45
Speaker
to be offended. Quite often people are getting offended on other people's behalf. They're not offended themselves, but they'd see something perceive the potential for offense and that social media has sort of exacerbated this because you can, in a very public way, sort of with your smart ass little tweet or something, kind of fire off something that if you look through all of that
00:29:09
Speaker
Twittering and tweeting and stuff, what's really underneath it all is narcissism. It's people wanting to appear virtuous and sticking their hand up saying, look at me, aren't I a good person? And aren't I an even more virtuous person than everybody else?
00:29:27
Speaker
And so, yeah, there's all these weird things that have crept in and they do all have a sort of suffocating effect on people like me who sort of expect that people know how to take a joke and expect that people will be able to understand what you're getting at. And yeah, it is really important because
00:29:45
Speaker
These are issues that need to be discussed and to live in a climate where cartoonists have to answer to these panels and make a case for why they've drawn somebody some way and why they've made a comment. It's unbelievable that we're even in a
00:30:07
Speaker
situation where this has become the norm, but it has happened to me. There you are being in this inquisition situation where you have to defend your right to see things the way you've seen them. The implication is that there is only one right way to interpret
00:30:26
Speaker
an issue and that's rubbish you know there's always various ways to interpret something and we reserve our rights to call out, you have to reserve your right to sort of call out the bullshit when you see it and just because all the sort of you know the fashionable people on Twitter feel a certain way it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to express a different opinion.
00:30:50
Speaker
You said that it's happened to you, possibly the best example of that was the response to a cartoon that you did of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Tell us about that experience, both in terms of what you drew and then the response to it and what you reflect on on that particular, I guess we'd call it a controversy now.
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, it was quite surreal, really, and it was also really unsettling. I lived through my dad's really difficult time when he was having to defend himself, when he was accused of breaching Section 18C and having to answer to the AHRC.
00:31:28
Speaker
and people are frightened center was tearing strips off him and saying the most unbelievable things right up to you know and beyond his death and they still love to stick the booty on twitter whenever he's his name is mentioned you see some people saying incredibly nasty things so it was sort of like i was aware that there are a lot of people out there who
00:31:48
Speaker
you know, hated my dad and hated what he stood for and so for them it was like an opportunity to have a crack at me, you know. So I sort of knew what was behind it. A lot of people were very keen to kind of get stuck into me early on and but yeah, look, I had to, I faced, what do you call it? I had, I faced a press council process where I had to defend the cartoon.
00:32:11
Speaker
The paper had to put out a press release when I was deemed to have breached the standards of the press council. So I sort of failed in my efforts to defend my actions. But yeah, I mean, it was surreal. If the desired effect was to shut me up or restrain my expression or something, it didn't have that effect. It's really more like a badge of honor.
00:32:35
Speaker
The source of the trouble was that you effectively used the words of Joe Biden, which could be perceived to be racist. You were quoting him, and then by putting those words to print, you were the Australian and you were tarred with the same brush almost. I think you mentioned this briefly before, but I think about this a lot. It goes to
00:32:57
Speaker
the inability for so many people to distinguish between exposing or ridiculing a concept and being said to be perpetuating it. I was watching a James Bond film a week or so ago, and I always laugh when James Bond is, the next James Bond film comes out because, you know, the conversation always is, well, you know, he can't be sexist anymore. He probably can't be white anymore.
00:33:21
Speaker
a misogynistic character has no place in 2023. And it's like, why does every character have to be morally virtuous? Why does every thought point screen have to be morally
Activism in Cartoons and Humor
00:33:32
Speaker
correct? In fact, don't we learn from actually displaying ideas which are troubling, which aren't necessarily moral? And you learn from those. I really struggle with this. And this isn't just in political cartoons. This is across creative fields, generally, that we can't make that distinction anymore.
00:33:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. There's a certain mindset, I think, in a certain cohort of the political cartoonists where they're activists, really. A lot of them, I think, feel like their job is to save the world. For them, it's all about right and wrong.
00:34:09
Speaker
the climate change debate for them is about, you know, are you on the side of people who wants to save the planet or you just don't care or you, you know, one of these wicked people who doesn't care and so they're highly charged positions that the people are taking and
00:34:27
Speaker
I think they've lost sight of the fact that at the end of the day, we're just supposed to be stirrers, you know, sometimes just do the funny thing. I mean, another cartoonist was described as the sort of as the conscience of the nation. And I sort of think who wants to be the conscience of the nation, you know, as a cartoonist, who wants to take themselves that seriously? And who wants to be this sort of moral beacon that their cartoons must embody the fashionable
00:34:55
Speaker
correct way of thinking about the world we live in at the moment, that that's something to aspire to. To me, that's the sort of exact opposite of what you want to be as a cartoonist. I like cartoonists who stir the pot and there's a bit of ratbag to them. What are your reflections, not just on those types of cartoonists, but your reflections on the state of the media more generally in 2023?
00:35:21
Speaker
My feeling is that there's a hell of a lot of activists who call themselves journalists getting around the place, really. This debate about the ABC that's been bubbling away is great because some people have pointed out that what used to be opinion has sort of seeped into general reporting.
00:35:44
Speaker
And it's not even just that. It's about the emission of the whole story. You only ever get parts of it presented oftentimes, and everything is slanted a certain way. It's so damaging, especially with the climate stuff.
00:36:04
Speaker
We're only ever presented with this sort of climate alarmist sort of angle on everything. It's not the full picture, but this is having a very real impact on the way the countries of the world are being run. So it's really a big problem.
00:36:20
Speaker
you look at the steve kunan book and he talks about this sort of thing that the media has a lot to answer for you because catastrophizing cells you know what do they say it grabs eyeballs and that sort of thing but but it's not the full picture and it's and that that is such a shame because we should be presented with all sides of an argument and to make up our own mind so yeah i mean i think that
00:36:43
Speaker
It is a polarized landscape, the media landscape today.
Media Polarization and Social Media
00:36:46
Speaker
There's no doubt about that. And it's also a very combative sort of environment. People have sort of moved further and further, I think, to different extremes and taking pot shots at one another. And I suppose it's all like everything. It's sort of been sort of supercharged by social media. I specifically on that, are we going to just keep getting more and more polarized?
00:37:11
Speaker
Is there any way that we can both maybe let's look at in the context of Australia as opposed to the West. Is Australia going to keep getting more and more politically and ideologically divided or is this a you see this as being an unusual moment in history? I really don't know. I wonder if it's a bit of a case of the pendulum swinging a certain way and
00:37:33
Speaker
You know, I suppose maybe five years ago, virtue signaling was a new concept. But I think everybody sort of knows what that is now when they when they when they hear the expression, you know, they understand what that is. So I think there's an awareness of the kind of excesses of of wokeness. And I think the laughable aspects of wokeness and extreme political kind of positions are
00:38:04
Speaker
have become more apparent to people and certainly more and more prominent people are kind of not afraid to speak up about things. You look at JK Rowling and people like that who are prepared to sort of stick their heads above the parapet and put their foot down when they see a sort of assault on common sense that we're seeing all the time.
00:38:26
Speaker
I think that does give people a sense that common sense, it's still there somewhere underneath it all. So maybe we will get our bearings and kind of capture a little bit about who we were when we were a sort of common sense Australia where we could disagree and still be friends.
00:38:50
Speaker
foreign concept to so many people now, which is just such a shame. But look, at the same time, I'm also pretty pessimistic about it, I suppose. It doesn't feel like the climate is getting any sort of friendlier. And you look at some of the big debates that are going on at the moment, it's almost like there's a deliberateness to the, it's almost like the stoking of division is what people are actually sort of out to do, I think a lot of the time.
00:39:16
Speaker
Here we have this voice debate, which is sort of presented as a call for unity, but you have to be on one side. But it still comes down to a binary choice, but it's presented as this opportunity for unity, but you have to pick the right choice. That in itself is a sort of divisive process. That is the natural cynicism in you coming out. I'm going to try and end on an optimistic note.
00:39:46
Speaker
Johannes, you are a very humble man. I want you to ditch that humility for my final question. What one cartoon have you drawn that you are most proud of and why?
Favorite Cartoons During COVID
00:40:01
Speaker
If I look at the cartoon that has been the one that got, well, the most popular cartoon I think I've ever drawn was
00:40:11
Speaker
was probably the cartoon I drew during COVID where I had a chicken crossing the road and on the other side were a couple of cops waiting for the chicken and they had the notepad out ready to find this chicken and one of the coppers was saying, this better be good.
00:40:34
Speaker
that that one that one I still have I still get orders for that one so so that one must have struck a chord with people but I think the one that I like and I think of course it was an extreme
00:40:47
Speaker
It was I took I took things to the extreme, of course, in the cartoon. And, you know, the world that I drew has not has not necessarily come to pass, but I still think that it captured something was the cartoon I drew also during the covid period where I sort of drew a couple of guys in loincloths walking through a desert wasteland.
00:41:07
Speaker
with the ruins of a city in the background and the sort of skeleton of an airplane slowly being covered with sand and some sort of marauding Mad Max type figures off in the distance. And one of the guys was one guy saying, well, on the plus side, we sure beat that coronavirus. And I mean, I sort of thought that that struck a chord
00:41:31
Speaker
I think, and I still sort of like that one, even though I, you know, I certainly took things out there, but I think there is again, I think we've got the essential truth. Well, it's a different world, isn't it? The world has changed since COVID and it will never quite be the same. There's so many aspects of our lives that have been affected there and we're still kind of unraveling and finding out just how much overreach there was and
00:41:59
Speaker
and how kind of over the top the response was. So I like that one. We will include links to both of those in the show notes. And I did like the little subtle plug that you can order your work.
00:42:14
Speaker
In addition to seeing Johannes's work in the Australian, you can check out his website. You can browse and purchase signed prints of his daily editorial cartoons, of which those are two cracking examples. I think they make for a cracking frenzy. I'm already eyeing off a few for Father's Day, Johannes. Thank you very much for coming on, Australiana mate. I think to your point, I think you do get to the essential truth of issues and you do it in a way which has such clarity and humour and insight. I think it's a very rare thing in the Australian media landscape, so keep doing what you're doing.
00:42:45
Speaker
Thanks so much, Will, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.