There’s a reason Leunig’s cartoons are pinned up where people are desperately unhappy: the cartoonist has been encouraging a retreat from reality for years
The enduring popularity of the cartoonist Michael Leunig is something I’ve been baffled by since childhood. His cartoons were stuck on my grandmother’s fridge, and I recall looking at the wobbly drawings of a man with a duck on his head with confusion and, as I got older, irritation.
Leunig goes there (again) on vaccination. @theage pic.twitter.com/3rRJf0LX3M
[I]t was drawing a cartoon about the Vietnam War ... I was trying to draw about this very difficult subject and I got engrossed and tangled in it and the deadline was ticking away and, anyway, I just then drew a duck. I drew a duck. It appeared. You see, I was stuck. I couldn’t go on. I didn’t know where to go forward. The duck appeared in my mind or came off the end of my pen and then I put a fella sitting on the duck and then I drew a teapot on his head. It was an act of defiance. I was being absurd, you see, because I couldn’t untangle this terrible Vietnam tragedy and I drew this thing ...
Our spirituality is innate, idiosyncratic and natural, and it would be futile for me to try to examine the matter too closely or elaborately in this limited discussion. I am not equipped to do so anyway.
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“Some cartoonists have been extraordinarily successful at taking pot shots at society’s mores while leading a merry dance like a medieval King’s fool. Michael Leunig is a classic example of this sort of artist. He claims to be non-political but all of his work is about the inhabitants of the City of Mankind. Even the holy fool occasionally finds himself out of the zone of sanctuary ....”
Some mothers do ‘ave ‘em.
They have maternal instincts
That contradict what science thinks.
They stand up to the state:
A mother’s love may be as great
As any new vaccine
That man has ever seen
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