Overland literary journal

Bruce Petty drawing money

Robert Phiddian on Australia’s pioneering cartoonist

Political cartoonists draw characters and events. They live off the flux of the political moment, and it used to be rare for them to reach deeper, to engage satirically with patterns of power in society, let alone the economy. Bruce Petty’s trajectory has been different and very influential, especially at the Age, on a generation of cartoonists like Spooner, Leunig and Nicholson. He has fostered a more analytical, economically literate, but still staunchly oppositional attitude towards money and its acolytes on the pictorial parts of the nation’s editorial pages. It is a culture of scepticism that the editorial and financial writers might have striven harder to share, before the instant wisdom of the global financial crisis became fashionable.

Ever since he started at Rupert Murdoch’s crusading Mirror (1962) and Australian (1964) newspapers, Bruce Petty sought to draw the big issues and processes more than other cartoonists. His work at the early Australian was dominated by the directly political issues that characterised the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a widely distributed and accepted sense of optimism that politics could involve planning and substantial achievement. The political spectrum supporting this attitude was broad and not even exclusively left-wing, running from Donald Horne’s right-wing contrarianism in The Lucky Country to the socialist and communist enthusiasms of Stephen Murray-Smith’s Overland. This time of hope, as Horne described it in another book, ended with the mayhem of the second Whitlam government and its dismissal in 1975, though the geopolitical driver for the change was the Oil Shock of 1973. Throughout these years, Petty was a prominent proponent of this progressive attitude, a daily cartoonist working in a newsroom, whose attention focused sharply on the daily news cycle.¹

The collapse of Planet Whitlam was compounded for Petty by the way the once liberal Australian suddenly veered Right and edged him out. He contributed posters to ‘Maintain the Rage’ rallies, donated images to any number of good causes, and focused a lot of attention on animated movies.² Instead of attempting to live in a lost Camelot, however, he got on with analysing the new, economically-driven politics. He was quick to spot the ascendant ideas delineated in political slogans like Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Life is not meant to be easy’(1971),³ Margaret Thatcher’s ‘And who is society? There is no such thing!’ (1987), and Bill Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ (1992). Before 1975, he had been swimming with the apparent tide of history, against a conservatism whose time was obviously up. Now, without any real ideological movement, he found himself a mordant critic of an ascendant and reductive economic libertarianism. The central theme of his cartooning became market-doubting in the decades of the rise of monetarism, and the main formal preoccupation became drawing the complex processes of money, influence and power. This searching satirical critique is apparent in books (The Money Book, 1983; The Absurd Machine, 1997), films (The Money Game, 1970; Global Haywire, 2008) and hundreds (if not thousands) of editorial cartoons.

Here I focus on yet another of the media in which he has pursued this mission, the public talk with pictures. He has given hundreds over the years, and no-one who has witnessed a talk will forget his demeanour or his point. What follows is an attempt, underpinned by Petty’s own script and drawings, to record a single but fairly typical instance.

Drawing economics in person

The room is a nondescript lecture theatre in Canberra. It is 5 October 2000, and Australians are in the mood for self-congratulation in the aftermath of the Sydney Olympics, the closing ceremony less than a week gone. The professor of politics introduces him, pleased to have drawn a major media practitioner to her strand of the conference: ‘Doyen of Australian political cartooning … decades of experience … transformed the political cartoon in his years at the Australian … Oscar winner for Leisure … deep engagement with underlying issues … far more than “just a comedian”’. Petty is visibly uncomfortable with the praise, justified though it is. His eyes glance to the floor or the side most of the time, but brightly. He smiles a little defensively, like an ethereal uncle. He has recently entered his seventies and comes from an era that valued reserve and understatement: the modern fashion for trumpet-blowing is something to be survived.

At the end of the Canberra panegyric he stands, deprecates the praise and apologises to the audience, deferring to their supposedly more profound and systematic knowledge, born of their deep academic training or the sharpness of their cartooning wit. He just tinkers with ideas, words and images, he insists. He plays with metaphors, and has managed to fool enough of the people enough of the time to have made a living out of it for a while now.

On the facts, this is a trope of modesty. Still, the caution, a resistance to being mistaken for a prophet, is real in Petty; it lies at the heart of his satirical practice and his (there’s no other word for it) wisdom. ‘The world is a tricky place,’ his demeanour suggests, ‘and I don’t claim to have any final answers. Maybe these are good questions to start with, today at least. Have a think about them, and see whether my guess that the answers come together a bit like this works for you.’

What he actually starts with in Canberra is:

Everybody has a problem with economics.
Basically it’s too hard.
What we are discussing here is simply too hard.4

When he sidles over to the overhead projector and takes out a marking pen, the drawing is no more apparently magisterial – just a few spidery squiggles on a transparency.

Petty continues with the historical perspective always important to him, then suggests:

Parts of economics are simple.
The market part is dead simple. Kids do it with their sandwiches at lunchtime. It’s easy, but it doesn’t work very well with adults.
It doesn’t work at all for 200 nations and it doesn’t work too well for quite a few suburbs.

Suddenly we are at the heart of the issue because the wisdom of the market has been prescribed for every social and political ill. Markets are simple, but not equal, and it’s the weak who often pay the highest price. It is one of those metaphors that prevails by over-simplifying, as he says a bit later:

But the market works well as a very nice word.
The market image is reassuring – gaily decorated stalls full of things you need; buyers being connected to sellers in a most cheerful manner; a trader and a customer, side by side, haggling over a second-hand bed lamp.

Things work, but only so far, and (Petty insists) you have to test every step for honesty and equity, as well as for efficiency. Even as deeply ingrained a metaphor as the market cannot be taken for granted, and has to be called to account for its blindness, even while its potential to provide insight is acknowledged. Petty is sometimes accused of being a left-wing ideologue by market-oriented commentators like Mark Steyn,5 but such people do not look closely enough at what he says and draws. He is stubbornly egalitarian and communitarian in outlook, and that makes him ‘of the Left’ surely enough, but he holds to no positions dogmatically, makes no blanket prescriptions for systemic revolution. Every system has its feedback effects, and he is a curator of unintended feedback effect, of the odd or useful angle.

He puts it disarmingly:

The most useful thing I can do is describe the kind of problem cartoonists have with this subject [economics] generally. That is, finding the metaphor, the visual analogy.

For him, the metaphor is central. Certainly, as he explains, ‘cartoonists use other devices – word play, inversions, obscenity, absurdity, puns’, but for Petty ‘you find the metaphor and draw it. All communication needs, it seems, metaphors to hang on to, to feed on.’ So he sets off, on this grey spring day, on a search for the right metaphor for economics.

He tries several. ‘The Titanic was a popular one’ with all the drama of deck chairs, band playing on, death by drowning and some surviving by managing to get into the lifeboats. ‘But it isn’t quite precise,’ because the Titanic was an excellent machine, and ‘it’s not good enough to say the economy works alright … so long as it doesn’t hit a bit of floating greed’. The ‘economy is more iceberg’, but that doesn’t quite work either, because that makes us the Titanic and we mostly survive the economy somehow.

Satire is a reductive art, and its most famous practitioners are usually those who reduce with the most fearless and charismatic vigour. But a large part of Petty’s genius lies in resisting the reductiveness, in twisting the simple joke around towards a complexity that asks questions more than it answers. So he moves to the sciences, picking up and considering biology, physics (‘heat death … a sort of bank death … the million-year-long death of a star’), but turns them down in the end. As Petty explains, ‘machines are about duplication, about reliably repeating the same again’ and ‘repeating events over and over is precisely what economies do not do. They self-modify – invent, privatise, dump, monopolise, retrench, borrow, fall over.’ So, as archly as regretfully, he discards this metaphor:

Machine is the wrong analogy.
A bit of a blow – I’ve drawn thousands of machines.

The machine is, unfortunately, an ultra-conservative dream image.

In Yeats’ ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1939), the ageing poet accounts for the various mythologies that have supported his poetry over the years, dismissing each in turn. Something like that is happening here in Petty’s testing of the metaphors he has drawn by.

There is competition and the sports metaphor – every Australian cartoonist’s fall-back option for the days when a really good or novel idea refuses to show up before deadline. ‘Australia’s favourite metaphor – Magpies versus the Panthers, cars versus the lights, a worker versus an employer.’

This is a metaphor beloved of capitalists, that we are all in a competition where everyone wins through striving, but there is a catch. ‘Curious thing about competition – we are very quick to endow both sides with equality … symmetry seems to be very deep in the human reference.’ So the sport metaphor doesn’t really work unless we can find some way to ‘get smarter about asymmetry of confrontation’.

How would we cartoon this level of discernment? ‘We start to get desperate,’ he asserts, but desperation isn’t the right word for his militant testing of the assumptions and metaphors that most public debate, not just cartooning, tends to take for granted. It’s more like an agile hunt for a good way of thinking, talking and drawing, for an honest way of looking at the world. ‘Try something from the past. Has economics taken the characteristics of religious debate in the seventeenth century?’ Even if this works, drawing Friedman and Galbraith as Leibniz and Spinoza may not have enough explanatory power to be effective among innocent citizens reading their newspapers over breakfast.

‘The establishment metaphors prevail – trickle down, the market,’ but they need to be resisted by the working egalitarian satirist, because they insist that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that will not do at all.

Petty descends upon the fundamental problem he has, both as a cartoonist and as a citizen:

It is odd that the process that determines who gets what in the world has no universally accepted shape.

A process that finally disemploys people, spreads desperation and has fear of failure as the engine of growth, that disfigures society, on its way to creating such exciting manifestations of wealth – it’s odd that such a process is beyond popular description.

His speech patterns are disarmingly laconic – he seems to be doing little more than tacking ideas loosely together – yet the analysis is piercing. Nearly three hundred years ago, Alexander Pope confessed to being ‘So odd, my Country’s Ruin makes me grave’,6 and the word odd has not often been used since with such ironic sharpness. Petty stumbles lithely straight onto this oddness in the fabric of things, and suggests that the ostensibly innocent dearth of description might, in practice, serve a political agenda. Lacking an agreed way of grasping economics, the public responds with fearful superstition, which brings out the worst in us:

We are behaving as we always did when the stegosaurus attacks in the night, or the ice comes over the horizon or the plague strikes from nowhere. We grab what we can get our hands on, we blame someone handy, we turn to the loudest and the biggest in the tribe, we give our trust to the well-spoken, and they make up cures and potions and gobbledygook. We sacrifice virgins of all kinds and we overrun anybody that thinks differently.

This is the bedrock of Petty’s economic and ideological vision, and he has been chipping away at this line of argument for more than half a century. We trust the experts to do our thinking for us at our peril, not because they are villains, but because they become creatures of the systems they build to manage us. It is the strangely liberating effect of nearly any Petty cartoon to be shown our dopiness as a clear and reformable thing. We do not need to react stupidly to the next stegosaurus; rather we can get a mental handle on it and respond with creative humanity. We probably won’t conquer all fear and stupidity, but each temporary win is worth having, because it means so many virgins unsacrificed, so many soldiers not sent to die in order to overrun those who think differently.

Playfully, Petty draws economics as a starry sky, as a solar system, as a series of graphs laid over each other so as to reduce the image to squiggles. Perhaps the dream of a single metaphor for economics is another chimera, and what we really need is lots of metaphors to aid intelligent debate. Suddenly he points out sternly that he doesn’t make his living innocently either: ‘Newspapers are advertising documents … We do finance in newspapers, not economics. What was the ideological debate now only happens in the front of the paper when John Ralston Saul comes to town.’ We are most susceptible to seduction when most flattered for our cleverness. In Petty’s world of public discourse and policy there is only the frailest of boundaries between smart and half-smart, between really clever and merely clever, depicted here as a wind-up John Howard:

For all the tentativeness, both apparent and real, the rigour builds. None of the metaphors will quite do the trick, none will provide the certainty a practical man craves and an ideologue promises. Petty is willing to entertain the thought that satire might not be the best way of getting to the truth, and runs close to dejection:

Subject exhaustion; attrition might be winning the day.
Satire is a sort of teasing. Tiger cubs do it, up to a point.
Teasing has limits. It’s play, but you don’t tease for too long. There’s been a lot of it in the Western world.

Is it possible that satire is now exhausting people’s patience?

He is right to question the efficacy of satire, to wonder if it becomes naturalised within the political economy it purports to criticise. After all, history is not exactly littered with examples of corrupt or incompetent leaders who have resigned in shame or despair upon reading a particularly scathing cartoon. But images, words and metaphors are Petty’s way of grappling with the intractable search for a fair and prosperous world. He has been a constant witness at the carnival of absurdity we call politics and business for half a century. He doesn’t think, with those triumphalist neoconservatives, that the machine of modernity has produced the best of all possible worlds, and yet he doesn’t just throw rocks. In decades of work dealing with economics and other big issues, he has dared to project alternatives without lapsing into the false consciousness of revolutionaries who declare that change is inevitable and predictable. He does not ask us simply to substitute his certainties for those of the current dominant ideology. He knows there is something out of joint in the global order of punishment and reward that we call money, he offers some alternatives, and persistently suggests that we should dare to think it through for ourselves. Since the collapse of the new century’s financial bubble, as so often in the decades he has been drawing, the times seem to suit him:

For economics – a set of scales – one third of the world rich on one side – two thirds on the other.

A bit of churning, that might be it.

1. Donald Horne, Time of Hope: Australia 1966–72, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1980. For an account of Petty’s career in this era, see Robert Phiddian, ‘Petty Notions, Grand Designs’, Overland 176, 2004, pp. 26–39.
2. Some of the posters are held at the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales, at Posters 287/1–12. The films of this period are Meglomedia, dir. Bruce Petty, 1981; Marx, dir. Bruce Petty, 1978; Magic Arts, dir. Bruce Petty, 1978; Kazzam International, dir. Bruce Petty, 1978; Leisure, dir. Bruce Petty, 1976.
3. Fraser has since suggested that he was quoted out of context and that he had added a coda along the lines of ‘but it may be delightful’. That is not how it played in Australian politics during the years of his prime-ministership, however, and even his authorised biographer quotes ‘Life is not meant to be easy’ without any addition from his Alfred Deakin Lecture of 20 July 1971: see Philip Ayres, Malcolm Fraser: A Biography, William Heinemann, Richmond, 1987. Even if Fraser is not trying to spin the past, how the slogan was employed during its currency matters more than how it may have been intended.
4. Script for talk provided by Bruce Petty, supplemented by notes and memory of the event at ANU, 5 October 2000. The images have been provided for this piece by Bruce Petty.
5. Australian, 10 January 2006.
6. Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, l. 207, 1738.

Robert Phiddian is an Associate Professor in English at Flinders University and Chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.
© Robert Phiddian
Overland 201-summer 2010, pp. 31-37

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