REMEMBERING BILL LEAK

Fred Pawle spent three years researching and interviewing dozens of the late columnist Bill Leak’s friends and colleagues to create an intimate and honest biography. In his biography of Leak – Die Laughing – The Biography of Bill Leak – there is now a whole beautiful, but occasionally troubled, story behind an extraordinarily gifted Australian artist, cartoonist, writer and raconteur. As Michelle Gunn, editor of The Australian and The Weekend Australian, put it, “Bill was a fearless satirist, a brilliant artist and an independent thinker. As an editor, a morning conversation with him about that day’s cartoon was the absolute highlight of my day.” In a zoom meeting for The Sydney Institute on Monday 1 November 2021, Fred Pawle reflected on the Bill Leak who was not always obvious to the fellow Australians he stirred and challenged with his artwork and cartoons.

REMEMBERING BILL LEAK

FRED PAWLE

To start with, I’d like to point out that I feel very lucky to have been chosen as Bill Leak’s biographer. But I do feel that I was in a unique position to do the job. Bill knew a lot of good writers, and there’s probably half a dozen people who are qualified to do the job.

I arrived in Sydney in 1992 and met Bill in 1994. At that point I didn’t know a lot of people in Sydney. Bill was sober at the time, and his young kids were in their early teens. To spend time with them, he was reacquainting himself with the sport of surfing. His kids were obsessed about it. The four of us became a little surfing group and we wound up going all the way to Indonesia together, on a special trip to a very remote part of the Archipelago and found some amazing waves.

Soon after that, I had some kids of my own, and Bill left his first wife Astrid and reacquainted himself with alcohol and gave up surfing. My friendship with Bill remained, but I, quite luckily, became a spectator at that point. A lot of his friends who were very close to him then were all part of a hard drinking rabble – which I investigate quite a lot in the book. Their memories of Bill from that period are tainted by the fact that, in hindsight, they really were all destroying their lives. A lot of them wound up with broken marriages, in therapy, broke and so on. But one of the things about Bill during that time, being such an incredibly funny bloke, and exuberant, was that he could make alcoholism look like a pretty good idea. He wore it well, even though his life was disappearing down a gurgler at the time. There was never a dull moment with Bill.

The problem with writing a biography of a person like Bill, was that he did live a hell of a lot of life in his short 61 years. He was a regular finalist in the Archibald Prize and he painted a lot of important portraits, including two of Donald Bradman. He was an excellent newspaper illustrator, and probably Australia’s greatest cartoonist. He was a raconteur and an excellent writer. On top of all that – some people here might be familiar with this – Bill had an extraordinary gift for friendship. He really did value his friends. He was brought up Christian and became quite a devout Atheist later in life, and throughout his life adhered to just two things; the truth and friendship. And he was very good at it.

So, to return to my original point, I do feel very privileged to have written this book.

It was done with the cooperation of the family, and as such I got a lot of really good insight into Bill’s life before I met him in 1994. His formative years were significant in as much as he developed values and belief systems that remained remarkably consistent throughout his life. So, I’ll just go back to the most accessible of those formative years.

I did write about his childhood and his teenage years, and they were all a bit of raucous fun. In 1978, when he was 22, he flew to Europe, ostensibly to study the great masters at the great European art galleries. Bill had studied at the Julian National Art School and at another art school in The Rocks in Sydney that emulated Matisse. He did that because he wanted to broaden his experience with art as much as he could. Julian Ashton taught him the two main things that any great artist needs – observation and draftsmanship.

Having pretty much not mastered that, but acquired a decent command of those two aspects of art, off he went to Europe to – in his words – read the great masters. He didn’t think that people could be taught great art; he just thought that you could absorb it through seeing it. So, off he went. I was given access to the letters he wrote to his family from this trip; there’s hundreds of them, and there are some interesting little nuggets in amongst them. In 1978, he wrote a letter to his sister Lynne. He described how stunned he was by the work of people like George Braque, Picasso, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Cezanne and a few others. But in this same letter, he says, “The glorious traditions of European culture don’t only enrich the lives of the people, they also weigh them down. So much bullshit goes on in the holy name of tradition and politeness.”.

So, that was Bill’s first profound observation of European culture; that he found it restrictive. He had grown up in a very libertarian Australia of the 1960s and 1970s. He went on:

I think that one of the great strengths of Australia is expressed in the way people say “Oh, bullshit!” to everything. As long as people keep recognising and condemning bullshit over there, everything will be alright.

It’s remarkable to look at that now and look at what happened to Bill later in life. It seems, in my opinion, to coincide with the moment in time when Australia stopped saying, or recognising, or calling out bullshit when we saw it. Bill continued to call it out and he got in enormous trouble later in life, which I’ll get to eventually. I was so startled when I read those words, because they illustrate just how consistent Bill was. Despite how it appeared to his detractors, Bill never altered his values. Nor did he ever stop calling bullshit whenever or wherever he saw it.

His fundamental values remained the same throughout life, and I hope I’ve managed to capture that in this book, because people who knew Bill would recognise that. There was a strength of character in Bill. He did have a lot of demons and he suffered from depression. In some darker moments, there was serious self-doubt. But his values remained utterly consistent.

When Bill joined The Australian in 1994, he was – as anyone familiar with Sydney at the time will know – part of the leftie, libertarian arts establishment. He was still trying to suck up to the right people to win the Archibald. He had spent a few years at Fairfax, absorbing that leftie culture. When he arrived at The Australian, I rang Paul Kelly and Chris Mitchell, who were the two people who had hired him. I asked Paul Kelly what The Australian stood for at the time.

Off the top of his head – it’s one of the most remarkable quotes in the book – Paul listed about 15-20 things that The Australian stood for at the time: Aboriginal prosperity and reconciliation, the Republic, a nation of states, Australia’s role in the world, the encouragement of a unique Australian culture and so on.

Then we segued the conversation into how Bill fitted into that. I said Bill – in those days – was quite a lefty. Paul said that actually he wasn’t. Which really surprised me because I knew Bill soon after that, and he was quite left. But what Paul was saying was that he recognised that Bill would eventually, and quite soon, develop into a free thinker.

The key quote was that “Bill just wanted to call out the frauds”. And that’s what he did. The other thing that Bill adhered to in his cartooning career was that the first rule of any cartoon is that it has to be funny first and make a point second. Bill often made pretty overt political points in his cartoons but, also, if he found something funny, that was it. Whichever side of the political divide it fell on, he was happy with that, as long as it was funny.

One famous Bill Leak cartoon has John Howard against the assembled forces of republicanism in Australia. Bill did not like Mr Howard, that’s no secret. But I really like this cartoon. One of the great things about Bill’s cartoons is that he tried, under any circumstances, to minimise the words he used. If you look at someone like Kathy Wilcox or Leunig, they tend to think of themselves as writers as well as cartoonists. But because Bill was also an artist, he tried to keep words right out of it.

This cartoon is so charming, and Bill is grudgingly giving Mr Howard enormous credit for having checkmated the entire Republican movement, led by a perplexed and obviously frustrated Malcolm Turnbull. The other thing about this cartoon is that you couldn’t caricature Howard or illustrate the energy and confusion of the republican movement as well as that if you weren’t, first and foremost, an artist.

Especially towards the end, Bill’s cartoons were quite seriously works of art, in my opinion. That cartoon with Howard and the Republican Movement, seems to me proof that Bill had strong political opinions, but he didn’t let his opinions, always, get in the way of a good joke. It is well known that Bill despised Howard during this time, but it’s a reflection of his character that he conceded, on this occasion, that Howard had played a masterful game.

Bill’s disapproval became much more obvious earlier that year when he drew a cartoon of Howard preparing to bash three unfortunate Indigenous gentlemen for daring to stand up to various social and legal rights.

This one was quite controversial. The original version of it was actually even more offensive. Bill took them both to Editor-in-Chief, David Armstrong, and said, “I’ll just take the less offensive of the two.” It was a standard technique of Bill’s to do that, knowing that if he’d just taken this one along by itself with no more offensive relative cartoon to gauge it against, he probably wouldn’t have got that one through either. He did get that through, and Mr Howard was deeply offended by it. David Armstrong, the Editor-in-Chief was given a serious dressing down at Parliament House soon afterwards.

That year, also, Bill got into a lot of trouble for a cartoon which I can’t put up, and I can’t even describe, because it was so offensive. It was Mr Howard and Bill Clinton in il flagrante. I can’t put it up because it’s both vulgar and defamatory. But I spoke to Dennis Shanahan who explained that the cartoon was just as a joke to amuse a couple of friends. But it wound up being widely circulated in Canberra while Bill was there at one stage. It wound up landing on Mr Howard’s desk and Dennis Shanahan was appointed the job of mopping the mess up.

Bill had caused serious offence to some high-ranking people. Dennis told me that Mr Howard, if he had wanted, could have had Bill sacked over that cartoon. He never did, which is a fine reflection on Mr Howard’s character. Dennis told me, and many other journalists would concur, that Mr Howard has never felt that politicians should be offended by what they see or read in newspapers, because it’s all part of the game. In fact, Mr Howard said that if they do get offended by it, they should seek another profession. One of the interesting subplots of the book is that in the late 1990s, Bill, at one stage, made a very charmingly but grudgingly complimentary cartoon of Mr Howard, but on two other occasions, that same year, drew cartoons that deeply offended him.

Later in the book, around 2014, the two men had something of a rapprochement. Bill wasn’t around for me to get his side of it and, as many of you would know, Mr Howard doesn’t disclose private conversations. But he did confirm to me that they had a conversation at the 50^th anniversary of The Australian newspaper. Bill approached Mr Howard, after which an interesting relationship developed between them. Bill would later go on to describe Mr Howard as a great man, which, again, brings me back to Bill’s values.

One of the things that people misunderstand about Bill is that he switched political sides. This is the other advantage I have as his biographer. Working in the media and journalism during the 1980s, 1990s, and even early 2000s, it was difficult not to be a leftie; all newsrooms in the country – and increasingly they still are – are inhabited by left wing people.

I never was a fundamentalist leftie such as Bill was throughout a lot of our friendship. So, sometime towards the end of the 2000s, we made a conscious transition, pretty much at the same time and we talked about it a lot. We had discovered that being libertarians – essentially, that’s what attracted us to left wing politics – we came to realise that the censorious people in the country were on the left. The people defending the values that we consciously or unconsciously had aligned with were all on the conservative side of politics. So, that’s where we wound up. Bill never apologised for switching sides, and he lost a lot of friends for it. Neither did he ever apologise for telling the truth.

I want to segue into Bill’s supposed racism now and put up another cartoon.

This is of an unfortunate scenario involving a man about to bash an Aboriginal woman, from 2003. It’s in reference to a speech that Warren Mundine delivered to the Labor Party when he was President of the Party. He said that the Party had become too “touchy feely” about Aboriginal issues. Bill saw the words touchy feely and took them off on a rather grim tangent. Now, the thing about this cartoon is that if you published that today you would be in enormous trouble. But this was in the early days of, if not preceding, social media; Facebook and Twitter, so he was able to get away with it.

It was only mildly controversial, but then fast forward 13 years and we get to Bill’s most famous cartoon, and what I’d suggest is probably the most famous cartoon in Australian history. The previously most famous cartoon in Australian history was Stan Cross’ “For gorsake, stop laughing”, two blokes, after an accident, hanging off a high-rise building, which was a fine reflection of Australia’s fatalistic sense of humour at the time.

Now, I think, as the most prominent cartoon in Australian history, that’s been replaced by something that’s not quite as funny. There is something funny about this, but it is not something that you would laugh about out loud. Ineptitude, stupidity and idiocy are always funny in one way or another – I’m referring now to “Righto, what’s his name then?” – but it is incredibly grim.

The grimness in Stan Cross’ cartoon was that these guys might find themselves, in a few seconds, splattered on the pavement for being careless. The grimness in Bill’s cartoon is that there’s nothing careless in the child’s predicament; it all comes back to the dad’s delinquency. I won’t bother analysing the cartoon because I imagine most of you know it quite well and have followed the debate about it and followed it all the way through the Human Rights Commission and so on.

What I’d like to point out is that I approached this book with many of the habits of a journalist. I did it as even-handedly as I could. I’ve included a lot of Bill’s flaws in the book. A lot of people have commented on that to me, that it is a warts-and-all book. I was guided by my knowledge of Bill that if he could see the book, he would approve of what I’ve put in it.

What I haven’t included in the book, and I hope readers can read between the lines, is just how angry I got at times while writing this. Bill was not a racist person. He was by far – and I’m not exaggerating this – the most egalitarian person I have ever met. He was raised in a household that utterly despised any form of bigotry. He passed the same thing onto his own children and he lived his own life according to that ethos; that you judge people by the content of their character not the colour of their skin or their sexual preference or whatever.

It still makes me angry, even furious. And that’s reflected in the fact that I’m talking to you tonight and am yet to talk to anyone at the ABC. Despite the fact that I’ve sent six copes of the book to the ABC, and many people from the ABC, prominent presenters are mentioned very favourably in the book, I still haven’t received a single call and probably never will. As far as the ABC and Australia’s woke establishment are concerned, Bill is and will continue to be a racist conservative person and is not deserving of their ABC’s time.