The Age retires Michael Leunig after 55 years
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Cartoonist Michael Leunig, a fixture for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, for 55 years, was laid off along with dozens of others across Nine Entertainment Co’s chaing of newspapers. The media company claims the layoffs were necessary due to declining advertising and the loss of $15 million in revenue from Meta. Michael says he was “sacked.”
Michael’s first cartoon appeared in The Age in September 1969. His last cartoon, a farewell, ran yesterday nearly 55 years later.
In a tribute column, The Age Editor Patrick Elligett, quoted Spectrum editor Lindy Percival:
“Through Leunig’s work, we have contemplated life’s beautiful and occasionally baffling moments: Mr Curly arriving home to his curly-headed family; a simple soul dreaming of floating coloured petals; and a father and son watching the sun set on TV, oblivious to the real thing happening outside their window. All the while, his angels have looked on – often in sorrow, sometimes in anger, but always with love.”
As for Michael, he’s taken a reflective tone in a posting on his website:
The ‘Grandfather in the Garden’ painting was finished after I was sacked. To me it has a festive happy feeling and suggests a bright new way. It arose from a sense of the approaching Spring up here in the bush of northern Victoria, and it came also from tender reflections about my childhood and never having had grandfathers to be with me in a garden. They had both died before I was born. Also I had recently spent some beautiful lively time in the garden with my five-year-old granddaughter; indeed a very bright spark who would not tolerate being trivialised or censored.
I’d had a growing expectation that I would be disposed of by the big shots at Nine Entertainment and in the fateful phone conversation with the editor, when he said he was sorry, I told him in all honesty that everything was okay and that I actually felt exhilarated. Suddenly, there at last after all those years in newspapers, in one bound I was free ; free to have a life without the compliance and worry of thankless mainstream media deadlines. Certainly I will now need to work hard and tighten my belt a little but otherwise I have been refreshed and granted a precious new chapter of life in which to plant trees, to paint pictures, to talk to the birds and kangaroos, to harvest my own vegetables and avocados, to appreciate all those who have helped and encouraged me, to be with friends and loved ones, to get on with the memoir and various projects; to be surprised and changed, to be grateful, to listen to music and birdsong, to grow, to wonder, to die… and of course, to be a funny old grandfather in the garden.
Michael’s relationship with his papers has not always been smooth. He was dropped from the Monday edition of The Age in 2021 after the paper rejected the cartoon below, but Michael posted it to his Instagram account with a simple note “Mandate”. The paper said, “We don’t mind cartoonists challenging the readers. We encourage diversity of thought, but I had a concern with cartoons perceived as anti-vaccination.“
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