LEUNIG
ON THE LOOSE.
 

“There is nothing more menacing sometimes than a happy enough person.”

“There was a time when I was getting too much criticism and I became too cautious and censored myself too much,” says Leunig.
I have to be a bit more outrageous in myself.”

For more than 30 years, Michael Leunig’s spin on life has delighted, moved and, lately, enraged.  Here he talks to HQ about cafe society, socks & the usefulness of despair…and invites us up to se his latest etching.
Interview & photographs by Chris Beck.
________________________________________________________________________________________
 

How did it feel to be named one of 100 Australian living treasures?
I can remember being told this and I kind of smiled.  I was a bit touched.

Was there a change in you after the recognition?
No, no, no.  I had arrived at a point already.  I’d said I’m not interested in being just an outsider any more.  There is such an industry made of outsiders, tough loners, sensitive loners.  While these are lovely people, they have become produce.  So I think in this time it’s more interesting to explore a kind of civic world-we’ve got to make all this work.
Once, it seemed to me that I was living in a world that was dominated by a status quo.  Solid immovable, dull and dreary.  Now I see the world as all shook up.  Nothing is steady except dull habits of corporations and things.  Whereas once I would rock the boat, now I am also interested in steadying the boat.

Do you consider yourself a theologian?
Yes, I suppose I do.  That’s a loaded way of describing me because people think of some kind of holy man or something.  See, it’s about Theos, God, some meaning to life.  Some invisible quality to life that you are really interested in exploring.

Well, as society becomes more pragmatic, do you embrace the more fantastical nature of religion?

Yes, there is some truth beyond what can be measured.  The human what can be measured.  The human spirit gets tyrannised by technology.  There is an illusion of freedom…I think we live in a time when we are overwhelmed and repressed.
Freud might have said that sexuality and sexual attitude oppressed people.  I would say now motor cars, traffic, oppress people.  Corporate procedures and culture oppress people.  They have lost confidence to be authentically human with all the rough, strange bits.
You watch children now, they don’t get enough time to be feral little animals.  They are being educated and civilised far too early.  The spontaneity of life is oppressed.

Teachers of meditation say you can be happy despite unhappy situations. Do you believe that?

I do.  In fact, people are often very happy when things are going bad because they have got something to struggle with.  Happiness is something about vitality, whether it’s a struggle or whether it’s lying under a palm tree.  Happiness is a great world.  Happiness.  Contentment enough.  In fact, I think there is a great persecution of happiness.  There is nothing more menacing sometimes than a happy enough person.  Sometimes I think the very powerful men who want to downsize and sell off and get everyone more competitive are profoundly envious of those people who have found some simple contentment.

Do you ever enjoy the feeling of depression?

I have, I have.  A truly depressed state is nightmarish.  But if you can just hold onto the knowledge that it passes, it’s cleansing.  Some new growth comes out of the rubble of disillusionment.  Some of my better work as far as I’m concerned-has been done by working in it.

What sort of work was that?

It was inclined to be poetic.  It was inclined to be sensitive and emotional and tender work, if you like.  Clinical depression is deadening.  But there is another depression, a state of despair which is sensitising and makes you tender and feel life’s wretchedness.  Sometimes that’s a really interesting perspective.

Much of your work comes from your inner world….

Yes, very much.  I suppose it dates back to an early childhood feeling that people weren’t really saying what they were thinking.  I think a lot of children grow up thinking, “Hang on, more is going to here, but people aren’t saying it.”  I wanted to know what they really though, what they were saying to themselves that they couldn’t say out loud.  People lie constantly, we all do.  I think we suffer from the absence of the personal.  When society lapses into the personal it gets all maudlin and inept and clumsy.  Because we are not used to incorporating spontaneous, natural, truthful response.

Did you have a liberation of your inner world?

I think I did.  It’s trying to tell the truth as you feel it.

Why don’t you still do cartoons about sexuality like the early days?

I was doing that in a different time, when sexuality was repressed in the media.  I was arrested on three occasions for obscenity.  That doesn’t really happen any more.  There was a point in toying with it in a healthy kind of way.  I don’t like what pornographers do, but I’ve always liked people who could touch upon the ribald and erotic.  I was just being cheeky and naughty.  But these days maybe I don’t because, in this time, sex and pornography are becoming a bit large and dark in society.  We didn’t talk about paedophiles once, we though of sexuality only as a healthy kind of thing.  I’ve heard Richard Neville expressing some sense of shame that he was involved in some sexual liberation which has now turned into a monster.  Sometimes, I think, in the broader interest of society you go a bit soft on that because some people aren’t as healthy about it as you might hope.  But, still, I think I should.  One could make some pretty funny jokes about people’s sex lives.  I must say I’ve got a store of what we used to all dirty jokes.  I used to think they were funny.  I’m afraid I still laugh at these kind of jokes.

Have you got an example?

I often come up with them spontaneously and I always distance myself by saying this is purely an anthropological joke.  I don’t know.  Oh, two guys walking down the pub.  One guy says, “What’s that bruise on your forehead?”  And the other guy says, “Oh, I was doing it doggy style with my wife the other night and she ran under the house.”  But if I say that as a joke people would say, “What a grubby mind.”  And it’s the women as the repressed sexual object and stuff.  But there were some pretty funny dirty jokes.  I like these jokes.  See, human sexuality is also the area where people are very human and vulnerable.  This is precisely where truths emerge-and sensitivities and fears.  All the stuff that humour is made of….I think people who lead very boring lives feel the greatest need to dress up as an ostrich or what ever they do.

You haven’t?

No, I never did that.  I think the strongest aspect of my sexuality was that it was fairly relentless.  It was keen.  I found woman to be very adorable and creatures of great beauty and interest.  It was strong.  It is strong.

Do you think expressing views from the heart detaches you from responsibility?

And, yet why do I feel so entirely responsible?

You don’t have to make the country run.

I do.  It’s not just economists who make the country run.  People think artists have nothing to contribute to the vitality of the society.  But they have absolutely everything to contribute.  Not just to the political situation but to the economic are starting to understand this.  They call it sentiment.  You can have everything set in place, but unless people feel this impulse towards life as a going concern…. You can’t say Mozart didn’t make the economy run.  There is some mysterious vitality that we take so much for granted.  People live in buildings that inspire or depress them and they don’t even realise it.  It would be great if town planners had the same sensitivity as a poet.

Recently, you have been fairly judgemental in cartoons depicting the cafe set and hoons….

I have, I have.  I enjoy a cup of coffee in a coffee bar.  I’m criticising the media, not the people who do it.  I’m criticising the media’s obsession with this being important in life.  The availability of good coffee has become more important than the availability of democracy.  It’s a kind of corruption.  And I think, “Come on, humans, you can do better than sit around in coffee bars drinking coffee.”  What sort of appalling, pissy sort of life is this?  And yet this is glamorised.  This is selling a really nasty lie to the peasants.  Life is a bit buggered, but you’ve still got your coffee.

Did your cartoon “The Sock”, depicting a character hugging an enormous sock, have a particular meaning?

That was a bit of a visual mystery.  I love the way pictures work.  Why is it that some photographs touch us profoundly, but you can’t articulate why?  This is truly an icon.  Icons were originally aids to a prayerful state.  An icon had a function: it brought us into a deeper contemplative state, to some truth.  Just as a piece of music might bring us to tears.

Where did “The Shock” bring us?

That might’ve brought us to this lovely thing called absurdity. Simple delight.  There is a lot of vaudeville in what I do.

You produced a cartoon depicting your Australian flag which was full of stereotypical Aussieness with thongs and beer guts and the “old bitch” down the road.  Why would that image be on you flag?

Because I think Australia has a lot of that truth in it still.  And there is something charming and funny in that; the aesthetic of Australian is so profane.  Nothing is sacred, it’s all made of plastic and garish colours harsh building materials and slapped together.  It’s as if nobody reveres anything.  And the sad thing is, this always hurt me deeply, that people have no tender reverence for all the little domestic things of their lives.  So often we make suburbs that are so appallingly hideous that we can’t admit to it so we make light of it.  It’s very materialistic and consumerist, everything comes out of a packet.
Sometimes you think, my God, we’ll take anything the modern world is dishing up to us; whatever the machines are making for us.  There is a harsh quality in Australian life.  And it’s pretty triumphant.  If they are going to build a shopping centre, you know it’s going to look pretty bad.

Do you care about the idea of a republic?

No, I don’t think in the long run it’s going to matter.  I’m not a monarchist but I like the Queen.  I was brought up with the Queen.  She went by in Moonee ponds.

You created controversy with your disapproval of working mothers expressed in a cartoon depicting baby in a creche.  You hurt many of your fans.

Hurt is not terribly worrying.  There are hurts and there are hurts.  These things are something I believe in for better or for worse.  I’m not against working mothers, but I am putting the child’s needs above those of the mother.  I watch a drift in society where children are being increasingly neglected in the name of economic rationalism.  I can’t make a mother feel guilty.  I can awaken a guilt which might be lying latent in her, but I can’t make her feel guilty.

Were you hurt by the angry response from people who had been fans?

No.  I had massive support from young women who feel strongly about this too.  And they feel that they are being outcast for taking this attitude.  They said, “All we see in the paper are women who are careerists getting praise for being good feminists.  We are being told we are old dorks going brain dead at home.  You have given us some dignity back.”  Massive support from psychologists, psychiatrists, creche workers who talked about the appalling pain they feel watching the distress of the children.  And lots of old women who are at war with their daughters doing this to their children.  I didn’t want to persecute a group of (working) women, because I view what they have to do with sympathy and pity.  And I respect that.  But I’m saying: this way lies madness.  That’s all I’m doing.

Why didn’t you involve men in your review?

Because it was about the mother-child relationship.  The mother gives birth to the child, it grows out of her, it comes to the breast of the mother.  Just about every culture respects and protects the state.  The man must create a setting which is secure, he must provide everything that is needed for the first early months.  We are getting (to the stage) now where a mother has a child and then puts it into the creche the next week.  I even heard of a case where a mother put the child in a creche on the way home from the hospital… I think what’s at stake, once this becomes culturally acceptable, is the happiness of society.

How do you know it’s damaging?

I know it all from my own experience.  I learnt from my primitive memory of childhood where I was mothered, but everyone knows the moment of terror when mother is not there.  I grew up surrounded by lots of women.  I listened to many aunties and grandmothers, sisters talking about child-raising.  That’s what women talk about, they argued about it.  It’s the great subject.  Then I became hugely interested in the subject in am academic sense.  I read a lot of psychology.  Then I started speaking to people who are specialists in the (child-rearing) area.

Maybe it’s dangerous to do stuff that is a real bugbear of yours?

I understand.  One could become obsessive.  But I must include that in my work also.  I think it’s great that contentious things are brought to life.  That is my function too.  I offer my two bob’s worth.  This wasn’t legislation, this was a cartoon.  Isn’t it astonishing that a little drawing can provoke so much reaction?
About four years ago I did a piece; there was a populist, pernicious, feminist kind of story going around, written about in the papers in many shapes and forms, to the effect that men were an inferior life form.  They were a bit stupid, not sensitive, they left their dirty socks on the floor, blah, blah, blah – “If you can’t find a good man it’s not your problem, it’s the fact that there are no good men.”  This was going on and on.  I did a cartoon off the top of my head about, “Well, you think you’re clever, don’t you?  But look at yourself in the mirror.  You’re a boring bitch, men wouldn’t touch you with a forty foot pole, anyway.”  I was saying the things men say when they sit around – “I’m not sick of all this, we’re not all rapists.”  It’s pernicious.  It dose nothing to help this ancient difficult about the relationship between men and women.  It’s meant to be difficult.  Instead of giving up, I was saying, “Stay with it, you’ve got to struggle, he’s not inferior, he’s just different.”  This provoked the greatest outrange amongst women.  I got a lot of angry letters.  Then I got this letter about a year ago from a woman saying, “I’d always liked your cartoons bit I hated you for this.  It even provoked an argument with my boyfriend and we went our separate ways.  But I cut the cartoon out and months later I put it on the fridge.  I looked at it and looked at it and, anyway, I want to tell you that me and my boyfriend are back together again and I want to thank you because there was a lot of truth in what you said.”

How do you respond to criticism?

There was a time (in the past five years) when I was getting too much criticism and I became too cautious and censored myself too much.  I thought, “The forces of the rationalists are getting too strong for me.”  They don’t appreciate whimsy and intuition and delight and humour.  They don’t understand where it comes from, basically, and they call you childish and a dreamer.
I don’t think being dismissed too much, you know, I feel that I’m on about something that is kind os serious.  So I pulled my horns in a bit.  I have to be more outrageous in myself.  If you’re going to be yourself you may as well go the whole hog.

Do you think there was a time when there were fairies and elves?

I like the idea.  There is a story that I read to my daughter.  There is this goblin who loves fairies.  He is told if he wants to see fairies he should wash his eyes with the dew from a four-leaf clover.  He spends years searching the world for a four-leaf clover.  He comes home in despair.  He starts weeding his garden and he finds a four-leaf clover, then washes his eyes with the drew.  He hears a voice and it’s a fairy sitting on his gate.  He says, “Where did you come from?” and the fairy says, “I’ve been here all the time.”  Suddenly he realises the four-leaf clover was at his doorstep and that the fairies were there all the time.  They are there, you just have to get the eyes to see it.  A fairy is like a nature spirit – the nation that spiritedness is available but only if you can see it.  In that sense, I believe in fairies.