Friday Spill: Victoria Roberts On Bruce Petty

Long-time New Yorker artist, Victoria Roberts has sent the below piece this way. My thanks to her for sharing it with Spill readers. 

“Australian cartoonist Bruce Petty died on April 6th, aged 93. His work graced the pages of Punch and The New Yorker, and he won an Academy Award for his film “Leisure” in 1977.

But what I will most remember Bruce Petty for, is saving me from the bowels of an emigrant’s darkest depression. In 1970, my mother had emigrated to Sydney from Mexico City, and me along with her. I was thirteen. Emigration is for the birds. I used to get into the sea and cry, wanting to swim home. Reading a story about a nineteen year-old stowaway on a plane to Australia I thought, “could I somehow get myself to Kingsford Smith Airport, and hide on the Qantas flight to Acapulco?

A year later, in an English class at North Sydney Girls’ High School, our teacher Mrs. Alexander, turned the lights off and turned on a projector.

On the wall she showed us “Australian History” an animated film by Bruce Petty. 

Suddenly I went from living in an Anglo-Saxon Hell with a lot of beaches to understanding how Australia had come about, and further there was a humour in the voice and the drawings of the film that were totally worth hanging around for. Somewhere there was this chap named Bruce Petty and this world existed.

Years later, when I was in my early twenties, Bruce was my neighbour. I would visit him in his studio on South Dowling Street, which was as chaotic as his drawings. He was always working, as Bruce never really finished anything. Even if he had sent off his drawing for publication, the wheels were still turning. It’s a work ethic I found daunting but completely exhilarating-that the work is never done, that there is always something to find out, that the problem is infinite.

Bruce explained the world to us in his books Bruce Petty’s Australian History, Bruce Petty’s The Absurd Machine, a Cartoon History of the World, and Bruce Petty’s Money Book, underlining man’s lack of kindness to fellow man. As a political cartoonist for The Australian and The Age he eviscerated Australian politics with the skill of a microsurgeon, before microsurgery was invented.

I would mail manila envelopes full of drawings to New York from Sydney, at considerable cost, which would invariably return with a rejection slip from The New Yorker, a cream note featuring the silhouette of Eustace Tilley. Over a pola pola at the Balkan Restaurant on Oxford Street, Bruce would encourage me to keep submitting. “You don’t want to show them you can do one joke,” he would say, “you have to show them that you have a world to offer.”

Bruce was one of the kindest men ever. At a memorial for Bruce I watched online this evening in Camperdown, New South Wales, from Mexico, I discovered that he had not wanted to go into aged care, and a rotation of ex-wives and children kept him at home until almost the very end. The sort of love that befits a National Treasure.”

 

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Further reading:

Victoria Roberts website.

Here’s the Spill‘s notice of Mr. Petty’s passing.

An interview with Mr. Petty from Artist Profile.

Three Petty New Yorker cartoons