Political cartoons bring flippancy to the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House

Is the great age of Australian political cartoons really over?

In the late 19th century, Phil May, in part, invented the political cartoon genre in Australia. In the 20th century and into the 21st, Will Dyson, Bruce Petty and Michael Leunig achieved legendary status for their cartoons. Who bears the mantle today?

Political cartoons, almost by definition, present a combination of text and image and are embedded in a newspaper or magazine.

Thirty years ago, when Old Parliament House started staging these reviews of the year in political cartoons, every driveway in our leafy suburb was graced with a delivered newspaper that multiplied in numbers on the weekend.

When we cancelled our subscription about three years ago, we were the last house in our street to have the paper delivered. Now, I never see the paper unless I visit a friend in a nursing home; otherwise, the paper and its political cartoons have become largely invisible and obsolete.

Behind the Lines has done a sterling job for three decades in mounting annual exhibitions surveying the current crop of political cartoons.

This year’s harvest of 130 political cartoons brings to the fore the predictable targets for wit and satire, from domestic politics to the monsters who clamber onto the world stage from Washington to Tel Aviv.

Forty-three political cartoonists have been selected for this show, with nine of them “first timers”. Of the nine, eight are not attached to a newspaper or a magazine but work entirely digitally on outlets like Instagram and Facebook.

The other observation is that the names of the political cartoonists are no longer well-known names within the broader community. When looking at the cartoonists in the present exhibition, the works that struck me for their boldness, accomplishment and imagination were by Fiona Katauskas, Nordacious, Matt Golding, Jean Harwood, David Rowe, Mark Knight, Cathy Wilcox, David Pope and Glen Le Lievre.

I had heard of some of these names before, possibly through earlier shows in this institution or in the closing moments of The Insiders on the ABC, but they do not have the ring of a well-known respected authority in the way we once would have asked, what do you think Leunig would make of this?

This is a pity, as a number of the cartoons have a brilliance and wit that we associate with some of the best work in this genre, such as Mark Knight’s Out of power, Fiona Katauskas’s Join the club, Matt Golding’s Nighthawks at the Sky After Dark Diner, and Jean Harwood’s Australia’s Non-Lethal Parts for Lethal Weapons.

However, the experience of walking through the exhibition, at least stylistically, did have a bit of a whiff of mothballs. Some of the names and issues have changed, but the pictorial language and the nature of caricature looked a little obsolete compared to the way most of us access the news and absorb our political satire.

The small video screens that accompany the display of Glen Le Lievre’s humorous graphics are a welcome nod to political satire in the third decade of the 21st century.

Humorous political commentary in a visual form, hopefully, will never disappear as a tool to bring insights into what is frequently a very bleak place where powers of darkness, stupidity, greed and imbecility have been unleashed onto this world.

In the same way as we are rapidly changing how we absorb the news, political cartoonists of the future will devise new ways to make their messages accessible, memorable and poignant. It will be an antidote to AI-generated political cartoons that are lurking around the corner.

Behind the Lines 2025: Are We Rolling? is a free exhibition at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Old Parliament House, until November 2026, daily from 9 am to 5 pm.