A lifetime of achievement for cartoonist Petty
Journalism awards
The Age, March 20, 2010 

BRUCE Petty, Age cartoonist, Oscar winner and delineator of the world, last night was honoured at the Melbourne Press Club's Quill Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award for journalism.

In the title is the precis of a career that has earned the respect and affection of his peers and admirers: it has truly been a lifetime of achievement.

The broad brushstrokes of a revolutionary life are this: Petty was born in Melbourne in 1929; he worked at a Box Hill animation studio in 1949; and moved overseas in 1955, where his drawings were accepted in Esquire, The New Yorker and Punch. He returned to Australia in the '60s, worked at The Australian and moved to The Age in 1976. His work has also appeared in the Bulletin and Time (Australia) and in numerous gallery exhibitions.

Drawings are only half of the canvas. Petty's short animation films include Leisure, for which he won an Oscar in 1978, The Mad Century and Human Contraptions. His books include The Money Book, The Petty Age and The Absurd Machine.

Creighton Burns, editor of The Age (1981-89), once offered the view while looking at Petty's drawing for the next day's paper: "Petty's the only bloke in the world who can draw the global economy in one frame."

His style, however, did flummox some editors, who could not see past the energy of the lines to the art within. Those lines set the template, and benchmark, for political cartoons in this country.

The Age's John Spooner said cartoonists all had "enormous respect for him". On his 21st birthday, Spooner received from a friend a copy of Petty's book Australia Fair. "I had never seen anything like it," he said. "How lovely it was years later to be sitting in a budget lock-up and being privileged to watch how Bruce works. If you could imagine the budget papers being like an ocean, while I was still getting my shoes and socks off, Bruce was already swimming out to sea and had already done a couple of laps. Ideas just spill out of him."

And all, said Spooner, without a trace of tension. "He is such a genial colleague."

That geniality runs with a fierce criticism of free-market capitalism, Spooner said, a view that in the '90s was deeply unfashionable.

Colleague Andrew Dyson said: "I hesitate to call Bruce a public intellectual, he's much too nice a bloke, but his ability to analyse and diagnose society should have seen him gonged decades ago.
"His wonderful, elastic line reflects a keen intelligence unimpaired by rancour or sentimentality; his style still seems, after all these years, startlingly modern; and his seemingly effortless ability to make the profound obvious makes mortal cartoonists despair. I, for one, find the way he can capture a superb likeness in one calligraphic squiggle deeply depressing.

"In person, Bruce is inevitably modest and affable, a true gentleman. This strength alone would make him unique among press cartoonists, who tend to oscillate between crippling paranoia and unseemly self-regard. At worst, Bruce can seem a little distracted, as if thinking of higher things. Having had the honour of knowing him for some years, I can say with some certainty — he is."

Peter Nicholson, now with The Australian , worked on The Age with Petty. He added: "Bruce wrote the rules on drawing cartoons in Australia, because his style was so fresh and post-Picasso, yet he used that looseness to create complex visual ideas."