A statement by the Association of Crap Australian Cartoonists

The boycott of the Ampol-sponsored Walkley cartoonist award: a statement by the Association of Crap Australian Cartoonists (as told to Guy Rundle)

The recent boycott by dozens of Australian cartoonists of the Walkley awards, sponsored by Ampol, has been celebrated by many as a bold stand against fossil-fuel companies and their increasingly common practice of “artwashing”.

This celebration of collective action has, however, not considered the position of the members of our organisation, the Association of Crap Australian Cartoonists (ACAC).

ACAC is a separate chapter, affiliated with the MEAA, that protects the distinctive interest of Australian humorous artists who a) stumbled into the job as no-hopers round the office, b) are good drafters, but really stupid, c) are talented illustrators who should never have been allowed to write their own material, d) were once good cartoonists now suffering age-related cognitive decline and/or e) are children of better cartoonists who needed a gig. 

Our members perform a vital service that other cartoonists cannot fulfil. With our distinctive lack of understanding of basic political frameworks, naïve sentimentality, clouded thinking, ignorance of the history of racist imagery, and shit sense of humour, we fill the spaces that right-wing media would otherwise leave blank.

We do the thankless work: drawing a picture of Alan Joyce standing with suitcases full of money next to a flight attendant who says, “You’ll have to pay excess baggage for that!”, while two average Aussies in the distance say, “Well, he said he’d take us for a ride.” We draw Xi Jinping as a pig-tailed Oriental, digging foot-long fingernails into a world globe, rendered in jaundice-yellow, labelled “Chinese takeaway”. We draw Africans as shadows lurking in alleys with the caption: “The age of criminal responsibility?”

When a beloved AFL player dies, we draw him sailing all the way up through the clouds to greet St Peter, clad in the footballer’s team livery, saying, “Up here [name of footballer]!” When two children drown in a rip, we are the ones who have King Neptune bear them up in his arms, saying “I’ll look after ’em till you see ’em again”, with a light-grey wash of storm clouds over the scene. We have a big frog labelled “inflation” being blown up by a bike pump labelled “wages” by a man who looks like no-one but labelled “Tony Burke” on a lily pad labelled “Australia”, the frog’s tongue missing a fly labelled “growth”.

We are the ones who offer, as humour, two people on a sofa watching wind turbines, one saying something stupid, and the other saying what the cartoonist thinks. Again. And again. And again. We perform, as we always have, a vital service for employers who can get us for a ham sandwich, and for a fan base of people who are even stupider than we are.

Thus, to ask us to think about complex political issues related to our own lives, as the boycotting cartoonists are doing, constitutes a breach of our conditions under the industry-wide Illustrative Artists (Dumb Ones) agreement, and seek a separate Walkley for our members in the “Stupid Media” section, alongside the TV network news awards. 

Should this fail to occur, we will be forced to draw a picture of David Pope, Fiona Katauskas and First Dog on the Moon standing around a stalled car, a venue saying “Walkleys” in the distance, one of them looking at a solar panel on the roof and saying: “I told you we should have stopped for sun.” Or that, on a TV screen with two people watching it on a sofa, one saying “Where are they going to?”, the other saying “Same as everyone, they’re on the way to net zero.” Actually we will do this anyway, because it is 90 minutes to deadline. But we’ll do it meaner. Again. And again. And again.

If you’re a crap cartoonist, sign the petition, leave your mark, or draw a tiresome picture of a tiny Digger wielding a pen, saying “Nothing funny about not getting a fair go” to protect that most venerable of Aussie traditions from The Bulletin onwards — sleazy, terrible visual jokes confirming our prejudices.

Yrs,

AK, JL, WB, JS and others