Michael Leunig. Photo: ABC News / Jeremy Story Carter
Australian cartoonist, poet and writer Michael Leunig has died aged 79.
Leunig's death was announced in a statement on social media on Thursday evening.
"The pen has run dry, its ink no longer flowing - yet Curly and his ducks will remain etched in our hearts, cherished and eternal," it said.
"Michael Leunig passed away peacefully today, in the early hours of 19 December, 2024.
"During his final days, he was surrounded by his children, loved ones, and sunflowers - accompanied as ever, by his dear old friends, Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven."
Cartoonist for The Australian newspaper John Spooner told ABC Radio Melbourne the loss of Leunig felt "pretty huge".
He said working alongside Leunig at The Age in the mid 80s was "a riot of fun".
"Leunig was a leader in the sense that he was an experimenter in graphic possibilities in newspapers, you know, like a half page full colour political or social cartoon," Spooner said.
"A lot of the people who love The Age don't realise the depth of his contribution to the idea of The Age, which was essentially pluralistic, in other words, both sides of an argument got a run.
"It was just so sad that he ended up in such a sort of a disappointing confrontation with The Age over his cartoons to the point where he felt humiliated and distressed by the way he was treated."
Born and raised in Melbourne
Leunig was born in East Melbourne in June 1945 and was the eldest of five children.
He went to school at Footscray North Primary School and Maribyrnong High School.
He studied briefly at university but dropped out and began drawing cartoons in the mid-1960s.
His early work appeared in Woman's Day and London's Oz magazine and his first book of cartoons, The Penguin Leunig, was published in 1974.
Leunig's prints, paintings and drawings have been exhibited in public and private collection. In 1999 he was declared a national living treasure by the National Trust.
Leunig was awarded honorary degrees from LaTrobe and Griffith universities.
He was a regular contributor to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. In September 2024, he was dismissed from The Age, 55 years after he penned his first cartoon for the paper.
Cartoons that 'probed the tender spots'
Leunig's later career was marked by several brushes with controversy over cartoons that some readers found offensive.
By his own admission, he "touched a landmine" with a 2015 cartoon that compared the Victorian government to fascists over vaccination, which he called "mass medication."
In 2020, he told the ABC's One Plus One that he was taken aback by the response to the cartoon.
"I wanted to point to the fact that in our great tradition of parenting and mothering that the mother has a really profound instinct which is held very strongly about what happens to her child," he said.
"I was trying to point to that and honour that a bit and say look we shouldn't bully people too hard and too fast into submitting to medication that they feel uneasy about.
"Soon you're seen as an anti-vaxxer or something, they put a label on you and then you get pilloried and dragged through the mud."
The cartoon was described as "misogynistic" and "reductive" and Leunig was prompted to write a column in The Age to defend it.
Leunigs 'Mummy Was Busy' cartoon drew criticism from some readers. Photo: leunig.com.au
"It's a harsh environment now, you can be ticked off by the wardens of culture and propriety and, as they say, political correctness," he told the ABC.
Leunig said it was his job to "probe the tender spots" because he felt they were the most important.
"I don't want to hurt people but you've got to keep your spirit up and be forgiving too," he said.
"I don't think I'm in a position of power. It's a cartoon, a drawing after all. It's only a drawing of a duck."
- ABC News
