Michael Leunig

Cartoonist, poet and writer Michael Leunig (1945–2024), referred to as ‘Leunig’, was a regular contributor to The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald for 55 years. Born in East Melbourne, he studied briefly at Swinburne Film and Television School where his first cartoons appeared in the student newspaper. In the mid-1960s his work began to appear in publications such as Woman’s Day, London’s Oz magazine and the afternoon paper Newsday. He produced his first cartoon for The Age in 1969 and gained wider recognition in the 1970s with his work for the Nation Review. In his earliest work Leunig drew classic political cartoons; but in 1969, frustrated by the genre’s conventions, he submitted a surrealistic cartoon of a man wearing a teapot on his head riding into a sunset on a large duck. It was published, and Leunig would later come to see it as a symbolic depiction of his own escape from the strictures of political cartooning. His subsequent work – in which the duck has frequently reappeared, along with recurrent characters Mr Curly and Vasco Pyjama – has been published in 25 books of collected cartoons; exhibited in prints, paintings and drawings; and adapted for television, theatre and radio.