It’s been a long while between takes, sorry folks. The ‘war on whatever’ is still going, splitting our reality shards into ever smaller fragments.
The truth is, I have sustained two significant personal losses since late December — literally a week before and a week after Christmas — and have been grieving quite deeply. I lost a dear friend (he died) and I separated in a process that was actually the end point of a long drawn out process with several dry runs. It sits more in the category of ‘ambiguous loss’ or even ‘disenfranchised loss’. That doesn’t make it any less painful; arguably, it is more so because I tried so hard.
It’s easier in many respects to talk about my lost friend, because the loss although painful isn’t freighted with complexity.
It was a curious friendship conducted almost entirely over text — long, deep, complex, poetic, insightful, unhurried, deeply personal texts. Sometimes daily, usually weekly and on occasion monthly. It remains an inspired mystery to me that we ever became friends since he is (or was) quite a famous Australian artist whose cartoons lined Australians’ lives like wallpaper. It is a strange thing to know a person at one level — the way we all know novelists, poets and artists (worth their salt) — and then to know them a second time over as a friend.
Mr. Curly and I ‘talked’ about all the things that matter — love, politics, poetry, psychoanalysis, friendship, children, gardens, heartbreak, trees, the Covidian cult, the difficulties inside our families, social decline, physical ailments (he’d recently gone blind in one eye), the great delicacy of swan egg sponge cake from Lake Wendouree (I know, I know it’s illegal to take a swan egg), the marvel of a common ancestor (more on that later), the end of newspapers and print based culture, collective insanity on the internet, the Jack Russel terrier and so much more.
How did such an unlikely friendship come about? I think a strange mix of authoritarianism and quantum entanglement. Bear with me.
In mid-2021, I was invited to give a lecture to the Melbourne Society of Child Psychoanalysis and couldn’t think of a topic before finally deciding on a contentious cartoon by ‘Leunig’ (as I then knew him) called, ‘Mummy was Busy’. This had blown up in the Australian media with the usual asinine outrage (see here, here, here and here).
I thought it might be interesting to talk to child analysts about ‘phoney love’, as he had originally called it, given we were in the longest lockdown in the uncivilised world, and everyone (literally) had disappeared into their screens. While I was listening to Alison MacDowell’s ‘fourth industrial revolution’ talks, I thought I’d enter gently via the language of Winnicott and proper empirical research (my faith in the latter having all but collapsed but knowing full well it’s valence in the chattering classes).1 In truth, it was Leunig’s gestalt intuitive insights that I wanted to explore.
I had a few lines of inquiry. One was that the vitriol directed at the artist personally was the projected rage of a pathological culture, and more specifically the ‘limbic hijack’ of his interlocuters. Just as the rage I saw directed against dissident scientists and doctors who spoke out against the Covid mandates indicated an hysterical unwillingness to tolerate differences of opinion, the vituperative bile directed against Mr. Curly was similar.
Give me back my phone-fuelled dopamine hit. Now! How dare you question us Leunig?! What do you know, you old Boomer bastard? The expletives were flowing in a way that shocked me in 2019 but that we are all inured to now. It went on and on.
“Hey Leunig, you f**king gronk,” Twitter-shouted Clementine Ford, “I bet you never spent hours walking babies around in a pram, feeling isolated and alone and terrified.” “After my bub was born I walked him around and around for hours in the pram or the carrier trying to get him to sleep. I spent much of that time on my phone. You know why? Because I was f**king WORKING.”
Fine, Clem, but he still has the right to make a point and to remind us of the baby’s perspective. He does.
Although I was getting used to the lingua franca of insult on social media, the response to ‘Mummy was busy’ was extreme even by contemporary standards. My thesis: journalists, social commentators and much of the lay public were interminable addicts themselves caught in cycles of reactivity. In a word, normal people had gone crazy on social media and now, thanks to draconian lockdowns, everyone was online all day! The medium is the message.
Leunig was doing what artists — at least political cartoonists and poets — should do: reflect the culture back to itself, exposing its lies, sore spots, vanities and injustices. Besides, wasn’t that what he had always done? Why did this make him a ‘national living treasure’ in 1999 and a vilified pariah in 2019? Good question. My hunch: the culture had changed, not him. Secondly, I asked: was Leunig correct? I mean we’ve read the flurry of insults on social media, and the victim stories of feminist writer mothers blinded by their own biases, but what do the social scientists say about the ‘phubbing’ of infants and young children?2 Because this has nothing to do with your or my need to work. It bears remembering, if this is still possible, that these are independent variables.
I finished my paper, and in a bold move I ‘cold called’ Mr. Curly via his website the night before the talk notifying him that a feminist therapist sympathetic to his work (me at the time) was presenting a talk to a bunch of child psychoanalysts on his cartoon. I outlined the central thesis attached the flyer and went on my way.
The next morning I discovered — much to my surprise! — a long, erudite and passionately furious letter from the artist himself, complete with phone number and a request we have a chat. OK, for my non-Australian readers, that’s like writing an email to Andy Warhol and getting a reply within 24 hours with a phone number. Slack jawed I wrote back, ‘No, I can’t talk to you, you’re Michael Leunig!’ And the rest, as they say, is history.
We continued the conversation with ever greater depth, vulnerability and, in the end, love. We even had a tiff or two, which is the true testament of friendship! Even though he sent me articles to read all the time (we did this almost daily at the height of the state sanctioned violence), he once told me off for sending a Walter Kirn article I thought particularly acerbic and brilliant. ‘Not another link from the snake pit of links!’ he exhorted. I could see them writhing in a tangled mess, demanding our hijacked attention and manufactured outrage. Hissing to keep those eyeballs on the screen and the cortisol levels up. Even his admonishments were poetic! I sulkily apologised acknowledging that he was undergoing gruelling treatment, and he didn’t need another missive about the inevitable state of social decline. Michael was unwell; he had gone blind in one eye — a painful loss for anyone but perhaps especially a painter — and was already deaf in one ear. He’d bashed his head some years earlier in a fall and there was much more, not to mention his interminably broken heart. Early in 2024 he told me he had cancer. Things weren’t good. He didn’t need Kirn to tell him so!
Mr. Curly had given everything, and his body was now holding the score. The ledger was demanding payment. When I say everything, I mean everything. He was a singular voice against the tyrannical state of Victoria and its leader whose name I still cannot utter without feeling an unhealthy level of contempt.
After ‘Tankman’, The Age – once the paper of record – now a rag of unadulterated propaganda, sacked Michael. Or, rather, they demoted him to the ‘lifestyle’ pages, only sacking him last year when it wouldn’t attract nearly so much attention. The bastards. This would ensure he was made to feel small and insignificant after a 55-year career as a colossus in cartooning. A national buried treasure, forgotten and walked all over. Although a degradation — and Michael knew it — he took to this challenge like a duck with a tea pot on its head, which is to say, with humility and acumen. Much was verboten — he couldn’t talk politics or war, he told me, and this included culture wars — but his magical mix of ‘whimsy with a punch’, as Richard Tognetti once put it,3 found its way into each cartoon.
What did he mean to me? I have no doubt in my mind he was an angel sent to give me hope when my own was dangerously low. I told him this once, and he said, ‘That is very serious. We should return to that’. At this time, which was unequivocally the worst in my life, I was isolated with two children and no partner (he’d gone AWOL) fearing the government was going to encroach even further on our collapsing civil liberties. It sounds like hyperbole, but the reality was, the ‘unvaccinated’ were no longer citizens in good standing and we knew it! We were the scapegoats. Politicians were openly vilifying us. This was a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, remember? Those selfish buffoons are putting us all at risk!
Police were opening fire on protestors and smashing dissidents’ heads to the ground in displays of violence that were truly shocking (and carefully shielded from the general public). Legitimate questions — by doctors, lawyers, scientists, journalists and lay people — were dismissed as ‘right-wing bigotry’. Freedom of speech, movement and assembly were effectively outlawed under the emergency powers legislation and anyone who challenged this – including Leunig, of course – was vilified and cancelled. The vaccine that didn’t stop transmission was forced on pain of social ostracism and job loss. While everyone is desperate to pretend none of this happened (and that they weren’t complicit in it); it did, and it was devastating for that small stratum of the population who in good conscience opposed it. It is a scar on the body politic of unspeakable magnitude.
Things were happening at a pace that was overwhelming. Schools, public venues, concerts were closed to those without ‘vaccine passports’ (me) and there was talk of a ‘vaccinated economy’ to exclude us from shopping for anything but essential items. Many were losing their jobs. My then 9-year-old son was cornered by a teacher and pressured to disclose his mother’s vaccine status. He got scared and did, which he then confessed to me a week later distressed that he had betrayed me. The moral injury from this seemingly small act is profound.
The teacher asked me first to determine whether I could ‘safely’ enter school grounds – in an outdoor area at a bush school with less than 20 pupils, I might add. I told her that I was no more going to disclose my ‘vaccine status’ than I was my gynaecological record. It was a matter of principle. Of course, that was already a statement that could be decoded into ‘anti-vaxxer’, since what I was really announcing was that I was holding to an older order where medical records were private and not the business of teachers or anyone (the fuck) else. So, she went behind my back and cornered my son in an act that to this day I consider not simply immoral, but evil.
The state was also propagandising about ‘mature minors’ through their media mouthpieces and how said minors could consent to medical interventions – a slippery slope to government usurpation of parental rights. Family and friends were dividing. My best friend was uninvited from her family Christmas on the grounds that she was a threat to (vaccinated) family members. We cried and ranted together and thanked God we were still on the same page. My other close friend couldn’t work but was mercifully put on leave rather than sacked. The traumatic watermark for me was my (absent) partner calling me an ‘anti-vaxxer’ with acid contempt (we couldn’t recover from this despite my best efforts). I had my first and to date only panic attack after he said this. Terrified that he didn’t love me anymore and I would have to face down this beast alone. My family and friends were dividing in ways I could never — and I mean never — have imagined in my lifetime. I found a new tribe overnight (with some old friends in it) but of course there was trauma and grief to watch one’s community — indeed society — devolve in this way.
Into the fray stepped Michael (as I now know him), not just on the public stage with Tankman, but into my fraying life and breaking heart. Right there into my inbox. I will always treasure this miracle and see it as a gift from God when I was both frightened and alone. Michael was also suffering but, at almost 80, he was sagacious, reflective and clear in his understanding of this descent into tyranny. His presence in my life — ironically through our phones — was a blessing.
The deepest blessing – and surprise – to me was that it blossomed into a true friendship. Sure, I had a certain hero worship (how could I not? I had grown up with his cartoons on everything from calendars to trams), but this abated relatively quickly and turned into a genuinely reciprocal relationship. He sought my opinion on all manner of topics personal and political, listened and engaged intelligently. He responded with visceral delight to a photo of freshly baked bread I sent on Easter morning (2022), and some months later of freshly milled wood. He also loved my son’s blacksmithing and daughter’s singing. On reflection these are all transformative, alchemical processes and I think this resonated with him.
Female intellectuals and creatives are used to being ignored. There is an organic difficulty in seeing a woman as an authority on anything other than the domestic sphere. For all the accusations of misogyny — and Michael has faced many — my own experience of him is that he listened to, engaged with and valued me – and specifically, my ideas, writing and thinking. It was truly a reciprocal exchange.
At his public memorial, I felt a little twinge of pain as I realised (naively) that this was not unique to me. The friends who gave eulogies all spoke of their treasured letters from Michael with jokes about his long, long texts. I was laughing along with a secret in my belly and a bursting heart that I too had a digital drawer full of messages from ‘my beloved Michael’ who was really everyone’s beloved Michael. ‘Loving Michael meant sharing Michael’, said his partner Nicola when we met up earlier this year. I felt a bit foolish. Of course he had many friends, and many across different stretches of his long life, not to mention two ex-wives and four adult children. I was nobody special. But I also know that by rejecting progressive shibboleths and, by dint of personality and preference, he was also remarkably alone, with the notable exception of Nicola. In this context, which I called ‘authoritarianism’ at the start of this essay, he and I became unlikely but perhaps also likely friends.
There were also curious synchronicities and overlaps — we lived in the same town (Daylesford), albeit at different times; we knew multiple people in common; my former partner had worked at his parents house and then there was our common ancestor. This is the quantum entanglement piece. It warms my heart to know — as I now do via Nicola — that he very much valued our friendship and would regularly report on this or that in our correspondence.
I am not wanting to share much of this exchange, which feels private and precious, but I will show this wonderful series of messages at the time my son Tom was involved in a fight at school. He had been teased over many months by friends (far worse than by enemies) for being short. And I can assure you that for all the DEI, being a short boy doesn’t get you any brownie points. He had snapped one day and punched a boy — the wrong boy! — not the boy who did it, a bystander in the group. He came to me feeling confused, ashamed, upset, angry and remorseful but also a bit relieved that they were off his case. We were all being called to ‘the office’. Who to turn to but Mr. Curly in such a situation? His replies are treasures:
Yes! A bit more back and forth and I questioned ‘what should I do’? I knew at some level nothing was best but, I also needed confirmation from someone I trusted. It takes a village to process a mother’s worries. I had said to Tom that that we do not hit others, but also wanted to affirm his right to protect himself and commiserate with him over the mistaken punch. Michael’s reply was also gold,
Michael was a prodigious talent producing so many paintings and poems, but he seemed to spend as much time working on his property and in his garden. We exchanged stories and photos of our farms, in particular, fallen trees (I had many from the 2021 storms and he had them often enough). Once I said divorce is like a tree falling with a big, loud, terrifying thud. Timber! You really do have to get out of the way or you might be killed. He fulsomely agreed with his usual poetic storm.
I spent the weekend at Michael’s house with Nicola in February. We talked, cried, ate and walked around his property. I sat and talked with Felix, his youngest son, who asked me, with Michael’s gentle features etched on his face, “How did you know my father?” I sat with Michael’s ashes at the peace tree he planted with then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams on the eve of the Iraq War, a fitting resting place for Mr. Curly. Nicola warns me that ‘ashes are actually quite crunchy’ and ‘you will see bits of Michael’s bones around the tree’. I take a sharp breath in and a painful ball forms in my throat with corresponding pricks in my eyes. Ball and pricks. Prick and balls. I can hear the cosmic Michael laughing! When the tiny white fragments of his bones come to rest in my eyes, I am overcome with the need to touch them. I feel his grit mixed with the wet earth. The air smells like rain after a fire. I wish I could text him about this moment. He always had something poignant to say.
This article first appeared on Petra Bueskens’ Substack, Veriditas.
- Of course I accept the validity of empirical research, it’s the fact that this research is thoroughly embedded in a corrupt system, which applies to the research questions that are allowed to be asked, which projects are funded (and which are not), which research is published and which is not and so on. ↩︎
- I published this talk as “‘Mummy Was Busy’: Leunig’s Cartoon, Smart Phone Addiction and the Loss of Transitional Space in Contemporary Culture” in the Australasian Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, vol. 40, no. 1&2, 2023, pp. 11–40. You can read it here. ↩︎
- Tognetti says this in The Leunig Fragments (2019). The exact quote is, ‘He draws you in with whimsy and then he throws a punch’. ↩︎
