Satirical - Australian

Australian satirical printmaking has a history almost as long as the colonies themselves, beginning with the cartoons published in the early colonial newspapers and reaching its mature form in the illustrated satirical magazines — the Melbourne Punch (founded 1855), the Sydney Punch (1864) and their successors — that were among the most culturally significant publishing ventures of colonial Australia. The prints produced by these publications document the political life, social tensions and cultural preoccupations of colonial and Federation-era Australia with a directness and wit that more respectable forms of journalism could not achieve, and they are primary documents of Australian public culture at some of its most formative moments.

The Melbourne Punch — modelled explicitly on the British original but rapidly developing a distinctive Australian voice — was the most important vehicle for political and social satire in colonial Victoria through the second half of the nineteenth century. Its cartoonists — particularly the long-serving S.T. Gill in the early years and the professionally trained illustrators who followed him — produced images of colonial political life that combined technical accomplishment with genuine satirical insight. The great controversies of Victorian colonial politics — the land question, the tariff debate, the labour movement, the federation discussions — were all addressed in Punch cartoons that reduced complex political arguments to vivid visual shorthand, making them accessible to a broad reading public.

The bush mythology that became central to Australian national identity in the 1890s — the celebration of the drover, the shearer, the bushman and the values of mateship, egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism associated with outback life — was as much a product of satirical as of serious illustration. The Bulletin magazine, founded in Sydney in 1880, combined political radicalism with social satire and a determination to create a distinctively Australian literary and visual culture, and the cartoons published in its pages by artists including Phil May, Livingston Hopkins and Norman Lindsay are among the finest examples of Australian graphic art of any period.

Social satire — the comedy of colonial pretension, the mockery of those who aped British manners in an antipodean setting, the lampooning of nouveaux riches squatters and their social-climbing families — provided material for illustrators who found in the social gap between Australian reality and British aspiration a seam of comic potential that never ran out. The gold rush and its social consequences, the rise of the selectors, the tensions between squatter and selector, free trader and protectionist, currency lad and immigrant — all provided material for satire that is simultaneously comic and historically illuminating.

Anti-Chinese satire forms a troubling but historically significant strand of colonial Australian comic illustration. The racial anxieties that drove the Chinese exclusion movement from the 1850s onwards were expressed in cartoons of considerable virulence, and these images are primary documents of the racial politics of colonial Australia even as they are morally uncomfortable objects. They must be understood in their historical context while being read critically for what they reveal about the assumptions and anxieties of the society that produced them.

For collectors of Australian history, political history or the history of graphic art, Australian satirical prints offer material of exceptional historical richness and consistent visual energy. They document the public life of colonial and Federation-era Australia from an angle that no other form of contemporary record can provide, and significant original examples from the major satirical publications are increasingly scarce on the open market.