“Here’s Mr Squiggle, with lots of fun for everyone; here’s Mr Squiggle, sing a happy tune...”
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For 40 years, from 1959, Australian children grew up with the whimsical television puppets created by the cartoonist and marionettist Norman Hetherington. Mr Squiggle, the gentle ‘Man from the Moon’ with a pencil for a nose; the irascible Blackboard with his refrain ‘Hurry up, hurry up’; the impatient Rocket, the garrulous Bill Steamshovel and his terrible jokes.
Hetherington had been a cartoonist since his youth. He sold a work to The Bulletin magazine while still a student aged 15, and his career there lasted until 1961. He was a war artist, a gifted puppeteer and a brilliant puppet maker.
He also collected the original copies of the work of his cartooning forebears and contemporaries. Names as famous as Norman Lindsay (45 works), Phil May, Unk White, Tom Carrington, Les Tanner, Judy Horavic and Michael Leunig are just a few represented in his collection, purchased recently by the Art Gallery of Ballarat.
Gallery director Gordon Morrison says Hetherington, renowned as a kindly and patient person, amassed his drawings over a period of 40 years. After his death in 2010 at the age of 89, his family sold the collection in the hope it would not be broken up.
The Art Gallery has honoured that hope.
“The collection has its own integrity,” says Morrison.
“There are only two or three institutions in the country that have the wherewithal to do that, and we were rather chuffed to get in first.”
Morrison says being originals, the drawings show the marks, corrections, creases and comments made by the artists and their editors. A marvellous Cecil ‘Unk’ White picture of a swagman tramping with an attractive young woman – “Don’t you find the miles clip by when you’ve got congenial company, lady?” says the swaggie – has paint marks where changes have been made. These would have been invisible to the lithographic process, says Morrison.
“It’s a fabulous work, it hasn’t been laboured on – it’s the fast work of someone who really knows how to draw.”
“They are the most amazing body of social and political commentary,” he says.
“Every single one of these will be connected to a story, and to a political or social event.”
Former Gallery board president Bob Bath has been a fan of the political cartoon for many years, and brought the gallery to the attention of the late, brilliant cartoonist Les Tanner.
“All the directors have been interested in the political cartoon collection, and if I see something I think they would like, I bring it to their attention,” says Bath.
The Hetherington collection of cartoons will be the subject of an exhibition later this year at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.