At 82, Bruce Petty is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and well-loved political cartoonists – to this day, he still draws one weekly cartoon for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. He also has an Academy Award on his CV, for his 1976 animated film Leisure.

“I was watching the Awards on telly, and was pretty impressed to win – it was a very unexpected result.”

The award helped gain Petty recognition for his later films in the niche area of political, satirical animated documentaries. They included Marx (1981), Money (1998), This Mad Century (1999), Human Contraptions (2002) and Global Haywire (2008) – the latter won him an Australian Film Industry Award for Best Documentary Director and Best Documentary Sound. Petty’s currently working on a new film, but it’s still
under wraps.

Petty got his first drawing job in an advertising animation studio in Box Hill, Victoria, in 1949. In 1955, he went to London and started to build his profile there and in the US in magazines such as Punch, The New Yorker and Esquire.

“Cartoonists have this privilege; they can be abusing and confronting and get away with it,” Petty says. “We get to be quite conceptual with our images, go into diplomatic subterranean territory, to point out the terrible decision-making and ridiculous, flawed policies of our leaders.”

Once he returned to Sydney, Petty produced work for The Australian, The Daily Mirror and the now retired news magazine, The Bulletin. Then in 1976 he landed the job he still holds today with The Age. In 2009, he received Melbourne Press Club’s Quill Award for lifetime achievement.

Every year The Age sends Petty overseas to gain inspiration from an international political event. “Seeing places for yourself as a cartoonist is important,” he says, adding that his visit to South Africa in 1994, when Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress came to power “was very moving; seeing kilometres of Africans who had never thought they would ever vote, queuing up to vote for change.”