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Stan Cross's "For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!" (Smith's Weekly, 1933) is the symbol and bellwether of the Australian cartooning tradition. It is often lionised as a national treasure, but its archival history has been perilous in a way that shows a lack of care amounting almost to national negligence. The original of this most famous cartoon of the Depression era was lost for 80 years before being rediscovered in 2014, and this article notes for the first time that Trove Newspapers lacks a record of its initial publication. We use this troubled material history of one significant cartoon to raise a range of issues about the quality and purpose of collecting and presenting Australian cartoons as a resource for Australian studies in fields ranging from media and humour studies to cultural and political history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political satire can contribute to the momentum and direction of opinion during political campaigns. A cartoon can capture the structure of a campaign. Satire can mold public opinion but the 1996 Australian federal election proved that it does not always succeed and can sometimes be lifeless and unhumorous. The satire remained tame because of the pressures on the media and Paul Keating's failures as the arch-satirist of Australian political life.

The early years of Bruce Petty, the Australian cartoonist, are focused, until the major sea-change in his and Australia's career were marked by the events of 1975. Petty's public life and debate are outlined to describe his developing perspective on the issues of the 1960s and early 1970s.

An introduction is presented which discusses articles in the special issue on Australian satirist John Clarke.

Clarke's poetic output was never the main game, but he was persistent in developing the (entirely self-authored) Complete Book of Australian Verse (39 poems; Clarke, 1989) through two intermediate versions culminating in the 2012 edition of Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse (68 poems). This article addresses the central characteristics of Clarke's art through the voice, timing and rhythm of these parodic poems. They illustrate the sort of parody discussed in 'Are parody and deconstruction secretly the same thing?' (Phiddian, 1997 and subsequent work). Clarke's own favoured word for his writing practice, tinkering, suits such carefully wrought pieces well, and fits with more expansive notions of parody as critical and creative refunctioning of models rather than as narrow lampoons. Through intimate imitation and distortion, they display a guarded, sometimes hostile, affection and a jagged nostalgia both for their poetic vehicles and for the Australian subject matter. Clarke always inhabits the words of others in his Australian work, speaking via parodic deflection. This contrasts with the Daggy directness of his New Zealand work. Was he only ever a visitor in Oz? Was the parodic reserve a necessary carapace against the sort of fame that he fled in the 1970s? This article reads the poems as a window onto the distinctive rhythms of Clarke's writing and his complexly ironic relationships with both his homeland and his adopted nation. His resistance of 'the voice direct' made him a wry and knowledgeable visitor and offers an abiding challenge to Australianness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of the editorial page cartoon capacity to lampoon leaders, political parties, and key election campaign policies and promises, with a special focus on the Australian federal election of 2016. It notes that cartoons in the print age enjoyed a very distinctive position in newspapers due to a unique mixture of words, caricature, stereotypes, and metaphor. It adds that sales of printed metropolitan and national newspapers have halved between 2002 and 2017.

The article explores publications about the history of political cartoons in Australia. It examines the paucity of books about Australian political cartooning. It discusses the increase of interest in political cartooning in the country in the 1970s, as well as the publication of the book "The Loaded Line: Australian Political Caricature 1788-1901," by cartoonist Marguerite Henriette Mahood. It also analyzes the interaction between contemporary politics and satirical art in Australia.

Metrics-based approaches to understanding the value of culture imply homogeneity of artistic purpose, invite political manipulation and demand time, money and attention from cultural organisations without proven benefit. The system retailing as Culture Counts, a dashboard approach to quality measurement that emerged from Western Australia and is currently trialling in Australia, the US, the UK and Asia, serves to further abstract assessment processes. Cultural policy-makers across international domains need a more robust appreciation of the limits of metrics. Statistical data, well channelled, may provide useful ancillary information. But, where questions of value are concerned, it cannot replace critical judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee's novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe's great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee's novels and Swift's works--nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver's Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee's attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee's oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the formation of the literary theory of satire and its limitations. Topics include the satirical practice in the poststructuralist era, the capacity of satire to moralise and simplify, and the works of satire between individuals and cultures. It also explores the classification of the genre as a rhetorical strategy to provoke emotional and intellectual reactions.

This article tracks the waning of John Howard's authority as leader during the Australian federal election campaign of 2007 by focusing on the political cartoons in major newspapers. Political cartoons as analysed in this piece provide two interlinked things of interest to political analysts: (1) a clear account of the ebb and flow of election campaigns; and (2) a good gauge of political 'strength' of individuals as it is projected in the media. The story they tell for the 2007 campaign in Australia is of a tired government led by a once-strong leader who came to look faintly ridiculous in the face of circumstances he could no longer control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand Herald cartoonist Malcolm Evans was dismissed from the paper after he refused to follow his editor's instruction to cease cartooning on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Members of the Jewish community were upset by a number of his cartoons, drawn during the first half of 2003. Evans is not alone among cartoonists to attract the anger of Jewish community lobbies and the hesitation of their editors when presenting cartoons dealing with the activities of the Israeli government. Cartoonists Tony Auth (Philadelphia Inquirer) and Michael Leunig (The Age) have also presented controversial cartoon commenting on the Israeli Government and, with Evans, defend their work on the grounds that while cartoons may offend an audience the content is not necessarily wrong. Cartoonists fiercely defend their licence to mock politicians, governments and states. This article examines this defence and the space within which cartoonists examine political subjects. We analyse the parameters within which mass circulation newspaper editors operate, principally in the Australian context. We defend a wide licence for cartoonists and argue that this licence represents an important measure of free speech in an era when the threat of terrorism looms large on national political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]