Bruce Petty, a suburb of Melbourne, is one of Australia's best known political satirists and cartoonists. He is a regular contributor to Melbourne's The Age newspaper. His intricate images have been described as "doodle-bombs" for their free-association of links between various ideas, people and institutions. Age journalist Martin Flanagan wrote that Petty "re-invented the world as a vast scribbly machine with interlocking cogs and levers that connected people in wholly logical but unlikely ways."
Work
Petty began working for the Owen Brothers animation studio in Melbourne in 1949, before moving to the UK in 1954. His cartoons were published in The New Yorker, Esquire and Punch. On his return to Australia in 1961, he worked at first for The Daily Mirror, The Bulletin and The Australian before joining The Age in 1976. In 1976, the animated filmLeisure, of which he was the director, won an Academy Award for the producerSuzanne Baker. "When I got it, the Oscar went to the producer. We got a picture of it, a very nice gold-framed picture." He has made a number of other award-winning animated films including Art, Australian History, Hearts and Minds and Karl Marx. Bruce has also created a number of "machine sculptures" with the most famous being a piece known as "Man Environment Machine" that was a feature piece of the Australian Pavilion at World Expo '85 at Tsukuba, Japan. In 2007, he received the AFIBest Documentary Director prize for the documentary Global Haywire which he wrote, directed and animated, as well as the Best Documentary Sound prize ; this documentary tries to unravel the global pattern that leads to an understanding of how the world came to be as it is today, and is based on interviews with intellectuals, students and journalists. Bruce's 2008 book, Petty's Parallel Worlds, is a retrospective collection of editorial cartoons from 1959 to the present, street sketches done on assignment around the world, and etchings. Those of Petty's cartoons that depict themes such as the economy, international relations or other social issues as complicated interlocking machines have been likened to Rube Goldberg machines or Heath Robinson contraptions. At the 2016 Walkley Awards Petty was recognised with the Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism award.
Influences
Petty says in the foreword to Parallel Worlds that he is a humanist and Socialist, mentions visiting Nicaragua and Cuba in the early 1960s, and feeling the influence of Colin Wilson's The Outsider. Also by Charlie Perkins.
Personal life
Petty was first married to ABC journalist and film critic Julie Rigg. They have two sons. In 1988 he married award-winning author Kate Grenville, with whom he has a son and a daughter. He and Grenville have separated, and Petty is now partnered with the bookseller Lesley McKay.
