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NLA News - home September 2005 Volume XV Number 12
click to enlarge
Judy Horacek (b.1961)
Childcare Closer to Home [1995?]
pen and ink on paper; 11.5 x 14.5 cm
Judy Horacek Collection of Cartoons
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3294998

A new lease on life

Judy Horacek has always looked for new ways to share her cartoons. As Kathryn Favelle reports, a selection of her work has now become part of the Library’s Pictures Collection

‘My life has been a quest to find new and better places to stick cartoons,’ said Judy Horacek recently. So far, the cartoonist, illustrator and writer has stuck her cartoons in newspapers and magazines, on aprons and coffee mugs, cards and fridge magnets. She has reprinted them in books, published them on websites and recreated them as limited edition prints. But last year, the National Library of Australia found a new place for some of Horacek’s cartoons—in the Library’s Pictures Collection.

Horacek has long been represented in the National Library’s collections. Her many publications, including Life on the Edge (1992, reprinted 2003), If the Fruit Fits (1999) and I Am Woman, Hear Me Draw: Cartoons from the Pen of Judy Horacek (2002, reprinted 2003), the small magazines in which she has published, and the books and reports she has illustrated, are all held in the Library’s general collection. An interview was recorded by Ann Turner in 1998 (TRC 3719) for the Library’s Oral History Collection, excerpts of which were published in Turner’s book for the National Library, In Their Image: Contemporary Australian Cartoonists (2000). And hidden between the sheets of the Newspaper Collection are her cartoons as they were originally published on the pages of the Age and the Australian.

click to enlarge
Judy Horacek (b.1961)
2001 Federation Odyssey, Part 1 [2] 2001
pen, ink and watercolour on paper; 23.0 x 25.2 cm
Judy Horacek Collection of Cartoons
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3293506

Over the past five years, the National Library has accelerated its collecting of original cartoons, acquiring the work of a number of contemporary cartoonists including Geoff Pryor and Alan Moir, as well as posthumous collections. Original cartoons held by the Library date back to the early years of European settlement.

Last year, Linda Groom, Manager of the Library’s Pictures Collection, and colleague Michael Proud, visited Judy Horacek in her Canberra studio. There they searched through archives of her work and selected over 40 cartoons for inclusion in the Pictures Collection. While many of us are familiar with Horacek’s gentle humour in cartoons such as her ‘Unrequited Love’ series, and her ongoing interest in telling women’s stories through cartoons such as ‘Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde’, Groom and Proud selected cartoons that revealed social attitudes to a range of subjects including Federation, the Republica Movement, Flybuys, immigration and Indigenous issues.

‘Cartoons fit strongly with the Library’s Collection Development Policy,’ explains Linda Groom. ‘Their subject matter is invariably about politics and social history and they document attitudes, some of which are irreverent and not documented in any other way. When we are collecting cartoons, we are trying to predict future research interests. Our experience shows that those images that are of most value to researchers are those that will date. They are documenting attitudes that change.’

Judy Horacek’s cartoons, however, are frequently described as being timeless. Some of those collected by the Library, such as ‘Compassion Fatigue Filter’ (published 16–17 October 1999) and ‘Childcare Closer to Home’ (published c.1995), continue to resonate strongly today. Horacek herself attributes the timeless quality of her cartoons to the way she has been published as a cartoonist.

click to enlarge
Judy Horacek (b.1961)
Flybuys 1999
pen, ink and watercolour on paper; 16.9 x 13.1 cm
Judy Horacek Collection of Cartoons
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3292541
click to enlarge
Judy Horacek (b.1961)
Philip Ruddock’s Australia 2001
pen, ink and watercolour on paper; 15.6 x 22.0 cm
Judy Horacek Collection of Cartoons
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3293184

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Dr Jekyll & Mrs Hyde
Reproduced from I Am Woman, Hear Me Draw: Cartoons from the Pen of Judy Horacek (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2002)
Courtesy of Judy Horacek

‘With the exception of a two week period when I was editorial cartoonist for the Australian while Peter Nicholson was away, one cartoon a week in the mainstream media is generally the best I’ve ever had. The timelines are longer and you have to be working with broader issues, not just the politics of the day.’ But Horacek also notes that it is not just publishing lead times that have influenced her choices of subject matter. ‘That’s the way I like to work—to deal with the issue, not just the personalities around it. It’s also because so many of the injustices of our society don’t seem to get better, in spite of the best efforts of cartoonists.’

Fellow cartoonist Peter Nicholson referred to the timeless quality of Horacek’s work in his foreword to her collection, If the Fruit Fits:

When your subject matter is the daily political dramas and catastrophes, you have ready-made cartoon subjects. You have a stage provided for you with a whole lot of actors running around doing dramatic and unwittingly absurd things … Now I think that Judy Horacek would make a very good political cartoonist if she got a gig with a daily paper and went in that direction. But for most of her professional life her cartoons have been more on the theme of people’s everyday lives and worries. When this is your subject matter you start in more of a vacuum. You need a powerful imagination, a great sense of humour, a real understanding of the human condition and you must have something to say … there is an advantage in this type of cartoon. It has a lasting value. And that’s why these cartoons are not only our friends today, but they still will be in twenty years’ time.

Judy Horacek describes herself as ‘working on the margins’. Her first paid job was drawing monkeys for a pamphlet about lice for a community services organisation in Fitzroy, Melbourne. As she comments in the Library’s oral history interview, when she delivered the monkeys:

they were really impressed and they said, ‘We’d like to give you $50.00 for this’, and I said, ‘Oh, wow, I can make some money from drawing pictures’. It sort of went from there. It was a gradual thing … the more work I got published, the more work people would give me. In the beginning, it was definitely for my political line, so I was doing a lot of work for the Legal Services Bulletin, which is now called the Alternative Law Journal, and for the Health Issues Centre, which represents consumer issues in health. So they were my two magazines. I went to the Age and newspapers and things and they weren’t interested at all, so I just sort of eked out this thing on the community. It was good and I did some very, very good work.

Horacek came to cartooning through writing. At the time, she was a member of a community writing group in North Melbourne. She told Ann Turner that:

The facilitator … suggested we all went home and drew a cartoon, drew some little pictures to go with our writing, because that’s what one woman in the group used to do. So I went home and I drew this cartoon about waking up in the morning and finding a giant fish on the table and not quite knowing what to do about it … It was very wordy, it was more like a comic strip page I suppose, but I just really enjoyed the experience of it.

Words continue to play an important role in many of her cartoons, sometimes dominating the pictures, and many of her cartoons, such as ‘Literary Controversies: The Demidenko Affair’, reflect her interest in both writing and the politics of the literary world. It was her burgeoning interest in feminism, however, that really drove Horacek’s early work and established her reputation as a cartoonist. In her introduction to I Am Woman, Hear Me Draw, she wrote:

with my relatively new interest in feminism I had a whole subject area just crying out to be drawn … It made sense to me to people my cartoons with female characters. Obviously one would use a female character for a cartoon about mothering or period pain, but I used female characters in cartoons about everything—from occupational health and safety issues to existential dilemmas.

click to enlarge
Judy Horacek (b.1961)
Compassion Fatigue Filter 1999
pen, ink and watercolour on paper;
16.7 x 13.0 cm
Judy Horacek Collection of Cartoons
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3292562
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Judy Horacek (b.1961)
We Want Our Land Back 1990s
pen and ink on paper; 13.0 x 9.3 cm
Judy Horacek Collection of Cartoons
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3294988

Eventually, the newspapers did become interested in her work, and she has had regular spots in the Weekend Australian Magazine, the Age, and the Canberra Times. But, as she ruefully noted when giving the 2002 Pamela Denoon Lecture, when a magazine or newspaper is redesigned, ‘freelance cartoonists are generally the first to go’.

To overcome the financial and creative insecurity of being a freelance cartoonist, Judy Horacek has found other ways of circulating her cartoons. She has been making greeting cards since 1991, expanding into other merchandise products. As she commented in the afterword to Life on the Edge:

I’ve realised that producing cards is a fantastic method of putting cartoons out into the world. Cards are a wonderful way for cartoons to come into people’s lives, one not subject to the vagaries of an editor, nor to the current preference of many newspapers and magazines for words over cartoons … There is also something very lovely about the fact that by being on a card a cartoon is turned into a message, into something that is passed on and shared, not just chuckled at by yourself.

More recently, Horacek has become a printmaker, recreating her cartoons as limited edition prints. A website (www.judyhoracek.com) and electronic mailing list enable her to keep in contact with her audience. And last year she illustrated her first children’s book. With text by Mem Fox, Where is the Green Sheep?, published in both Australia and the United States, has been shortlisted for Best Picture Book—Early Childhood, and the Crichton Award for first-time picture book illustrator, in this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards.

Where is the Green Sheep? is Horacek’s second project with acclaimed children’s author and reading educator Mem Fox—she also illustrated Fox’s guide to reading, Reading Magic. The green sheep featured in the new book began life as an etching reproduced on Horacek’s website. When Mem Fox saw it, she told Horacek ‘it had to have its own children’s book’. If you scour Horacek’s cartoons, however, you will discover earlier incarnations of the sheep. One appears in the cartoon ‘The Unjolly Swagman’, held in the Library’s Pictures Collection.

Buoyed by the success of Where is the Green Sheep?, Judy Horacek is now working on a children’s book of her own.

As she explains: ‘I always wanted to do children’s books, even as a child. I always wanted to be a writer and an artist and recognised that children’s books were a place where both elements could co-exist.’ For Horacek, the inclusion of her cartoons in the National Library’s Pictures Collection reinforces the belief that she is able to have an effect while still working primarily outside the mainstream media.

‘I really like being recognised for having done work that is part of the social discourse. And it’s always nice to see cartoons get another lease on life—now they represent a particular time and context and become part of the portrait of who we are.’

KATHRYN FAVELLE is currently on leave from the National Library of Australia, where she works in the Publications and Events Branch

STOP PRESS: Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek was named 2005 Book of the Year: Early Childhood by the Children’s Book Council. For more information on the awards, visit the Children’s Book Council website (www.cbc.org.au).

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