Bruce Petty

Bruce Petty (born 1929, Melbourne) is one of Australia's best known political satirists and cartoonists. He is a regular contributor to Melbourne's The Age newspaper. He is married to Australian award-winning novelist, Kate Grenville; they live in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales.

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 leaving in 1955 to work overseas with work being published in The New Yorker, Esquire and Punch. On his return to Australia, he worked at first for The Bulletin and The Australian before joining The Age in 1976.

In 1976, his work on the animated film Leisure won an Oscar for the producer Suzanne Baker (the first Australian woman to win an Academy Award). "When I got it, the Oscar went to the producer. We got a picture of it, a very nice gold-framed picture." (The Age, 22 June 2004)

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" (fondly known as the "Petty Machine") that was a feature piece of the Australian Pavilion at World Expo '85 at Tsukuba, Japan.

In 2007, he received the AFI Best 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.

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.

Filmography

• Hearts and Minds (1968)
• Australian History (1971)
• Art (1974)
• Leisure (1976)
• Magic Arts (1978)
• Karl Marx (1979)
• Megalomedia (1983)
• Movers (1986)
• Money (1998)
• The Mad Century (2000)
• Human Contraptions (2002)
• Global Haywire (2007)

Books

• Australian artist in South East Asia / Bruce Petty with introduction by Ronald Searle (1962)
• Petty's Australia fair / Bruce Petty (1967)
• A portfolio of Petty / Bruce Petty (1969)
• The best of Petty / 1968, Ed. Ron Smith
• The Penguin Petty (1972, ISBN 0-14-003639-3)
• Petty's Australia: and how it works / Bruce Petty (1976, ISBN 0-14-070060-9)
• The Petty age / Bruce Petty (1978, ISBN 0-909331-67-7)
• Petty's money book / Bruce Petty (1983, ISBN 0-00-636551-5)
• Women and men / Petty (1986, ISBN 0-04-820029-8)
• Bruce Petty's the absurd machine / Bruce Petty (1997, ISBN 0-14-025554-0)
• Petty's Parallel Worlds Bruce Petty (2008, Ed. Russ Radcliffe, ISBN 978-0-646-49028-1)

References

• Conversation with Bruce Petty (1972 sound recording) - interviewer, Hazel de Berg
• Interview with Bruce Petty, cartoonist and filmmaker (1996 sound recording) - interviewer, Ann Turner
• Portrait of Bruce Petty (picture) by Virginia Wallace-Crabbe
• Bruce Petty (I), IMDB

Classroom resources

• Cartoon page of The Age newspaper
• Bruce Petty - 27 June 2004 article from The Age
• Three Cartoonists - transcript of Andrew Denton’s ABC interview with cartoonist Bruce Petty, Bill Leak and Patrick Cook
• Review of Global Haywire in The Sydney Morning Herald