Bruce Petty

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Bruce Petty (Melbourne, 1929 - ) 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-associating 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."

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, he won an Oscar for his animated film Leisure, although he claimed in 2004 that he had no idea of the statue's whereabouts. "When I got it, the Oscar went to the producer. We got a picture of it, a very nice gold-framed picture." (The Age, June 22, 2004)

He has made a number of other award-winning animated films including "Art", "Australian History", "Hearts and Minds" and "Karl Marx".

[edit] 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

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

[edit] External links

• 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