The scalpel and the axe: Bill Leak’s biographer offers a sympathetic but unflinching account of the controversial cartoonist’s life

When Bill Leak died suddenly in March 2017, two days after the launch of his fourth cartoon collection, Trigger Warning, it seemed you could choose between two positions. Either he was the villainous creator of “that racist cartoon” of an Aboriginal father enquiring as to the name of his son, or he was “our dead king,” murdered by the repressive forces of political correctness. Fred Pawle’s biography of this giant of Australian political cartooning veers towards the latter view, as you might expect in a book sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs. But it is a much richer account of a passionate life than either caricature could sponsor.