Biography

Bruce was born in Melbourne in 1929 and distinguished himself as one of the great political satirists of any generation. You don’t have to agree with his political views all the time but his satirical ideas were all informed by a fierce desire to champion the underdog, the oppressed or the dispossessed.

Bruce has worked for The New Yorker, Esquire, Punch, The Bulletin, The Australian and The Age. He also won an Oscar for his animated film called Leisure in 1976. He has made many films since then including Global Haywire, which won AFI awards for Best Director, as well as for the sound work of his eldest son and film collaborator, Sam..

Bruce’s love of the “contraption” also drew him to make three dimensional sculptures, for example “Man Environment Machine,” exhibited at the World Expo in 1985 in the Australian Pavilion. He was commissioned to build working sculptures by the Law Society, Powerhouse Museum, Treasury, Film Australia, AMA- institutions whose own workings and industries were duly deconstructed and pilloried by the Petty machines, clunking satirically away in their grand foyers. Visiting CEO’s would guffaw uncomfortably as they pulled a lever saying “restructure”, only to see a sequence of cogs and pulleys cause a football boot to fall on the head of a miniature worker 10 feet away.

Petty’s early political cartoon book, Australia Fair was an inspiration for every Australian young cartoonist. His liberated freewheeling line work (inspired by Thurber and Topolski) influenced many young cartoonists who yearned for a style that did not depend on conventional draughtsmanship.

You could argue that Bruce’s greatest achievement was to aggressively tangle his thin, strong line around the tragic giant of the Vietnam War. Bruce’s brilliant cartoons pilloried the double speak and euphemism of that disturbing period.

His other great achievement was in a sense journalistic. He imagined a visual approximation of economics, a Newtonian world of levers and pulleys. The pseudo-scientific jargon of economics is easy meat for a satirist. Bruce’s wild thicket of lines is ideally suited to the chaotic reality of modern economics in the era of the Global Financial Crisis.

For years, Bruce attended Federal Government budget lock-ups. For about five hours Bruce would be locked in a room full of reporters, sub-editors and other cartoonists and a mountain of budget papers. His job was to find a humorous or ironic comment on as many budgetary categories that he could. Faced with this task, most other cartoonists would struggle to invent more than a handful of ideas. Within an hour of reading the budgetary summaries, Bruce’s desk would be littered with dozens of brilliant, miniature cartoon ideas. Each cartoon was a marvel of dexterity and insight. They were also very funny.

(Words reprinted here courtesy of John Spooner and the Canberra NPG).