A controversial cartoonist delivered a blistering parting shot to his boss after he was sacked in a ‘throat-cutting exercise’.
Michael Leunig’s 55-year career at The Age came to an end last week when the editor of the Melbourne-based masthead, Patrick Elligett, told subscribers the cartoonist had ‘filed his last editorial illustration’.
But Leunig, 79, is refusing to go quietly, and delivered a blunt farewell message to the newspaper by accusing its editors of censorship and branding it a ‘tacky tabloid’.
He described his sacking as a ‘throat-cutting exercise’ and took umbrage that Elligett did not tell readers it was his decision to end his career.
‘There was no mention of the fact that he (Elligett) gave me the axe,’ Leunig told The Australian.
‘I was expecting it, as I have parted ways with The Age philosophically (and) culturally. I don’t read it really, I just scan it. It’s a sad story because I began there when it was a substantial newspaper.
‘It’s almost embarrassing now to say that I worked for The Age. It’s become like a tacky tabloid.’
Mr Elligett said his only comment in response was ‘to thank Michael Leunig for his contribution to The Age over many decades’.
Michael Leunig’s (pictured, above) 55-year career at The Age newspaper came to an end last week when the editor of the Melbourne-based masthead, Patrick Elligett (below), told subscribers the cartoonist had ‘filed his last editorial illustration’
But Leunig, 79, is refusing to go quietly, taking a parting blast at The Age by accusing its editors of censorship and branding it a ‘tacky tabloid’
Leunig, who started working for the newspaper in 1969, said the relationship between him and the paper became strained during the Covid pandemic.
The newspaper had been owned by Fairfax Media before it was taken over by Nine Entertainment following a merger between the two companies in 2018.
Leunig is the latest star to be sent packing after the media outlet let go of hundreds of staff in August as part of its $30million cost-cutting plan.
The cartoonist made headlines when he shared an illustration that was rejected by then-editor Gay Alcorn because it was heavily critical of vaccine mandates.
Leunig’s cartoon, which never made the paper, featured one of his typically fragile, big-nosed figures facing the silhouette of a tank with a syringe in place of the gun turret.
In the top left corner, the 76-year-old copied the iconic ‘Tank Man’ image showing a Beijing demonstrator standing in the path of a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
He posted the drawing on his Instagram page with the word ‘mandate’, an act that eventually resulted in him being fired from the news pages of The Age and left to file a single cartoon a week for the weekend section.
‘I just had to raise questions, as did a lot of people, about the severity of the Covid measures and this was intolerable, these things kept getting not published without any explanation or discussion,’ Leunig said.
‘It was kind of like being sent to Coventry, you don’t exist.
‘It was almost a lonely kind of position, there was never any contact from anyone … I was just left out on a rock.’
The newspaper had been owned by Fairfax Media before it was taken over by Nine Entertainment following a merger between the two companies in 2018
The cartoonist made national headlines when he shared a cartoon that was rejected by the then editor Gay Alcorn because it was heavily critical of vaccine mandates (pictured)
Leunig said he had submitted numerous cartoons about former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews’ extreme lockdown measures during 2020.
But these, he claimed, were rejected out of fear of upsetting The Age’s largely left-leaning readership who were in favour of lockdowns.
Last week, Leunig wrote a piece for his own website in which he accused The Age of censorship, claiming there was ‘a message relayed to him from above to not mention Gaza’.
‘He went around that instruction but in a sense, he was mostly left in the dark with one hand tied behind his back,’ Leunig wrote in the third person.
‘It was obvious to him that the institution which most needed to be questioned, shaken and satirised was the mainstream media – but of course, this was out of bounds.’
He accused the modern cartoon industry of being too ‘smart, clean and sanctimonious’ and claimed cartoonists ‘don’t have the support and encouragement of courageous or adventurous editors’.
‘With some terrific exceptions, Australian mainstream cartoonists can’t be so funny, spirited and naughty any more; they are not free enough, they don’t have as much ink on their hands as they once did, they are mostly over-educated, they don’t end up in court on charges of offensive publishing like they used to, they clamour too much after neat punch lines and the self-congratulations of cosy, dubious media awards, they don’t receive letter bombs or the volume of hate mail as was normal in previous times,’ he wrote.