Political cartooning – the end of an era

Amid industry turmoil, newspaper cartooning is increasingly becoming a niche activity.
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An evocation of the horrors of last year’s long election campaign by David Rowe in the Australian Financial Review (detail).  

We started collecting cartoons in the last days of the Keating supremacy. We used them to chronicle how the wheels fell off during the 1996 election campaign and that serial failure John Howard (once written off in a Bulletin headline as “Mr Eighteen Percent. Why does this man bother?”) won in a landslide.

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Robert Phiddian and Haydon Manning
About the Author
Robert Phiddian is Deputy Dean, School of Humanities, Flinders University. He teaches in Renaissance and Eighteenth Century literature and has a special interest in political satire, parody, and humour. He researches political satire, especially current Australian political cartoons with Haydon Manning. He is Chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, and has particular interests both in the quality of public language and in writers' festivals. Haydon Manning is Associate Professor, Politics and Public Policy, Flinders University. He is a frequent commentator on South Australian and national politics. His main research interests concern on political attitudes, voting behaviour, elections, political parties, politics of climate change and chronicling South Australian politics for the Australian Journal of Politics and History. He teaches undergraduate topics on voting behaviour, political parties, environmental politics and Australian political and economic history..