The following I found The Weekend Australian in the Inquirer section. It's a section that my parents rarely read, and as I was going through the newspapers, I stumbled across the headline, "How to Draw Kevin Rudd". Now, as an artist, my interest was piqued, especially because I've been wanting to draw Kevin Rudd for some time now, and as I started reading the article, I began to laugh out loud. My parents asked me what was so funny, and I read the entire 2000 word article to them.

It was about five paragraphs in that we started to have tears streaming down our face in hysterical laughter. LOL XDDD

I just HAD to give all my fellow Aussies a Christmas present, and I could do no better than to show you the following article that had my parents and I literally pounding our fists on the table in hysterics, passing tissues around to wipe our eyes with, and laughing so hard our sides hurt.

To the non-Australians on my flist, you can enjoy this too! You probably won't know who 95% of the people I'm talking about are, so I've linked pictures of the people being spoken about so you can follow along :D

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

Say no to handsome pollies
by BILL LEAK

I would have jumped at the chance to draw Ian Chappell. The man’s a cartoonist’s dream come true. For a start, he sports a moustache, a form of self-mutilation just begging to be ridiculed. Hanging ominously above this little island of hair in the middle of his face is a nose that accounts for 3kg of his body weight, a magnificent protrusion adorned on either side by little gimlet eyes, so heavily hooded and with such well-formed pouches underneath that they look for all the world like the bellybuttons in two little beer guts.

Frankly, I wish he were our new prime minister or, at least, that Kevin Rudd looked a bit more like him.

It’s every cartoonist’s right to look forward eagerly to a change of government, especially after you’ve been drawing the same faces for 11 ½ years. I can draw John Howard and Peter Costello in the dark, and where, I ask you, is the challenge in that? For cartoonists, a change of government marks the dawn of a whole new phase in their life, right up there with being expelled from school and the birth of your first child.

So I feel it’s also within every cartoonist’s right to feel extremely disappointed, depressed or even downright angry at what Rudd and his cohorts have given us to work with in what has been an appalling anticlimax. I, for one, am already coming over all misty-eyed and nostalgic whenever I think of the treasure-trove of grotesqueries that was the Howard government: the PM’s caterpillar eyebrows and that wonderful bottom lip that looked as if some Ethiopian tribal beautician had inserted an ashtray into it; Costello’s endearing nose, so reminiscent of a chimpanzee’s bottom; Alexander Downer’s pneumatic face, so reminiscent of a slapped bottom; the ghostly pallor of Philip Ruddock, the dead man talking. The list goes on and on. All gone now, lost forever. And replaced with what? With a few notable exceptions, Rudd’s team is a case of the bland leading the bland.

Let’s start with the man himself.

As a cartoonist it was hard to share the sense of excitement or even fully appreciate the extent of the seismic shift in the Australian political landscape that accompanied the news of Rudd’s ascension to the leadership of the Labor Party. The significance of the events seemed strangely at odds with the appearance of the bloke who was causing them. Hardly surprising, then, that this emerging political powerhouse in short pants, who looked as if he had yet to have his first shave, reminded me irresistibly of Tintin, the world’s most unlikely comic-book superhero. Thintin, who made a habit of beating the baddies not with his fists but with his brains, was a perfect fit for Rudd. Fortunately for me, all that was required was the addition of a pair of glasses and he looked like Rudd’s identical twin.

It was only when the return on a $1 bet for the Coalition government to retain office hit $4 that I realised this was a conceit with a use-by date attached. If Rudd were to win office, he’d have to become his own man. Given the raw materials he placed at the cartoonist’s disposal, it was a prospect that filled me with horror. Here is a man with a perfectly spherical head; a little chin that moves independently of his face, much in the style of a ventriloquist’s doll; a slightly protruding bottom lip that amounts to a pale imitation of that of his predecessor; and no nose to speak of. In his final encounter in the ring against Howard, I had him remove his Tintin clothes, and since then I’ve watched in quiet amazement as he’s gradually morphed from Kevin07 into the more simplified Kevin 0, the only character I’ve drawn whose outline’s best done with a compass.

So thank heavens for Julia Gillard. While not in the same league as, say, Maggie Thatcher or Chappell, Gillard at least brings a few elements into play that a man can work with. No cartoonist worth his salt could be anything but delighted with her nose, which passes the 7cm mark before the exaggeration even begins, her flame red hair and her ear lobes, which, after a haircut, seem to dangle at the sides of her face like baubles on a Christmas tree.

Then, of course, we have Peter Garrett. Rudd, the cunning bugger, knew that as long as we had Garrett’s astonishing head to draw, we’d focus on him at every opportunity, and it has worked.

Standing as he does at 2.5m and as bald as a trout, the man is the lightning rod of the Labor Party, attracting all the attention while doing nothing, leaving the rest of them to do as they please.

If the retention of Garrett in his portfolio was Rudd’s gesture of kindness towards cartoonists, then surely the Opposition must have thought it was Be Kind to Cartoonists Week when it elected Brendan Nelson as leader and he chose his shadow cabinet.

Heads come in all shapes and sizes: footballs, shoeboxes, jam jars, pears, radishes, Volkswagens, you name it, but never until the advent of Nelson, had I seen a human head in the shape of a figure 8 before. Decorate that figure 8 with a tuft of gravity-defying hair that looks like a toilet brush and you have a truly magnificent subject to get your pencils – and your teeth – into. Ability or no ability, the Opposition Leader is an adornment to our parliament and I know I speak on behalf of all cartoonists when I wish him well and express the sincere desire to see him flout all expectations by going on to enjoy a long and successful career.

In her role as deputy, Julie Bishop – or Juri Geller, as I call her – is, in every respect, a formidable match-up for Gillard. She has the nose, the teeth, the cheekbones and the hairdo of a real leader. Her one great advantage over Gillard is her eyes. Not since Richard Alston departed our shores have we seen eyes such as these in Australia. I will never forget the night when Bishop appeared on ABC television’s Lateline to do her first interview after her election as deputy leader of the Liberal Party. So mesmerised was I by that relentless stare that it was only after the interview ended that I realised my dog had bolted out of sheer terror. When I finally found him he was crouched in a dark corner in the laundry, whimpering.

After I managed to calm him down and get him off to bed, I returned to the kitchen to do the washing up. That was when I discovered all my spoons and forks had mysteriously been bent out of shape.

While none of the other shadow ministers poses a direct threat to the cutlery, there is no shortage of cartooning potential among them. Horatio “Stud” Nelson has – wisely in my view – resisted what, for him, bust have been an almost overwhelming temptation to pepper his cabinet with females. One of the most eminently drawable politicians of recent times, Mark Latham, once opined that “Canberra is Hollywood for ugly people”, a truism that obviously made a deep impression on the young Stud at the time. When, finally, it came his turn to select a team, he remembered Latham’s words and stuck firmly to the old principle that leadership is not a beauty contest.

Well done, I say.

Rudd, on the other hand, was not listening to his colleague or simply chose to ignore him, an understandable position at the time, but a regrettable one nonetheless. Looking down his list of ministers – and correct me if I’m wrong - I count nine women, an example, if ever there was one, of positive discrimination getting out of control. Just as he put Garrett in an as a decoy for cartoonists, Rudd has cleverly scattered nine females like landmines all across his political landscape, just to make life as difficult for us as possible. Cartooning is a cruel business – I’m the first to admit that – but politics is an even crueller one and, although I may have a bit of a nasty streak, Rudd’s inclusion of so many women in his ministry proves he’s an out-and-out sadist.

As I said to Chappell, it’s handsome men and attractive women who make life hell for cartoonists, and the Rudd ministry is chock-a-block with them.

I mean, how, I ask you, can you turn a Maxine McKew, a Penny Wong or a Kate Ellis into a gorgon or a toad? Clearly, if the occasion demands, it will have to be done. But it’s not going to be easy. Furthermore, I can hear the howls of outrage now. Jenny Macklin, who, when she was Opposition spokeswoman for health, used to devote most of her time scouring the papers in search of cartoons with a whiff of sexism about them, will be the first cab off the rand, excoriating me for being a male chauvinist pig when all I’ll really be doing is my job.

As well as being cruel, cartooning is also a delicate occupation, fraught with danger. You can turn a male politician into anything you like, be it an alien creature with great big bug eyes and green skin covered with warts, a rodent complete with swishing tail and hideous whiskers or a baboon with a Technicolor bum and nobody raises an eyebrow. But turn a woman into any one of the above and see what happens. My advice is to take the phone off the hook, delete all incoming emails and seal up the hole in your letterbox until the whole thing blows over.

Latham’s Canberra is gradually transforming itself into Hollywood for slightly less glamorous people and as a cartoonist it’s a development that fills me with despair. I mean, what’s a cartoonist supposed to do with the likes of Stephen Smith? We’re in the business of lampooning faces, not haircuts. To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t been offered any acting roles so far, but if he is, I can only hope he takes them. The man does not look like a politician and he doesn’t belong in Canberra.

Mind you, as you go further down the list, things do start to improve. I had lips like Wane Swan’s once after coming off second best in a schoolyard brawl. The same thing must have happened to Swan and looking at him makes me realise how lucky I was that mine eventually returned to normal.

John Faulkner [left] shouldn’t present too much of a problem as long as he keeps those swimming goggles on; and Anthony Albanese, whose open mouth looks like a cemetery after an earthquake, should also prove valuable as long as he continues to resist calls to visit a dentist. Lindsay Tanner, too, is pleasingly rumpled and improving by the day.

Life in high office is rarely kind to people’s faces. The early mornings ad the healthy lifestyle eventually take their toll. That is, of course, unless you’re Howard, whose physical appearance improved steadily throughout his 33 years in parliament, only to degenerate suddenly the moment he left. There he was on the night he conceded defeat, still looking as sprightly as any 40-year-old. Two days later there was a photo on the front page of the newspaper of a 96-year-old geezer tottering about on a golf course who, if the caption was to be believed, was him.

But Howard was very much the exception that proves the rule. Most people who achieve their dream of being picked for the top team finish up like front-row forwards, getting their heads and bodies bashed about so regularly that, after a term or two in the job, they no longer resemble themselves but look disturbingly like their grandparents.

So perhaps there’s no need to worry. I’m sure they’ll all be satisfactorily repulsive after 11 ½ years in office.





WASN'T THAT THE MOST BRILLIANT THING YOU'VE EVER READ, EVER?!?!! XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD LOL

Well, I'm off to bed now. It's officially the 25th of December in 15 minutes here... however, my family and I don't celebrate Christmas until the 27th. If you're interested to know why, lemme know, and I'll tell you in my next post.

So! Merry Christmas to all of you for tomorrow!! I hope you have a wonderful day :D *huggles*

Peace,
Rotae