“This bloke must have a jaundiced sort ’o mind,
If how he draws is how he sees mankind,
Perhaps his eyesight is a trifle squiffy—
or else – oh hang it all – it’s ’cos it’s Frithy.”
Anon. 1944.
For more than sixty years John Frith entertained Australians with his powerful and insightful cartoons. Frith stripped back the layers of national and international events, exposing their complexities in a simple and humorous way. Frith was also a skilled caricaturist, and drew upon his large repertoire of characters to present a sharp and revealing interpretation of Australian politics and life.
John Frith was born in London in 1906 and discovered his talent for caricature at boarding school. In exchange for extra rations of jam and bread he would sell drawings of schoolmasters to his peers—a practice which was frequently rewarded with the strap! It was not until 1929 that Frith was to receive monetary payment for his art work.
In that year he arrived in Sydney and was fortunate to obtain a job with The Bulletin despite the massive unemployment throughout the country during the Depression.
“Many cartoonists create images synonymous with their signatures…I created a bird, unidentified by the experts. Its birth happened the night a member of the SMH staff complained that I had left too much white space in the cartoon. To satisfy this unartistic type I quickly pencilled a scraggy looking bird in flight…the bird remained and over the next twenty years became my hallmark.”
‘The bird’, as seen in the watermark on the pages of this website, appeared in Frith’s cartoons from 1955 onwards.
For the next 15 years Frith worked with the greats of the Australian cartooning fraternity, such as Norman Lindsay and Ted Scorfield. Having established his reputation, Frith went on to become the first daily cartoonist for The Sydney Morning Herald. He concluded his newspaper career with Melbourne’s Herald, retiring in 1969. Into his eighties and with failing eyesight, Frith continued to caricature many of the significant personalities of the 1970s and 1980s. John Frith died in Melbourne on 21 September 2000.
