### Michael and Clive

  Two Australians, Clive Robertson and Michael Leunig died recently.
  I enjoyed both of their senses of humour. 
  
  Michael Leunig was a cartoonist and a philosopher. While there are many
  cartoonists who are clever and can find an interesting angle on a situation,
  Michael seemed to have a perspective that was almost always unexpected. He was
  always anti-war and during periods that Australia would participate in the
  wars invented by the United States of America, Leunig's cartoons could become
  dark and almost depressive. He worked for one newspaper, The Age, for
  decades, but when he died, I searched for tributes and articles about him in
  that newspaper but could find very little. Probably the first cartoon
  of Leunig's that I saw was one were a man is playing the guitar or 
  ukulele to his son in a very dirty and ugly car scrap-yard. The son says
  to his father "Gee dad, you're fantastic!". 
  
  Once, when I was traveling in rural New South Wales, I found a battered copy
  of one of his books in a second-hand bookshop in Tamworth and it had a
  foreword by Helen Garner. I can still remember the tone of that foreword. It
  had phrases like "His cartoons cut from the newspaper and stuck to our
  fridges, slowly turning yellow, were an important backdrop to our lives"
  (Obviously Helen Garner expressed it better than that). 

  Clive Robertson was a radio journalist who started his career in small
  country towns, where he said that he used to ride a bicycle 30 kilometers to
  work everyday. Then he had a series of radio programs on different stations
  in Australia. At one point he was appointed to read the late night news on
  one of the commercial television stations (it seemed a very odd choice by the
  station executives). I used to sit with my brothers and watch this because it
  was so unusual. He would intersperse the news with asides, sighs and cynical
  comments.  Before one commercial break he said "And shortly we will be back
  with more of the death and destruction which is the nightly news".
  
  I think both of these men were important to me because they displayed a
  different sort of masculinity, they weren't tough sportsmen or handsome movie
  stars; they were just creative men who were able to speak honestly about how
  they felt.

  In a low-key sort of way, both of these men were an important part
  of my culture. "Well done" to you both.