Bill Leak

Desmond Robert "Bill" Leak (9 January 1956 – 10 March 2017) was an Australian editorial cartoonist, caricaturist and portraitist.

Desmond Robert Leak was born in Adelaide on 9 January 1956, the second of three children of Doreen and Reg Leak in what was reportedly a "blue-collar Labor family".

He was brought up in Condobolin from his birth until 1967, when the family moved to Beacon Hill.

He attended Beacon Hill High School and Forest High School, forced to leave the former for the latter after drawing caricatures of his teachers.

Raised in Condobolin and Beacon Hill, Sydney, Leak attended Julian Ashton Art School during the 1970s.

Remembering what Beacon Hill was like in the early 1970s, Leak described the place as "intellectually barren, culturally hostile and isolated".

In the late 1970s, Leak departed Australia on an art pilgrimage to Europe.

After finishing high school, Leak trained for two years, 1974-1975 at the Julian Ashton Art School, dropping out before his studies were completed.

He also spent time working as a postman.

In 1978, he was particularly impressed by an exhibition of the paintings of Paul Cézanne at the Grand Palais in Paris.

While in Salzburg that same year, Leak met a woman named Astrid and they married soon after.

The couple lived together in Bavaria until 1982, when they relocated to Australia.

His cartoons were first published in 1983 in The Bulletin and after he drew for The Sydney Morning Herald until 1994, when he was recruited by News Limited to contribute to The Daily Telegraph-Mirror and later to The Australian.

As an artist and illustrator, Leak was acclaimed by journalist Peter FitzSimons as "colossally talented, driven, and passionate for his craft".

Leak began drawing cartoons professionally in 1983, first for The Bulletin and then for The Sydney Morning Herald.

They divorced in the early 1990s.

Leak entered paintings into the Archibald on several occasions, having won the People's Choice Award in 1994 for his portrait of Malcolm Turnbull and the Packing Room Prize twice, in 1997 and 2000 for his portraits of Tex Perkins and Sir Les Patterson respectively.

Leak resigned from The Sydney Morning Herald to take up a role at The Daily Telegraph-Mirror, a News Limited newspaper, in 1994.

He later moved to The Australian (also a News Limited newspaper).

Leak's novel Heart Cancer was published in 2005 and in 2008 ABC TV aired his six-part series Face Painting.

Leak's editorial cartoons for The Australian were at the centre of several controversies.

Works that received considerable media coverage include a 2006 cartoon drawn during the West Papuan refugee dispute, a series of cartoons in 2007 that featured Kevin Rudd as Tintin, a 2015 cartoon depicting starving Indian people attempting to eat solar panels, and two cartoons in 2016, one an illustration of a neglectful Aboriginal father and another that depicted same-sex marriage campaigners wearing rainbow-coloured Nazi uniforms.

In April 2006, Leak drew a cartoon captioned "No Offence Intended", depicting an Indonesian person resembling then president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, as a dog mounting a Papuan native.

The drawing was in retaliation to a cartoon in the Jakarta daily Rakyat Merdeka from the previous week, which had depicted the Australian prime minister and foreign minister as dingoes engaged in sexual intercourse, with the prime minister saying "I want Papua!! Alex! Try to make it happen!"

The foreign minister, Alexander Downer, told media that he felt Leak's cartoon was crude, offensive and potentially racist.

In 2007, a Belgian company that controlled the rights to the cartoon character Tintin, issued Leak a copyright complaint for portraying the then-leader of the opposition, Kevin Rudd, as Tintin (accompanied by Snowy).

The complaint was resolved when Leak agreed not to profit from sales of the cartoons.

A Leak cartoon published in The Australian in December 2015 depicted starving Indian villagers trying to eat solar panels delivered by the UN, a comment by Leak on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

The academic Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, told media that it was her view that the cartoon was racist.

Social media commentary, including by Tim Watts, agreed with Wise and condemned the cartoon.

The Australian Press Council dismissed a complaint about the cartoon, saying that "the cartoon is an example of drawing on exaggeration and absurdity to make its point" "by ridiculing [the UN's] decision to provide solar panels at the expense of more appropriate aid".

The Australian Press Council delivered a ruling on the work in November 2016 that it did not breach standards of practice.

In August 2016, on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children's Day, a Leak cartoon in The Australian depicted an Aboriginal policeman holding a teenage male and telling the youth's father that he needed to teach his son about personal responsibility.

The father, with a can of beer in hand, replies "Yeah, righto, What's his name then?"

Muriel Bamblett, head of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, as well as Roy Ah-See, chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, and Nigel Scullion, the minister for Indigenous affairs, all labeled the cartoon racist.

Western Australian Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan and academic Jeremy Sammut defended Leak's 2016 cartoon, saying it was an appropriate portrayal of some communities and families.

Leak said the cartoon was not racist, reflecting that if the characters he had drawn were white, he would not have been accused of racially stereotyping all white parents as bad parents.

A complaint by a woman who said she had been discriminated against as a result of the cartoon triggered an investigation into Leak and The Australian by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

The complaint was later withdrawn after the woman behind the complaint was subjected to alleged intimidation and harassment from Leak's employers at News Limited.

The investigation was thus terminated.