Epidemic is no laughing matter
... would Tremain have made a similar crack after the Pike River disaster on the West Coast?
New Zealand has had a long and fairly lively history of newspaper cartooning, whether it was Dunedin-born David Low upsetting Adolf Hitler through his work in the London Evening Standard, or more recent and no less daring satirists such as Tom Scott and Sharon Murdoch annoying local politicians. The best cartoonists can turn a complex issue into a memorable visual joke or commentary while mocking and belittling the pettiness of authority.
But what happens when it is not the powerful who are mocked but the powerless? You often hear cartoonists and comedians talking about the need to ‘‘punch up’’ rather than ‘‘punch down’’. We laugh and applaud when authority is brought low by humour, but we feel decidedly uncomfortable when those who are already suffering or grieving are then humiliated or laughed at. It offends our sense of basic fairness. It looks mean and heartless.
Queenstown painter and cartoonist Garrick Tremain has been publishing cartoons in the Otago Daily Times for 31 years.
While even his critics agree that he is a skilled illustrator, he seems to have had a blind spot when it comes to Ma¯ ori issues. A notorious cartoon in 2000 depicted the Endeavour arriving in New Zealand while Ma¯ ori on the shore said they were pleased they finally had someone to blame.
Patronising and ill-informed views of Ma¯ ori were once common in New Zealand newspaper cartoons but they began to vanish during the 1960s and 1970s as so-called ‘‘Hori humour’’ started to go out of fashion and a new generation of cartoonists appeared. Some of Tremain’s cartoons looked like throwbacks to those older styles and attitudes.
It was also easier to hold outdated and even offensive attitudes in southern cities like Christchurch and Dunedin before the internet and social media could turn a provincial issue into a national or international one within minutes.
The management of the Otago Daily Times must have been taken aback by the national outpouring of anger that has led to Tremain’s cartoons being at least temporarily removed from the paper.
People who may never have seen a physical copy of the paper, and had no investment in its local and regional reporting, expressed strong opinions about its cartoons.
In the end, it was not a cartoon about Ma¯ ori that has caused the paper to ‘‘review’’ its publication of Tremain cartoons, but one with a more complicated racial dimension.
In the cartoon published on Tuesday, two white women are pictured leaving a travel agent. One says to the other that she asked about the least popular spots and was told they are ‘‘the ones people are picking up in Samoa’’.
At least 60 people have died during a measles epidemic in Samoa. Five children died overnight on the same day that the cartoon appeared and another 20 children are reported to be critically ill.
The epidemic is an easily preventable tragedy in a country that is both geographically and culturally close to us.
Tremain has defended the joke as ‘‘innocuous’’ but it is crass and insensitive to try to make light of the very deep grief experienced by so many Samoan families.
As more than one observer has asked, would Tremain have made a similar crack after the Pike River disaster killed half as many people on the West Coast? And if not, what does that say?
Irreverence and a sense of daring are important in cartooning, as they are in journalism generally, but they need to be balanced by empathy and understanding.