A man, a dog and a social conscience

A statue of Wal and Dog has already been cast and will no doubt soon find a permanent home around Gisborne way.

Nobody’s proposing a statue of their creator Murray Ball, if only because we can be pretty sure the very thought would appal him.

After Ball announced in 1994 that he would stop drawing Footrot Flats ,a mere 6000-odd strips into the series, he and wife Pam took a holiday in Europe and returned to a deluge of mail, some from people who sounded bereft and many from people who had something personal to say about what the series had meant to them.

He found it a bit scary. As if he was reading his own eulogies.

‘‘One of the good things about being dead,’’ he said at the time, ‘‘is you don’t have to live up to your obituaries’’.

Perhaps this is an unworthy question but, now that Ball has actually died, could we ask ourselves this?

Weren’t we every bit as sorry when we heard the news in 1998 that his dog Finn had died? Or even, before that, the real Horse?

For that matter, were we stirred-up, one way or another, when the cartoonist and one-time Junior All Black made the anguished call to withdraw Dog as the All Blacks’ mascot, in opposition to the 1981 Springbok tour?

Murray Ball cannot be defined by any single comic strip. Not even that one. Particularly since so much of his other work was more nakedly politically provocative.

Footrot Flats was sentimental, yes, but incisively so. The work of a sometimes disconcertingly honest man.

Which is part of the reason he stopped.

The New Zealand he was describing no longer meshed with what he saw going on around him. Farming, and the country, were changing in ways that troubled his sense of social justice.

It came down, he said, either to changing the strip and following the country, or stopping the strip.

Some would have wished he had pressed on and more resolutely politicised Footrot beyond the environmental themes that certainly shone through.

Instead he turned to other projects, like The Sisterhood and strips like All The King’s Comrades.

Maybe the integrity underpinning that call was essentially artistic.

He’d created characters that rang so true in themselves and in their context that they no longer particularly bent to his will.

Not, at least, without the feeling that he’d be mistreating them. He’d never want to do that. And now it looks like we’ll never know Dog’s name. This is good.

It’s an agreeable thought that a strip we feel we know so well, still retains a secret or two of its own.