Drawing on experience
Cartoonist Sharon Murdoch’s work has always had a social conscience at its heart. The Christchurch mosque attacks – a year ago today – changed the way she saw and drew the world around her,
Sharon Murdoch takes a moment to pause and think back a year. She has a sip of her cup of tea from a big mug and softly recalls how she approached work the day of, and the months following, the Christchurch mosque attacks.
On the morning of March 15, 2019, the major headlines were around the massive student climate strike and the assault on Green Party coleader James Shaw.
‘‘I was working on a cartoon about the climate strike and then we all just started hearing about what was happening in Christchurch. It was such a devastating and shocking event, and still is.’’
The Sunday-Star Times cartoonist thought about how could she begin to illustrate something so brutal, so enormous. How do you communicate any meaningful message in the wake of such an atrocity?
‘‘I came in on the Saturday and did the cartoon, which could only really be in relation to the shock of all that had happened. It could only really be a gentle cartoon, quite simple. I tried to show some sympathy for what had happened. That wasn’t really a time for anything else.’’
The cartoon published in the March 19 edition of the Sunday Star-Times had a label at the top saying ‘‘Let’s unravel it’’ and showed people removing layers of red wool from a sign that said ‘‘HATE’’ and using that wool to create something positive, a red heart.
‘‘I suppose it’s a pretty literal interpretation,’’ she says. She’s printed out the cartoon, along with others, and gently traces her fingers across the words.
‘‘I mean there’s hatred, there was the tangled and knotted look – and it was very difficult for a lot of us to understand where that hate would even come from. And then there’s the remaking of that, the untangling of that. But I don’t know how much untangling we’ve done as a country in the meantime.’’
Fifty-one people died at the mosque shootings and countless other lives changed forever, but what about the national psyche?
‘‘Maybe as a country, we’ve had to look at ourselves more closely, but there are others who haven’t looked at themselves very closely at all. They’ve just said, ‘Oh well, this was just an extremist act, it was a terrible crime’, but we haven’t really looked at what the underlying things are that percolated away in the surrounding society.’’
The attacks made Murdoch more determined to continue with themes that have helped define her career: fairness, solidarity and compassion.
‘‘Even though a lot of people see cartoons as negative and as takedowns, one of the nice things about them, if you use them the right way, is that they can also be done in solidarity with people.
‘‘It’s also important to bear witness to something that’s happened and to say that you’ve seen it and you recognise this injustice, or whatever has happened.
‘‘The love/hate cartoon – that was in solidarity, that’s a public statement. And a lot of the cartoons I would do are in the same vein. But that solidarity doesn’t just have to be with people, it can be with the environment, too.’’
Looking back over Murdoch’s past year of work those themes shine through, whether it’s covering climate change (locally and internationally) or issues such as gun control and arming police officers.
On gun use and control she saw an almost immediate shift and schism between people who immediately wanted tighter laws and those who thought the Government was moving too quickly.
‘‘There’s a lot of invested groups there, like the gun lobby in the aftermath. And, personally, I can’t see a reason why we need guns in New Zealand apart from people who use them for target shooting.’’
She remembers going to the Kilbirnie mosque in Wellington soon after the attacks in Christchurch and seeing police with guns. ‘‘That was shocking. I worked in South Africa years ago and you’d see guns on the streets during the delivery of cash to banks. To see it at a place of
‘‘That solidarity doesn’t just have to be with people, it can be with the environment, too.’’
worship was such a shift.’’
Murdoch believes one of her first cartoons after the shootings still resonates. It’s labelled ‘‘Pat Yourself Down’’.
It has six panels with various takes on the shooting, but the underlying message is simple.
‘‘We as people can be like something that’s armed as well, we can be dangerous as hell. We’re not equipped with guns, it can be our ideas and how we express them. Pat yourself down, check yourself.’’