painter, cartoonist, commercial artist, clerk, theatrical designer and producer, was born in Junee, NSW but moved to Melbourne as a young man. When WWI broke out, he enlisted and served at Gallipoli. After his return, he devoted much time and energy to working against war and imperialism. Studied at the Working Men’s College (RMIT) in the 1920s, then worked in various commercial art studios, finally becoming a tally clerk in a shipping office where he remained for the rest of his working life. The Depression led him to join the Communist Party.
Reproductions of anti-war images by Otto Dix and George Grosz had a deep and lasting effect on Maughan and inspired him to begin drawing. In 1931, with Noel Counihan, Judah Waten, Nettie Seeligson and Nutter Buzacott, he formed the Workers’ Art Club. He was allocated the first exhibition of the 'worker artists’, which had a catalogue by Guido Baracchi, a founding member of the Party. ( Portrait of a Man c.1931, pen and ink on paper, private collection, reproduced Merewether, depicts a working man in a cloth cap.) At the same time Maughan began to contribute cartoons and illustrations to labor publications like Stream , Proletariat and the first issue of the Workers’ Art Club magazine Masses (1931). In late 1932 he held another exhibition at the Club with Counihan and Buzacott but mostly did stage designs and produced agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) sketches and full-length plays. The first play performed, Ernst Toller’s Masses and Man , was condemned by sections of the party for its expressionist defeatism and pessimism, as was Maughan’s own artwork like Civilization 1931 (pen, indian ink and watercolour on paper, La Trobe Library: ill. Merewether in b/w), a great image of ant-like workers dwarfed by their factory.
The Workers’ Art Club was disbanded in 1935 and the New Theatre set up. There Maughan continued his stage work and wrote even more one-act plays. In 1937 he produced a scene from Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead at the Princess Theatre, part of a programme sponsored by the 'Movement Against War and Fascism’ with half the proceeds going to help Australian nurses serving with the Spanish Republican Army. The full play, staged at the Apollo Theatre by the New Theatre Company in 1938, had a poster and handbill designed by Maughan (poster with Hitler-skull reproduced in Merewether, 102). The plays he produced throughout the 1930s and 1940s included Storm Over St. Kilda (1939), which starred his wife, Leila. He also did the stage design for Vic Arnold’s production of Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty . Jack and Leila Maughan continued to work in theatre for the rest of their lives, with Jack retaining his daytime job in the shipping office. He also continued cartooning, at least for some years, e.g. for the Melbourne Guardian 1943.
