Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, was born at Boggy Creek near Caboolture, Queensland, on 21 March 1884, son of Thomas Joseph Case, a gardener, and Margaret Elizabeth, née Feenan. He left school at the age of 14 and began work in the machine room of the Brisbane Worker ; his duties including delivering Monte Scott’s cartoons to the engraver. When his talent for drawing was noticed he was given training at Brisbane Technical College. He then worked as a painter and decorator but continued to draw occasional cartoons for the Worker in 1906-7, e.g. the simple gag 'Not Long Enough./ Diner (sniffing): “Waiter, I’m sure this meat is not fresh.”/ Waiter: “Yes, sir; Can’t answer for that, sir. I’ve only been here a week!”’ 15 December 1906. He was soon contributing to other papers too: 'It is said that his work on the radical papers was responsible to a large extent for keeping the Labour Government in office’ (Moore ii, 126).

In 1908 the Worker expanded under editor H.E. Boote (see ADB 7), who held a competition for a cartoon to be produced from a blank outline of a human face. Case won it and was employed as an artist by the Worker , sharing the cartooning work with Monte Scott until February 1909 when he became the Worker’s sole official cartoonist, which he remained until c.1920. He drew a front page cartoon of 'May Day in Brisbane 1908’ (a series of vignettes), frontispiece 9 May 1908. Other works include: 'Wake Up!’ 18 July 1908, cover (labour asleep on island in sea labelled 'Cost of Living’ with boat labelled 'Socialism’ tethered nearby); 'Next Day’ 28 August 1908, cover ('The Worker’s artist has a vision of Australia suffering a recovery from the visit of the Yankee Fleet’); 'Justice’ (a half-blind lawyer dressed as woman) and 'The Real Anarchist’ (a policeman) 1909 (illus. Dunstan plates 9, p.42, and 10, p.21). 1911 cartoons include a bloated capitalist and workers during the sugar strike with 'Monopoly’ tramping over the workers (ill. Harris), and a capitalist being swept downstream for the Official Strike Bulletin . Others include 'Social Pyramid’, 'The Case for the Sugar Workers’ and a possible self-portrait.

His best-known Worker cartoon is 'Black Friday’ 1912, showing an allegorical Australia drawing back a curtain on the Queensland general strike scene (which lasted seven weeks, involved 43 unions and is believed to be the first simultaneous strike in the world) full of cops beating up men and women, i.e. this is Case’s famous 'Black Friday’ cartoon for the Strike Bulletin referring to an incident on 12 February where a women’s delegation to Parliament House led by Mrs Emma Miller (aged in her 70s, see Harris) were attacked by mounted police on returning to Trades Hall. Murphy notes that the allegorical Australia’s bosom is more fully covered in subsequent postcards and posters than in the original cartoon. Also his 1913 Worker cartoon of Brisbane under police rule [reprinted in the International Socialist ?]

Case exhibited with the QAS in 1910-12 (oil and watercolour scenes, a pastel and some pencil sketches) and in 1914, when he showed only cartoons. He made a national reputation as an anti-conscription cartoonist in 1916-17.

When the Daily Standard was established by the Labor Movement in December 1912, Case contributed to it too. From 1909 he worked mainly for the extremist I.W.W., according to Alan Dunstan (p.43), although the IWW’s headquarters were in Sussex Street, Sydney, and Case appears to have remained on the Brisbane Worker (not the Sydney Australian Worker ) at least until 1917. He contributed to Labor Call (Melb.) c.1908-09 and 1917-19, e.g. Yankee Boodle 17 September 1908, Design for a monument commemorative of the visit of the U.S. Fleet – a good anti-capitalist parody of the NY Statue of Liberty (ill. Senyard, 39). He was again on Labor Call in 1917-19 (not necessarily from Melbourne). 'Who threw that egg?’ (at Billy Hughes) was published in Australia’s Pioneer Co-operative Labor Journal on 27 December 1917 (NLA neg).

Case moved to Sydney Truth in October 1920 but died of cancer a few months later, at Bondi on 24 October 1921. Buried in the Anglican section of Bulimba cemetery, Brisbane, he was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Victoria, née Hancock, whom he had married in Brisbane on 1 January 1914, a son and a daughter. He signed his drawings 'J.T. Case’ or 'Jim Case’. Some work was reprinted by the Queensland Worker in the 1940s and 1950s and also used in Labor in Politics (Brisbane, 1972), et al.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007