cartoonist, began drawing cartoons for the Waterside Workers’ Federation as a lad. In the 1980s he mainly drew for the Australian Financial Review where he had started work as a copy boy. A cartoon of 1985 was included in Christine Dixon’s exhibition (not ill.). He also contributed cartoons to the Sydney Morning Herald , to Choice magazine, etc. Four originals for the Bulletin dated 12 November 1983 & undated (ML PXD 739) include caricatures of Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and Prince Charles & Diana. He was included with John Spooner in Joe Szabo’s The Finest International Political Cartoons of Our Time .
Knight was appointed political cartoonist on the Melbourne Herald and Herald Sun was still working there in 2007. He had cartoons in Kaz Cooke’s Beyond a Joke: The Anti-Bicentenary Cartoon Book (Penguin, 1988), pp. 63 ('The P.M. [Hawke] re-discovers the aboriginies [sic]’), 97 (death in custody), 109 (Hawke), 113 ('Aboriginal Art [hands]/ White man’s art [Maralinga Test site Aboriginal reserve – bodies]’) – some presumably first published in the Melbourne Herald Sun . He also drew a cartoon for the 1991 'Quit’ campaign (original ML PxD 672/15).
Three original cartoons published in the Herald Sun in 1996-97 were exhibited in the NMA/ Old Parliament House exhibition Bringing the House Down: 12 Months of Australian Political Humour (Canberra, 1997), cats 53 (on Pauline Hanson), 65 (on Senator Colston) and 81 ('Sojourner PM’, on the unemployed). He exhibited the following year and spoke on his work at the NMA Seminar on Australian Political Cartooning at Old Parliament House on 5 December 1998. He had two cartoons in the 2001 show and probably in the intervening ones.
Other publications in which Knight’s cartoons appeared include Christopher Sheil’s War on the Wharves: A cartoon history (Evatt Foundation & Pluto Press, Annandale NSW, 1998), an anthology of newspaper cartoons about the 1998 Wharfies’ strike. A witty cartoon, The announcement of Bob and Hazel’s Divorce , showing Bob weeping to the media 'This is a very sad moment for Hazel and I…’ while Hazel does a joyful handstand in the background, was reused in Ann Turner’s book of interviews, In Their Image: Contemporary Australian Cartoonists (NLA, 2000). Turner claimed in the NLA News (October 2000) that on the criteria she established for the book (circulation figures) Knight and Warren Brown of the Sydney Daily Telegraph were the most influential cartoonists in Australia. Both appear seven days a week. The Herald Sun sells over 560,000 copies on weekdays (making it Australia’s largest selling weekday paper), 520,000 copies on Saturdays and 530,000 on Sundays (figures Turner took from the Audit Bureau of Statistics c.1999).
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
