Ron Tandberg b. 1943

  • Artist (Cartoonist / Illustrator)
Prolific contemporary Melbourne newspaper cartoonist and poster artist. He created the much-publicised poster supporting the condom campaign in the fight against AIDS, with the slogan "Tell him if it's not on, it's not on." Has won several awards for his work.

cartoonist, was born and educated in Melbourne. He worked for a while as a teacher then turned professional after a strip was internationally syndicated in the 1960s. He drew the cover of Overland no.69 about Gough Whitlam in 1978. In 1988 he drew a much-publicised poster promoting the government campaign to use condoms as a preventative against AIDS with the slogan: 'Tell him if it’s not on, it’s not on”. For years public lavatory doors (e.g. ANU) were adorned with these small, framed posters showing his cheerful little man walking along with a condom over his head. He also drew cartoons for the 1991 'Quit’ campaign (originals ML PxD 672/37-39). His humanitarian (and/or left wing) sympathies have always been evident, although apparently not to the Savage Club, Melbourne, where the Secretary told JK in 1999 that Tandberg and Peter Nicholson had refused the offer of membership on the grounds of not wanting to belong to any club that had people like businessman and prominent Liberal John Elliott as members.

First published in the Age in 1972, Tandberg has been its regular cartoonist ever since, e.g. Vacancies Nuclear Plant , published 5 April 1979 (ill. Christine Dixon). In 1979 he was among the eleven cartoonists included in the newspaper’s Black and White 125th Anniversary Exhibition at the Age Gallery, 250 Spencer Street – comprising staff cartoons and photographs – along with Horner , Leunig , Nicholson, Petty , Spooner , Tanner et al (copy of review by Mary Eagle, Age 5 October 1979). He was briefly at News Ltd in the 1980s, but then returned to the Age . His small cartoons also appeared regularly in the news and letter pages of the Sydney Morning Herald from the 1990s (see 'Tandberg is back at the Herald’, SMH 23 November 1994, 3) – irregularly from the 1980s – until 15 September 2001, when the letters’ editor announced that after almost twenty ( sic ) years Tandberg’s little gags would no longer be appearing there. Instead, the single-column simple line cartoon was done by other artists, e.g. Shakespeare (but more in Tandberg’s style than Shakespeare’s).

A member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, Tandberg won a Stanley Award for best editorial/political cartoonist in 1986. By 1998 he had won at eleven Walkleys, nine for best cartoon and 2 Gold Walkleys – in 1979 and 1986. His fourth (1979) Walkely was for two identical pictures of a supercilious Fraser labelled 'The public image of Malcolm Fraser’ and 'the real Malcolm Fraser’, done for the Age (ill. Peter Cole-Adams, The Best of the Age 1979-80 , Nelson, 1980, 146). A copy of his Walkley Award winner, “Bill I’ve caught you with your pants down!”/ “It’s Bob”, published in the Age in February 1983 after the announcement of the Federal election by Fraser was immediately followed by a change of leadership from Haydon to Hawke, was donated to BFAG by the artist in 1983.

'Australia offends Pacific nations’, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 22 July 1997, and Aboriginal people in custody , published in the Age on 23 December 1996, were exhibited in the National Museum of Australia’s annual Old Parliament House exhibition Bringing the House Down: 12 Months of Australian Political Humour (Canberra, 1997), cats 58, 90. He had one cartoon, 'Dad’s army’, in Bringing the House Down 2001 .

Tandberg lives at Mount Macedon, Victoria.

Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007