Design and Art Australia Online

author and illustrator, was born at Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. He left school at thirteen and worked as a seaman, fruit packer, grocer and cartoonist. He joined the Communist Party in 1939 and later was a member of the Realist Writers Group. He joined the AIF in 1942 and during WWII was chiefly an artist – not a journalist. He produced Troppo Tribune , a camp newspaper in the Northern Territory, then did cartoons for Salt . This weekly magazine of the Australian Army Education Service was produced and published in Melbourne from 29 September 1941 to 22 April 1946 by journalists in uniform and distributed free to all ranks of the services in Australia, including the home front, army and navy. Amateur contributions were used for cartoons and pars. In 1944 it was increased from 48 to 64 pages. Other artists who worked on it included Ambrose Dyson junior, nephew of Will Dyson , who joined the staff in 1944, Colonel J. Hanna , Littlewood and Vane Lindesay (see The way we were ).

Hardy drew a portrait sketch of the Gurindji activist Sandy Moray (undated but presumably during WWII: reproduced in Minoru Hokari’s PhD thesis on the Gurindji 2001, p.134). After the war he became a journalist in Melbourne and appears to have confined himself to writing. He is known for his novel Power without Glory whose publication in 1950 let to him being prosecuted for criminal libel. He was acquitted – after a nine months’ notorious trial.

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Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007