cartoonist and illustrator, was born in Hobart in December 1928, educated at St Virgil’s College and later obtained a Diploma in Commercial Art from Hobart Technical College. After several years in the Tasmanian Public Service he was employed on the Hobart Mercury as a press artist in 1951. He remained there for 13 years until moving to the Melbourne Herald-Sun as political cartoonist in 1964, where he drew an average of three cartoons a day. He had to produce a daily publishable one for it as well as provide others for the Sun News-Pictorial and the Sporting Globe (1976: ill. Lindesay 1979, 320). A cartoon of the early 1970s dealing with the Six-Day War, Three Wiser Men, was used by the London Times. By 1978 he had written and illustrated a children’s book, Jamie The Jumbo Jet, and illustrated three others, including Osmar White’s The Super-Roo of Mungalongaloo (Puffin Books, Harmondsworth, 1978, 1st pub. Wren Publishing 1973), which parodies the intrepid explorer myth. Other books he illustrated include The Footballer Who Laughed (Hutchison Aust, pre-1982).
Hook writes with his right hand and draws with his left. He signs his cartoons 'Jeff’ and most include a small hook (initially suggested by Bill Green i.e. 'WEG’). He and journalist Keith Dunstan often worked together overseas and in Australia on features for the Sun in the 1960s-70s. Last of the Boat People, published in the Sunday Herald Sun on 29 June 1997, and A Wik is a long time in politics! (27 April 1997) were exhibited in Bringing the House Down: 12 Months of Australian Political Humour (Canberra: National Museum of Australia/ Old Parliament House exhibition, 1997), cats 60, 86. He also had cartoons in Bringing the House Down 2001 (and presumably in the intervening ones): NMA website.
He retired in 1993 and is now a freelance cartoonist and illustrator. His work appears regularly in the Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun. Married to Pauline, they have five children. They live in the Melbourne suburb of Burwood.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
