cartoonist and painter, was born in New York and grew up in Mexico and Australia. She says she started doodling at the age of four; she also trained at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College in 1974-76. She published her first book of cartoons, My Sunday, when aged twenty. She held several exhibitions of her drawings in Sydney, where she contributed to Nation Review, Cleo, the National Times, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald etc. In 1983 she illustrated Oz shrink Lit: Australia's classic literature cut down to size, edited by Michele Field (Penguin, 1984) and The Penguin Victoria Roberts calendar, 1984: Leap year with Nona in which our heroine leaps through 366 days, mostly with aplomb (Penguin 1983).
By 1985 Roberts had published The Book of Meaningful Relationships (Penguin Australia, 1984) – a general collection of her drawings and cartoons – and My Day (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), cartoon biographies of 50 famous people including Ronald Reagan, Princess Di, Beatrix Potter and Sigmund Freud. She had also illustrated two calendars, Phillip Adams’s Uncensored Adams (Melbourne: Nelson, 1981), Robyn Archer’s Mrs Bottle Burps (Melbourne, Nelson, 1983), Nicholas Enright’s The Maitland and Morpeth String Quartet (David Ell Press, 1980), Town Tales: poems by Tony Lintermans (Melbourne: OUP, 1981: ABC videorecording 1990), and Nancy Keesing’s Lily on the Dustbin (Penguin, 1982) and Just Look Out the Window (Penguin, 1985) on children’s rhymes. Her drawing 'Waltzing Matilda’ from the last was included in the 1999 SH Ervin art exhibition Australian Artists in Black and White.
Roberts also drew for film and TV. She designed the poster, printed by Art Unit, for 'Characters II: Women comics from across Australia’, sponsored by the Australia Council (Theatre Board), produced by the GAP (Larry Buttrose, Judy Barnsley and Mandy Salomon) and staged at the Wharf Theatre, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay in 1985, compered by Wendy Salomon and Julie McCrossin in which, wearing a Victorian nightgown, she performed 'a strange piece about telephones and Catholicism’ on stage in the 3-5 January session compered by Salomon, and also including Wendy Harmer, 'Sax au Violins’, Gretel Killeen and Melanie Salomon. Other performers were Sue Ingleton, Maggie Lynch, Angela Moore, Jan Cornall, Lana Caruso (Harmer, 147, and program).
In 1986 she illustrated A Life Album (ABC Books) with text by Elizabeth Butel and contributed to the calendar: Australia, I love it! The Penguin 1986 calendar/ our style and strange habits through the year as drawn by Petty, Leunig, Roberts … [et al.] (Ringwood Vic: Penguin Books Australia, 1986). In 1988 her comic bicentennial history, Australia Felix, was published in London by Chatto & Windus.
Other Australian cartoons include: 'Mrs Cristo [sic] wraps up her husband’, National Times 23-29 November 1980 (ill. Richardson 114); Gearing Up For The Bicentennial (two women on couch): '“I thought I’d go as Caroline Chisholm”/ “I think I’ll just wear my Jenny Kee sweater with the koalas”’, Matilda June 1985 (ill. Christine Dixon).
Roberts returned to New York in the late 1980s where she contributed to the New Yorker, Cleo et al. She revisited Sydney as guest speaker for the 1990 Stanley Awards (compere Jane Singleton) in “ladies’ year”, when two women – Suzanne White and Donna Short – won Stanleys for the first time. Paul Keating presented them (see Lindesay 1994, 58). In 1999, 67 of her original New Yorker cartoons were at www.cartoonbank.com (run by the New Yorker magazine), e.g. 7 May 1993, “If I ever make a phone call from a bus, do something about me”, on sale for $1,000 in March 1999. 327 of her cartoons were illustrated on the site in August 2001 (see page in file including middle-aged suburban couple in bed with wife saying, 'I dreamed Lucien Freud was coming to paint us’). Since being in the US she has published Cattitudes (hardcover, advertised Barnes and Noble 1997, $US15.00 RRP) and exhibited her work, now mostly colourful watercolour, collage and line combinations, in art galleries.
In August 2001, while still in New York working chiefly for the New Yorker, Roberts was employed to provide cartoons for the 'new look’ Weekend Australian Magazine on a regular rotating basis, initially to appear two weeks out of three with previous weekly staff artist Judy Dunn and a new casual employee Fiona Katauskas (who replaced Judy Horacek who had provided regular cartoons in the late 1990s). Roberts’s first cartoon, dated 2001 and published in colour on 11-12 August, 60, showed her bespectacled, red-haired, plump, middle-aged wife saying to her balding, newspaper-reading husband, “I need a hug, but straight sex will do”. The same gag was apparently published in the New Yorker 3 years earlier. By 2002 Roberts was appearing almost weekly in colour on the horoscope page of the Weekend Australian Magazine.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
