Editorial (or political) cartoons occupy an in-between space in the news media landscape, understood by practitioners and located in scholarship as works of comic art and vital journalistic outputs. Cartoons span industry and professional boundaries in their locations, conditions and technologies of production; formats and methods of dissemination and reception; and potential social, cultural and political impacts. This article considers the evolving location of editorial cartoons and cartoonists in relation to the role and mission of journalism, and their connection to newsroom cultures and news agendas. The Australian Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism, which have featured a dedicated cartoon category since 1958, are used as a case study. Industry awards like The Walkleys celebrate Australian traditions of comic art and satire, and promote particular constructions of professional journalism's value for and contribution to Australian society. Through consideration of the markers of "excellence" privileged by these awards - and the ways they are discussed, reported and celebrated in media coverage - this article argues that Australian editorial cartoons operate as "boundary objects".

Abstract Property and propriety in literary texts were vexed issues in the Restoration, both legally (as with the Licensing Act of 1662) and in the contested cultural politics of print and scribal publication. Was writing, especially in its most prestigious form as poetry, primarily an appurtenance of a courtier’s prestige? Or was it a source of profit to writers and booksellers in a growing national market? In the late seventeenth century, the obvious answer was that it was both, in ways well exemplified by the different centres of gravity in the works of the rival writers of the era, including Butler, Marvell, Rochester, Shadwell, and Dryden. This chapter first surveys practices of literary reuse and abuse in the period, before a new reading of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe brings the tensions between parody and plagiarism in the small literary world of the Restoration into focus. The battles were intensely personal as well as highly significant for the development of print culture.

Darkness and light - the binary opposition most deeply embedded in the Enlightenment - also shaped the 2020 David Nichol Smith Seminar in versity of Adelaide. Conceived as a face- to- face conference to be held on Kaurna land, never ceded by the original inhabitants to the colonizing Europeans bringing the supposed "blessings of civilization," it was forced online by COVID, into the world of universal connection enabled by fiberoptic energy and light. This meant that a much wider range of scholars could get, virtually, to Adelaide than would normally have been the case, but they were conferring in the dark shadows of colonialist expropriation. The conference theme of Dark Enlightenments spoke directly to the tension between the universal and the particular that shaped the event. This was certainly fortuitous and we are still trying to work out the complexity of the attendant ironies.

This volume explores the concept of humour and its relationship with human behaviour. The interdisciplinary essays in this book cover a wide range of time, from the sixteenth century to the present day. They delve into various cultural contexts, challenging social norms and prompting readers to reflect on the ethical implications of humour. The collection highlights the varied metaphors of heroes and monsters in each case study, which are crucial to understanding the moral spectrum of human existence. These metaphors represent aspirational ideals and darker aspects of what it means to be human. The book encourages readers to critically analyse the complexity of humorous objects and social practices in contexts like digital culture, mythical folklore, entertainment technology, or politics, recognising their interconnectedness with societal issues and emphasising that different settings might call for different interpretations.

Stan Cross’s “For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!” (Smith’s Weekly, 1933) is the symbol and bellwether of the Australian cartooning tradition. It is often lionised as a national treasure, but its archival history has been perilous in a way that shows a lack of care amounting almost to national negligence. The original of this most famous cartoon of the Depression era was lost for 80 years before being rediscovered in 2014, and this article notes for the first time that Trove Newspapers lacks a record of its initial publication. We use this troubled material history of one significant cartoon to raise a range of issues about the quality and purpose of collecting and presenting Australian cartoons as a resource for Australian studies in fields ranging from media and humour studies to cultural and political history.

On April 9, 2017, Australian satirist John Clarke died suddenly while bush-walking and bird-watching in the Grampians, some hills in Western Victoria. He might not have minded dying while he was do...

The dream of political satire - to fearlessly speak truth to power - is not matched by its actual effects. This study explores the role of satirical communication in licensing public expression of harsh emotions defined in neuroscience as the CAD (contempt, anger, disgust) triad. The mobilisation of these emotions is a fundamental distinction between satirical and comic laughter. Phiddian pursues this argument particularly through an account of Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries. They played a crucial role in the early eighteenth century to make space in the public sphere for intemperate dissent, an essential condition of free political expression.

This article considers the role of reporting processes in the assessment of arts and culture and argues that a determination of an organisation’s or event’s value is the result of a chain of administrative and political interactions. The ‘conferral of value’ on a particular cultural activity may be seen as the outcome of a multi-stakeholder dialogue involving governments, funding agencies, cultural organisations and individual artists. The article emerges from a mixed-methods research project, Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture, underway at Flinders University. The project works with three industry partners: the State Library of South Australia, the State Theatre Company of South Australia and the Adelaide Festival. A sketch of the history of the problem of culture’s value is given, together with the historical background of the arts in South Australia. The article concludes with a brief overview of two innovative reporting frameworks – sustainability reporting (GRI) and Integrated Reporting (IR) – and the potential gains for the cultural sector in the reporting reforms now happening in South Australia across all public bodies at a state government level.

Clarke’s poetic output was never the main game, but he was persistent in developing the (entirely self-authored) Complete Book of Australian Verse (39 poems; Clarke, 1989 Clarke, J. 1989. The Complete Book of Australian Verse. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. [Google Scholar]) through two intermediate versions culminating in the 2012 edition of Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse (68 poems). This article addresses the central characteristics of Clarke’s art through the voice, timing and rhythm of these parodic poems. They illustrate the sort of parody discussed in ‘Are parody and deconstruction secretly the same thing?’ (Phiddian, 1997 Phiddian, R. 1997. “Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?” New Literary History 28 (4):673–696. doi: 10.1353/nlh.1997.0056.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] and subsequent work). Clarke’s own favoured word for his writing practice, tinkering, suits such carefully wrought pieces well, and fits with more expansive notions of parody as critical and creative refunctioning of models rather than as narrow lampoons. Through intimate imitation and distortion, they display a guarded, sometimes hostile, affection and a jagged nostalgia both for their poetic vehicles and for the Australian subject matter. Clarke always inhabits the words of others in his Australian work, speaking via parodic deflection. This contrasts with the Daggy directness of his New Zealand work. Was he only ever a visitor in Oz? Was the parodic reserve a necessary carapace against the sort of fame that he fled in the 1970s? This article reads the poems as a window onto the distinctive rhythms of Clarke’s writing and his complexly ironic relationships with both his homeland and his adopted nation. His resistance of 'the voice direct' made him a wry and knowledgeable visitor and offers an abiding challenge to Australianness.

The International Journal of Comic Art is an independent publication, which remains print-only in nature. The journal's online presence is confined to the blog: http://ijoca.blogspot.com/.