And while that’s an impression that anyone would be happy to leave, I think Murray Ball’s legacy is much more than that.
Like Barry Crump before him, whose easy accessible writing style painted pictures of characters we could all recognize, in like vein Murray Ball helped further reveal us to ourselves through the characters he drew in his cartoons.
Filled with images we could identify from our own experiences – the stoic, the grumpy, the conservative, the lazy, the sexy, the authoritarian, the philosophical, etc, Footrot Flats reflected New Zealand in microcosm through lives lived in on and around a small rundown farm.
Born in the small Manawatu farming town of Feilding – which by extraordinary coincidence is where cartoonists Tom Scott, Garrick Tremain, David Henshaw and I also hail from – Ball spent his formative years in Australia and South Africa.
After returning to NZ, Ball, who by then had become a very good rugby player, was selected as an All Black triallist, following in the footsteps of his father who played for the All Blacks between 1931 and 1936.
After working in the 1960s on Wellington’s Dominion and Palmerston North’s The Manawatu Standard, Ball moved to Scotland, there establishing himself as a freelance cartoonist. And it was there that he developed his first important cartoon character – Stanley, the Palaeolithic Hero, a strip about a caveman who wore glasses, which was to become the longest-running cartoon strip ever published in Punch.
Bringing his family back to NZ in the 1970s, Ball continued to produce his by-then internationally syndicated Stanley strip. But hankering after a local vehicle for expressing his thoughts on life, in 1975 he created Footrot Flats and we were all changed.
Syndicated since then in newspapers worldwide, Footrot Flats has been published in at least 40 books, has inspired a stage musical and a theme park and been the catalyst for the production of NZ’s first feature-length animated film.
From the days when we cringed at the sound of our own voices on radio, and winced at the site of ourselves acting on television, NZers are now much more at ease with such things thanks, at least in part, to Murray Ball for helping us to see ourselves as we are.
Vale Murray Ball;
1939 – 2017.
• Malcolm Evans is the creator of the Edna cartoon, which appears in each issue of Rural News.
