Playwright and cartoonist join the exit of our big, creative characters

It is the season, unhappily, for the loss of big characters from the arts, the media and from our lives.

Melbourne playwright, author, artist, actor, teacher and humourist, Barry Dickins, died on Monday, July 13.

Australian-born Pat Oliphant, for decades one of the world’s most influential cartoonists, died at his home in Santa Fe in the United States on the same day.

Dickins, aged 76, and Oliphant, 90, join much-loved actor Sam Neill, 78, and the crusading journalist and former senator, Derryn Hinch, 82, on the roll of remarkable lives struck out in the past week.

Born in Adelaide, Oliphant joined The News in Adelaide as a teenager and shifted to The Advertiser before moving to the United States in 1964, where the young man quickly gained a wide and admiring audience for his skewering of politicians and presidents.

In 1967, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, but protested that the judges had selected the cartoon for its subject matter – the Vietnam War – rather than the quality of the work.

He refused to be considered for the award again, but went on to become reportedly the world’s most syndicated cartoonist, with his daily offerings in the 1980s appearing in more than 500 publications in the US and around the world.

In 1990, The New York Times Magazine declared Oliphant “the most influential editorial cartoonist now working”.

Barry Dickins, born into a working-class family in Reservoir, never left his hometown, and wrote passionately and at length of the “Roy Boys” – the footy team he loved, Fitzroy.

He was a fixture in Melbourne’s literary and arts communities ever since he drifted into the “new wave” of Australian theatre that was nurtured in the late 1960s and 1970s at La Mama theatre and the Pram Factory, both in Carlton.

His first play, a translation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, was performed at La Mama in 1974. His first role as an actor was at the Pram Factory in 1978, in Barry Oakley’s The Ship’s Whistles. He wrote another 50 plays plus numerous essays, children’s books and opinion pieces, many of them for The Age and Sunday Age.

His play, Remember Ronald Ryan – dramatising the life and death of the last man hanged in Victoria – won the 1995 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

He taught English and creative writing for 41 years at Melbourne primary and secondary schools, and was a talented painter who made a habit of simply giving away his work to friends and admirers.

He had numerous roles in films.

His son, Louis, wrote this week of his father’s portrayal of “a manic, free-thinking postman” in Paul Cox’s beautiful and dreamy art house film, Man of Flowers (1983).

“His zest for life and his creativity shine through the screen and almost sum up who he was: an eccentric, theatrical and loving man, determined to light people up,” Louis Dickins wrote.

“He was a raconteur, a provocateur, a gentleman and a loving man.”

Dickins lived with depression and spent his last years in a care home, but Louis remembered the best times with his father were “bombing around town in his beat-up Corolla” and spending carefree days at the Carlton baths, “infuriating the lifeguards”.

He also infuriated the police and embarrassed The Sunday Age in 2015 after he wrote an eye-popping article about being strip-searched in Lygon Street, Carlton, after which he lodged a formal complaint to police.

A magistrate found him guilty of making a false report and said: “For reasons which I truly cannot fathom, Mr Dickins invented a set of facts, which were not true.”

Declaring, however, that Dickins was “an outstanding Australian citizen” of exemplary character, magistrate John O’Callaghan placed Dickins on a 12-month good behaviour bond without conviction.

Across the world, Oliphant retired to his home in Santa Fe in 2015, but couldn’t resist publishing two last cartoons when Donald Trump became US president the following year.

One, drawn in 2017, famously depicted Trump as a childish member of the Hitler Youth, asking his then chief adviser Steve Bannon what he thought of his outfit.

Australians like Oliphant and Dickins, and those adopted from New Zealand like Sam Neill and Derryn Hinch, always enjoyed puncturing the vanity of the mighty. Mightily.

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