“You’re All A Pack Of Arseholes”: A Mildly Ranty Interview With Cartoonist First Dog On The Moon

You’ve probably never heard of Australian cartoonist Andrew Marlton, at least not by his real name, but you’ve almost certainly come to recognise his work satirising the relentless schoolyard slapfight that is Australian politics under his pseudonym, First Dog on the Moon. For thousands of people constantly bamboozled and infuriated by the everyday absurdities and cruelties of Australian political life, viewing events through the surreal and deceptively biting lens of his cartoon dogs, cats, varied native marsupials, pieces of fruit and creatively reimagined political figures has become a much-loved source of catharsis and, ironically, sense.

Marlton’s reputation as one of Australia’s funniest, strangest and most eloquent political cartoonists was established during his long in-house stint at Crikey; his works became personal favourites of politicians like Julia Gillard and Tony Windsor. Certain characters became cult icons among devotees, inspiring framed portraits and merchandise — Kevin Rudd’s ruthless, foul mouthed, Malcolm Tucker-esque cat Jasper; Tony Abbott as an anthropomorphised penis smothered by a pair of Speedos, and later as a man with a bucket on his head; the ABC’s official Interpretive Dance Bandicoot.

When he left Crikey in 2014 to take up a post at Guardian Australia (as well as a weekly morning spot on the ABC’s Radio National since 2013), his works suddenly found a far larger audience. It was a move that dovetailed well with that boon to satirists and political piss-takers everywhere, the Abbott government — the demise of which earlier this week has led to some pretty rapid rewriting of his upcoming live shows in Sydney and Canberra.

But as he tells Junkee, Abbott’s downfall is more of a blessing for the business of satire than people might first think.

“Everyone’s exhausted by the Tony government. They were so unutterably awful, and went so far beyond satire themselves, that it never changed. It made it very hard to do the job sometimes, because they were kind of beyond it,” Marlton says.

“If two years ago you had come to someone and said ‘I’m going to write a book about the first two years of this government, here’s what they’re going to do’, they wouldn’t only not publish it, they’d probably throw you in the sea or something. It’d be unbelievable.”

While the prospect of not having to exhaustively chronicle the myriad fuck-ups of Tony Abbott is something he welcomes — “I got sick of drawing Tony, so I just put a bucket on his head” — Marlton doesn’t think a Turnbull Prime Ministership is going to see the day-to-day idiocy and nastiness of government that informs much of his work dry up. “We all think we know what it’s going to look like. But we all thought what Tony Abbott was going to look like — we thought he was going to be terrible, but we had no idea. Interesting times, but not in a good way,” he says.

If there’s proof of that anywhere, it’s in his coverage of the Labor Party and Bill Shorten — or, as the Opposition Leader’s routinely mischristened in First Dog cartoons, “Burp Snooten,” “Bus Flirting” or “Tent Bumflaps,” among others.

“The Labor Party are terrible too, but they’re terrible in a very different way,” Marlton says. “I have to be completely bipartisan, but that can be a struggle.”

Being paid to essentially rant about the things that make him cross is something Marlton regards as an enormous stroke of luck, especially because he can go and draw a cartoon about cats or cassowaries whenever he needs a breather from what he calls “the daily terribleness of politics.”

Among his favourite non-politician characters at the moment are Ian the Climate Denialist Potato, who works out of the Environment Minister’s office “because he’s secretly in love with Greg Hunt,” and Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin, who’s been pretty busy fomenting the coming revolution on the streets of Melbourne lately.

But some of his most well-known and harrowing works have been inspired by that most fraught and anguished of all political topics: how Australia treats asylum seekers. His Walkley-award winning cartoon ‘Drowning’ and ‘Let Them All Come’, which was published shortly after a boatload of asylum seekers capsized off the coast of Java in 2011, are cases in point.

“It’s unnecessary cruelty. These are the things that make me cross, so I want to go after them. I want to talk about them. Right now, as you and I speak, there could be sexual abuse of a child taking place on Nauru, and if a health-care professional decided they wanted to report that they could go to jail. The ALP voted for that as well,” Marlton says.

“I’m very much of the thinking that ‘you’re all a pack of arseholes’, and these are the stories that need to be told. I just draw stupid pictures — I can be as much of an activist as I like, but they’re still just cartoons — but if I can draw a cartoon about something as terrible as that, and then because of the cartoon people will read about it, then so be it. It’s more of an indictment on Australia, but who cares?”

Whatever new outrages and stupidities await during the tenure of Malcolm Turnbull, a “smug and glossy merchant banker,” a First Dog cartoon of the Prime Minister with Madame Slocombe’s hair — and a savagely honest, wonderfully off-kilter take on the day’s events — will be waiting.

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First Dog on the Moon is appearing in Sydney on Friday and Saturday September 18/19 at Giant Dwarf, and in Canberra on Thursday, November 12 at the National Library of Australia. Details and tickets here. Listen to him on Radio National here, see his work at the Guardian here, and buy his excellent tea-towels here.