I spoke to illustrator Jim Pavlidis just before the federal election. Pavlidis is lean and angular, and in his grey shirt and faded jeans he looks like a former member of shoegaze band.
Pavlidis’ illustration, Net Zero, Zero Net, for The Age, from October 8, 2021, won the Cartoon Quill award from the Melbourne Press Club. The illustration depicts former prime minister Scott Morrison swinging on a high trapeze, he reaches for a lump of coal swinging on the other trapeze but misses and finds himself in mid-air over a burning inferno. In the adjacent image the earth balances precariously on a safety net over the inferno. The Quills judges wrote that Pavlidis’ idea ‘captures the politics perfectly.’
“Morrison left the climate issue wander and had done nothing about it,” says Pavlidis.
Australia’s devastating Black Summer bushfires and the catastrophic floods were the chorus to Morrison’s electoral defeat.
The illustrator was never going to attack Scot Morrison’s religion.
“I refused to attack him on religion, my focus was on his politics. What if he was Jewish or Muslim, would we feel comfortable attacking him?” Pavlidis asks.
I suggest the Quill is an emblem of respect and recognition.
“That’s overstating it” he says, “it is a lovely thing, but there’s always lingering self-doubt.”
He has been lucky to have had editors who regardless of agreeing with him or not, allowed him the freedom to express his views.
Not a cartoonist an illustrator.
“Matt Golding [The Age], is the best at political cartoons. I do satire. Comedy is having the ability to make someone laugh, and that is a difficult thing.”
The illustrator has a substantial career outside the newspaper. There are people which hold a view “this is an artist, and the other is an illustrator,” he says.
But, he understands categorisation, curators he says, “know their business and categorise as a way of navigating the terrain.”
For Pavlidis, “an artist is one who lives the art.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you like them or not, there’s a phrase once about my hero, Frank Alba, ‘that his desire was to find the coolest spot on the pillow.’
“It’s difficult to find a cool spot, where someone has not been before” says Pavlidis.
His art also belongs to the journalistic world of observation and storytelling.
“I am not good at following briefs, I relay a story, the politics, and the issues.”
Pavlidis digs into the issues, and follows the detail, be it environment, politics, wars, culture – all the clashes.
He discusses issues with journalist colleagues before coming up with an illustration. He relays a story of how, Sean Kelly the columnist for the Saturday Paper – whose analyses he likes – once said to him, ‘I think you’ve done this piece before’.
“I could have stuck to my guns, but I respected process, so I pulled it and I did a new piece. Even though I could have stuck to the principle that it’s my image and I can do what I want.”
The wheelie bin as a comment on life
Pavlidis’ illustrations, outside the media reflect on his life, his family, his aged parents – his world.
They tell a story and create a mnemonic landscape of migration, ageing, and living in Australia.
“My latest obsession is wheelie bins, not as a fetish, but for what they represent in the suburbs we live in.”
He laughs and says that his parents “must have the cleanest wheelie bins in the world.”
“They’re spotless! It’s a rubbish bin dad, I often say, why are you cleaning it?'”
As a kid in the 1970s the “images of overflowing rubbish bins, were signs of social unrest and a fraying society.”
His father’s obsession with clean bins is witness to the trauma of war and migration. Wheelie bins are also markers of class; of poverty and privilege.
“You look at the wheelie bins, from the fancy suburbs, the outer suburbs, and even housing estates, and you can tell who lives in the house.”
Our parents’ generation and we, the second generation, also carry the wounds from the fratricide of the Greek Civil War (1945-1949).
Pavlidis’ extended family from Northern Greece is divided across political and ethnolinguistic lines born of that bloody affair. He is the bridge between them he does not let the darkness reign and continues to try and make the divisions disappear.
We reflect on bands from our youth, The Saints, Radio Birdman, The Sports and more. I ask if our generation is more tolerant of diverse ideas than our ‘woke’ kids’.
“I’m 58, I can’t speak for my kids, I can only talk of our generation.”
“We felt outsiders. We were the children of migrants. The racism and the Greek jokes were there, even though I was lucky to go to a school where Aussies and wogs mixed well.”
He stops short and says, “I don’t want to romanticise it, there was some toxicity, and soon after I left, the Greek and Italians at school began to drift and separate from the rest.”
I ask if that ethnic kid, the outsider, is still there in the centre of mainstream media. “Possibly, yeah when I consider it, I am sure he is still there and it surfaces at times.”
We walk down Swanston St. and like the ageing men that we are becoming, we talk of our ailments, our adult children, our love of home and how we often retreat into our parents’ culture.
