Well hello Mr Tassie!

Through many decades Tasmania has helped the development of Australia as a whole, yet it is also a fact that through those years there has, at times, been a non-recognition factor of this small island state by the larger mainland. In short, being left off the Australian map, an irritating geographical lapse for Tasmanians.

But back in the 1920s there was a delightful local cartoon showing Tassie as a proud symbol using our map – a smiling, confident young Mr Tasmania gesturing proudly as if to say to Australia at large “look at what we’ve got here!”. He put Tasmania on the map.

It appeared as an advertisement of our well-being in the 1926 Christmas edition of the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail. The imaginative sketch utilising the map was from the pen of Alex Gurney, then a promising young cartoonist who was to go on to become one the country’s greatest and best-loved cartoonists as the creator of popular newspaper comic strip soldier characters Bluey and Curley.

They enjoyed a long and widespread popularity syndicated to newspapers throughout Australia, New Zealand and Canada – Bluey a First World War veteran who enlisted for the Second World War and Curley a new recruit to the AIF. The comic strip also had a long life after the war when Bluey and Curley were in “civvy street”.

Alex Gurney is remembered in Alison Alexander’s recently published book Beneath the Mountain, an extensive work on the life and times of South Hobart. Living in South Hobart, Alex attended what was the Macquarie Street State School and is shown in the book with his mother (usually known as Birdie) in a photo looking a very dapper lad aged 13. He enjoyed drawing at school and classmates were eager for him to sketch them. He realised art could pay and for drawing a school chum’s head on the body of a dashing cowboy he extracted payment in marbles.

(Born in England in 1902, Alexander George Gurney came to Hobart when he was just a few months old. His father had been a navy steward and was lost at sea. His mother married again in Hobart, to a policeman, James Hursey, a widower).

It was as a 13-year-old that Alex left school and had an apprenticeship with the HEC with the aim of becoming an electrical engineer. But an art career beckoned and it was from studying part-time in night classes at the Hobart Technical College under the expert tuition of Lucien Dechaineux that he moved on to his cartoonist’s path.

While the young Mr Tassie was a notable early achievement, it was in the same 1926 year for the Tasmanian Mail that he produced caricatures of eminent Tasmanians; it became a book, the first of its kind produced here.

Although Bluey and Curley (debuted in 1939) gained him a great following on a bigger stage, he also created other notable characters, such as Stiffy and Mo, the Daggs, Fred the Football Fan, and Ben Bowyang. Alex was also an official war artist in New Guinea.

His mainland success was in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, but he was also hit by ill-luck with several papers closing during the Depression years. He became leader-page cartoonist with the Herald in Melbourne from 1933 and Bluey and Curley continued until Alex’s sudden death there in December, 1955.

Footnote: South Hobart today is home to another leading Australian cartoonist, Jon Kudelka, and several of his cartoons with particular reference to Mt Wellington feature in Alison Alexander’s book.