When Megan Herbert got the call telling her she had been voted Australian political cartoonist of the year, she had the most vocationally appropriate response imaginable.
“I didn’t believe them. I thought it was a joke. Ha-ha. I said, ‘Do you want to do a recount?’ but they said, ‘There’s no mistake, and it was unanimous.’ I was like, ‘What? Wow’.”
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There’s no feigned humility in this. Herbert is relatively new to the game. Her first paid work didn’t appear until 2021, in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, where she is now published every second Monday.
And while cartooning is a passion, it is but one part of a dizzyingly broad employment palette.
“There’s no way you can support yourself on a cartoonist’s salary,” she says. “I’ve got about 10 different jobs that, when you tie them all together, equal a career and a sustainable income.”
Cartooning is a passion for Megan Herbert.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The main one is on Neighbours. “I started with them as my first job out of university in 2000, as the photocopy girl, and I’ve worked my way through every position, up to script producer, and now I’m a freelance scriptwriter.”
Nor is her work typical of the realm of political cartooning. Her style is very much in the vein of The New Yorker, a magazine to which she has submitted mounds of work without success, and into whose storied pages she still hopes to be admitted one day.
“I’m not doing this sort of classic Australian political cartoon where you do a funny drawing of the politician with a big nose,” she says. “That’s not really my style, and sometimes I get flak for that. The trolls take aim, they don’t find any of my cartoons funny.”
