Shan Jayaweera’s John Howard has been pressing the flesh in Melbourne. I love this, especially where he describes himself as the Mick Jagger of Australian politics! Jemila McEwan made the puppet.
Previously:
john howard
Search for a Scapegoat
I’ve written previously about Shan Jayaweera’s John Howard puppetry satires. Now with an election looming later in the year, ‘Australian Prime Minister John Howard needs to find something
new to blame and scare the voters into voting for him’. Follow his efforts in a welcome new series, John Howard – Search for a Scapegoat:
- Episode 1: Howard looks at former grand Mufti Sheik Taj el din al Hilali.
- Episode 2: John Howard goes into the music world to find two potential scapegoats to help him win the next election. There is also an advertisement for the latest Liberal Party
Reception centre.
Once upon a Coffee Cup
You might think I’m on a real anti-Howard bender today, especially since I’ve also just decided its time to stop posting to my Vigil blog, but I swear this video was found quite accidentally while I was trying out the new Alpha search engine (very cool). It’s such a good caricature, both in looks and voice, too funny to pass by (the ‘Go Aussie’ cracks me up!):
Once Upon a Coffee Cup is described as a A Greek-Australian fairy tale!, presented by The So-Called Elite, a group of ‘latte-drinking, chardonnay sipping, over-educated, under-achieving artists who have come together for the first time to perform in this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival’ under the direction of Matt Scholten and if theatre. It’s written and performed by Andrea Mina, Vaya Pashos & Shan Jayaweera. Show dates are April 17-28 2007, 6:30pm Evatt Room @ Trades Hall.Can anyone tell me who made the puppet?
Shan also has a nice earlier Howard/Bush cowboy spoof.
Update:
Thanks to Shan Jayaweera, the puppeteer behind the John Howard puppet, who contacted me to let me know a few more details! Shan hadn’t picked up a puppet until he did the one year puppetry course at the Victorian College of the Arts last year, but since then he has worked with Philippe Genty (visiting artist at the VCA), and with Spike Jonze (on the Where the Wild Things Are film adaptation).
The puppet in the Howard/Bush Brokeback parody was made by Shan, but he then got a classmate, Jemila McEwan, to re-do the head for Once upon a Coffee Cup. Jemila was a production student at VCA at the time, and did the puppet build
for the show they did with Genty.
Thanks again, Shan.
If the boots don’t fit redux
(photo via the Canberra Times)
Speaking of sculptures, one of my first blog posts was about Greg Taylor’s satirical bronze, If the boots don’t fit, which depicted the prime minister as dwarf ANZAC. I got a bee in my bonnet, and tracked it all over town. I was pleased to see that its still doing the rounds, and has most recently been placed on the high water mark on Horseshoe Bay at Bermagui, as part of the Bermagui Seaside Fair ‘Sculpture on the Edge’.
Taylor is quoted as saying Bermagui now has “arguably the safest beach in the world.” “What terrorist is going to come ashore there? And there will be no global warming – the sea will not dare rise.”
The best photos (and commentary!) I can find of the sculpture at Bermagui are by JohnG here: 1, 2, 3.
The Lying Rodent
I’m in the same mind set as a net friend who recently said that he just wanted the electioneering to be over and to be able to cast his vote with grim determination. So I’m trying to let most of it pass me by. But the appearence of protestors in body suits added a couple of brief moments of levity this last week.
At the Perth campaign launch Howard was hugged by a large sheep, protesting the live sheep export trade. A few days later a large rat pestered Howard while he was electioneering on the streets in his home electorate of Bennelong, while other protestors called ‘Lying Rodent for PM’ from across the street.
The ‘lying rodent’ tag stems from a sworn statement a few weeks ago by a Queensland Liberal Party branch official, Russell Galt, that Liberal Senator Brandis said of Mr Howard in relation to the Children Overboard senate enquiry: “He is a lying rodent” and “we’ve got to go off and cover his arse again on this”. Senator Brandis denied the allegation on oath, but went on to explain with a barristor’s distinction:
‘He would only ever call Howard the rodent; never a rodent, because the former is a nickname, whereas the latter would be a pejorative term.’
According to the same article,
‘… the PM has been descriptively tagged as the rodent almost as long as he’s been ironically tagged as Honest John. The nickname dates from the long internecine war between Howard and Andrew Peacock some 15 years ago.’
It began as a reference to the way Howard ceaselessly gnawed at Peacock’s leadership, and was adopted by John Hewson supporters for much the same reason.
Some people in the Australian Rodents Fanciers Society are offended by the slur:
“We would have to say that it’s quite funny that it’s not technically correct,”
“Unfortunately, most rodents, we have around 30 at our place, actually have a little more integrity than prime ministers and politicians.”
Another Howard statue update
As I mentioned previously, Greg Taylor’s satirical John Howard statue was to have a showing at the National Folk Festival. The Green Left Weekly Online has a report and picture of the statue standing festooned amid a Field of Hearts that were made in support of refugees.
According to Art Almanac, Maitland Regional Gallery is showing Taylor’s statue from May 7 to June 7 in its first officially sanctioned exhibition.
Howard statue update
Greg Taylor’s sculpture of John Howard that I blogged about in late February is apparently in storage at the moment until an unveiling at the National Folk Festival over the Easter weekend.
I’ve also found an ABC 666 page about the sculpture, which includes two pictures of the statue being removed from Reconcilliation Walk, and a couple of radio interviews with Greg Taylor at the time. The interesting thing about the second interview is that the joking talk about businesses having to ‘pay ransom’ to get the statue moved from their premises came back to haunt this last week. A local liberal MP claimed that ActewAGL, the company to first to host the statue outside their shopfront, had been blackmailed into making a donation. Both the sculptor and the CEO of ActewAGL dismissed the claims as ridiculous.
John Howard Statue: ‘If the Boots Don’t Fit’
On Saturday Feb 7th the Melbourne sculptor Greg Taylor erected this fine life-size bronze sculpture of the Prime Minister, John Howard, in Reconcilliaton Walk in front of Old Parliament House in Canberra.
Called ‘If the Boots Don’t Fit’, it is reminiscent of all those noble-looking statues at ANZAC memorials across the country, but a wonderfully stunted one: the boots are like Goofy’s, the uniform baggy and oversized, the rifle held back to front and the hat worn with the wrong side up. Add in the droopy-shouldered stance and the self-satisfied expression and you have fine satire. Taylor says his artwork is intended to draw attention to Mr Howard’s “smallness” in a metaphysical, spiritual and political sense.
Unfortunately, the National Capital Authority removed it promptly the next day. And ever since, events surrounding the statue have just kept bubbling along in a very entertaining manner.
On the following Thursday, the Canberra Times reported that the statue had been found ‘behind barbed wire’, in an NCA ‘detention camp’: a storage compound in Commonwealth Park. That day Taylor was allowed to hire a crane to lift the one-tonne statue out, and by then our electricity and water company, ActewAGL, had offered to pay $2000 to charity if they could exhibit it outside their shopfront in Garema Place in the city for a few days. Click on the thumbnails below to view images.
Since then:
Jon Stanhope, the Chief Minister of the ACT, has said he would like the ACT to buy the statue so that even if Howard won’t live here himself, at least the statue will have a permanent home here. That is causing consternation in some quarters! Some people have suggested the people of Canberra would be willing to subscribe to a fund to buy it if that plan falls through. Meanwhile, the head of ActewAGL apologized if they had offended anyone, saying exhibiting the statue was only intended to be a bit of fun.
The letters to the editor have been vitriolic and amusing on both sides.
The Sunday Canberra Times editorialized about the value of satire, and surmised that Howard himself might have preferred the statue to be allowed to stand in the first place.
Geoff Pryor, our cartoonist, had some fun with it all.
The art critic Sacha Grishan reviewed the work and concluded that the only reason it did not fit the bill as artwork that the ACT might purchase was that it had not been commissioned.
The NCA is considering charging Taylor $850 for the removal and ‘storage’.
There were rowdy scenes in a Senate Estimates Committee when the Territories Minister expressed outrage at having his Sunday afternoon interupted by the NCA advising him of the statues removal. Also, “Senator Heffernan asked what would happen if ‘every second yobo’ wanted to erect effigies on Commonwealth land in future. ACT Senator Kate Lundy suggested the NCA could erect big fences around any open space.” ;-P.
The statue has spent last week outside the Hawker Butchery, and a sausage sizzle was held in its honour, with donations going to the charity Koomari. Tomorrow it apparently moves on to be on show outside the Kingston Hotel.
Stay tuned, folks… And thanks, Greg!
