2009 Lifetime Achievement Award

Bruce Petty was the winner of the 2009 Melbourne Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Bruce Petty’s cartoons have been described as “doodle-bombs” and "as the victory dance of a fly escaped from the ink pot". As journalist Martin Flanagan once observed, Bruce Petty “re-invented the world as a vast scribbly machine with interlocking cogs and levers that connected people in wholly logical but unlikely ways.”

For the best part of half a century, not only has Bruce’s pen irreverently depicted society and politics, he’s also helped to define Australian political life.

In the tribute video below Late Night Live host Phillip Adams and fellow cartoonists Bill Leak and John Spooner pay tribute to Petty.


Tribute video


Bruce Petty's acceptance speech at the Quill Awards dinner

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