My father Alex Gurney, was
born in Portsmouth England in 1902. He and his mother migrated to Hobart when he was
three months old. At school he found to his and his mates enjoyment he could draw caricatures of his teachers and others
with quick likeness. His love of drawing continued all his life.
His parents insisted he had a 'proper job' when he left school and so was apprenticed to the 'Hydro' electrical authority in
Tasmania. At night he studied Art at Hobart Technical School. During this time he had a number of drawings accepted by
the Hobart Mercury, the Tasmanian Mail, The Melbourne Punch, the Bulletin and Smiths Weekly.
ln 1926 he came to the mainland to try his luck as a full time black and white artist.
He did numerous cartoons including 'Stiffy & Mo'. 'Daggs'. 'Ben Bowyang' and daily political cartoons. At the onset of World War I I, he created 'Bluey and
Curley' a daily cartoon strip for the Herald and Weekly Times. Its popularity during the war years was incredible and it
was circulated to all Australian forces overseas.
The characters were classical larrikins, although loaded with human frailties, the pair were fearless in battle, imaginative, superbly adaptable and always capable of outwitting any German or Japanese who came their way.
Bluey was the older one, a bit henpecked and Curley was young and single but nothing too
carnal. Sex and religion were taboo, but it was alright for the pair to be gamblers, boozers, layabouts, anti sergeant, anti officer, anti saluting and quite blissful about going absent without leave.
Dad was an official Australian War Correspondent and worked on location with our troops in the front lines. The three attended the victory parade in London and visited occupied Japan. It was the
first cartoon to be radioed back
home for publication.
My father was a genuine artist with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous. He loved to do big strips - the whole sky filled with whizzing bullets, exploding shells, total mayhem. Bluey and Curley would be there, totally impassive, usually talking about something else :
Blue (yawning) : What was that, thunder or bombs?
Curl : Bombs !!
Blue : Thank heavens. I thought it was going to start raining again !!
On the other hand, he was accurate about detail. All the uniforms were exactly right, as were the tanks, the guns and
carriers, the jeeps. The scenes were just as they were: the mess huts, the tents, the parade grounds. It took him at least six
hours to draw each cartoon. And often many hours painfully thinking up the joke.
After the war Bluey and Curley moved to civvie life. They never looked any older, but had a thousand different jobs
and situations.
Dad died in 1955 aged fifty two. The strip was continued after his death, but in my opinion never quite recaptured the
original spirit of the creator.
Norman Lindsay wrote in a letter to my father, "There's no doubt you've turned out the best comic strip in this or any other country. I owe you a deuce of a lot of
hearty laughs. Humour is a precious thing. But you've done something more than hand out laughs. You've caught the spirit
of something exclusively Australian: As Australian as Steele Rudd or
Lawson. It is a hard sardonic spirit, and it rejects
false sentiment and translated into any form makes for the best art."
Margaret Gurney.
Note:
An exhibition by Margaret in March 2005, ‘STRIPS by Gurney’,
utilised her father's original paper:
"The exhibition is a collection of ink drawings of nudes on
paper of my father’s + 4 of his original cartoons."
Click here for more details
