Ross McMullin’s Will Dyson is a new edition of a book that first appeared twenty years ago. Over that time, the author has promoted his subject, according to the book’s subtitle, from ‘Cartoonist, Etcher and Australia’s Finest War Artist’ to ‘Australia’s Radical Genius’. ‘Genius’ is a strong word, and the new edition does not make a case for its use any more than the old one did. But Dyson is certainly an important, often unregarded, figure in the history of political cartooning. The story of this talented, likeable, thoroughly political man is well worth knowing on many fronts: as a saga of early Melbourne working-class bohemian culture, as an example of the invigorating effect on English political cartooning by antipodean artists in the early part of the twentieth century (the career of David Low shadows that of Dyson), and as an account of the way that World War I registered on a sensitive, and responsible, Australian imagination.
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