One of Australia’s most enduring cartoonists is venturing on to the stage with her cartoons in a show called Everyone on the Bus Fell Down (Not Just Me), reports arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Judy Horacek, who got her start while living, studying, and working in Canberra for 14 years, has always been an independent artist.

“When the last Melbourne International Comedy Festival came around, I felt I’d like to put my cartoons out there in a different way,” she tells me by phone to her home in Melbourne. “I’d done so much cartooning, and when I looked back at them, a lot haven’t dated at all. I wanted to find a new way of getting them across to an audience.” 

This inspiration led to a mini-tour to Hobart and Castlemaine, and now Canberra, all places where she already knows the locals.

Returning to Canberra will be especially meaningful.

The genesis of her famous 2004 collaborative children’s book with writer Mem Fox, Where Is the Green Sheep? lies right here in the capital.

“I drew all the pictures for it from my studio in Gorman House,” she says.

The National Library holds all the original artworks for the book, one piece of which is proudly displayed in its Treasures Gallery. She will take the stage inside the library’s own theatre.

“Canberra is going to be the best,” she says. “It already feels like a homecoming.”

Apart from a few weekly or fortnightly gigs with various newspapers, cartooning has not been a traditional day job for her.

Horacek produced her first cartoon book, Life on the Edge, in 1992, with an introduction by feminist scholar Dale Spender. 

Much later, somewhat to her own surprise as an untrained artist, she found herself enrolling in a course at the then Canberra School of Art.

Like many cartoonists, her work is heavily issues-based, though she emphasises that she is not a political cartoonist covering the 24-hour news cycle.

“The reason I became a cartoonist in the first place was feminism,” she says.

“I thought there were systemic things holding women back, but at the same time, I was very concerned about the environment and I’m also deeply interested in a more equal society.

“I wanted to say something about the world, and cartoons seemed to be the perfect meeting point.

“All my life I’ve sketched, drawn and written, and in cartooning, I can do both.”

Ironically, it wasn’t until 2004, when Where Is the Green Sheep? was published, that she went to art school. 

 “My first degree from Melbourne University was in art history and English, so I knew about words and pictures, but not how to actually make them myself.”

She describes the old Canberra School of Art, where she specialised in printmaking and drawing, as an extraordinary environment.

Her connection to Canberra’s national institutions runs deep. Beyond the National Library, the National Museum holds a major set of her work, stemming from her 2002 retrospective exhibition that marked the centenary of women’s suffrage in Australia.

Now, stepping into comedy is a bit of a surprise for the artist. 

“I’m essentially a shy person, and to me, comedy always felt like a very blokey thing,” she says. “I didn’t have the confidence to cope with the ‘show-us-your-tits’ kind of heckling.

“But I’ve given a lot of talks, so I thought, well, with my cartoon slideshow, why not? If I run out of words, I can just press the button.”

She already had an established relationship with the Comedy Festival, having been commissioned to design its festival logo in 2019. This gave her the confidence to pitch her show idea to them.

To help shape the performance, she teamed up with comedian and writer Fiona Scott-Norman. 

“She helped me to shape it a little so that it wouldn’t come across in lecture mode,” Horacek says. 

“I thought it would be really fun.”

Everyone on the Bus Fell Down (Not Just Me), National Library, November 10.

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.