Today I shed a tear for a man I had never met.
I woke up this morning to see on social media that Murray Ball had passed away. A minor celebrity that Gen Y or anyone outside New Zealand or Australia has probably never heard of. He was a Kiwi Cartoonist who had written a few books but was most famous for being the creator, artist and writer of Footrot Flats, a newspaper comic strip that ran for a few decades and inspired an animated movie.
So why did this cartoonist whom I never met mean so much to me?
Growing up on a farm in Australia there was not a lot of media one could relate to. We only had two TV channels and I had no concept of Cable TV, let alone the internet that would come along decades later. Everything on TV was from America or the UK, the exceptions seeming to be the news and soapies – neither of much interest to a young boy.
But there was Footrot Flats.
Whenever Mum would buy the paper, when she had finished with it I would grab it to read the comics section and my first port of call was the Footrot Flats strip. Here was something I could relate to. There was shearing and herding cows and sheep. There were magpies and pigs and feral cats. There was marking lambs, making sure the sow didn’t eat her young, dealing with droughts and cutting hay. It didn’t matter it was set in New Zealand and not here in Australia, it was still my world.
And it was funny!
Footrot Flats was laugh out loud funny! It didn’t rely on the same joke every strip (yes Garfield we get it – you like lasagna and don’t like Mondays) and after the first few years the strips became stories that actually progressed. Through a series of 6 to 8 strips you would find out how The Dog (the only name the main character ever received, except for the one given by Aunt Dolly we were never told) was dealing with the latest rivalry with the Murphy Dogs, or trying to get to Jess when she was in heat, or was observing Rangi going through the first crushes of puberty. That was the other beautiful thing of Footrot Flats, the characters grew. Pongo grew from a screaming kid always trying to push The Dog around in her pram to an outspoken feminist teenager dealing with what she perceived to be a misogynist society and her burgeoning bisexuality (she had a major crush on Cooch’s Cousin Kathy we never saw the face of). Wal and Cheeky Hobson (whom I blame for my lifelong penchant for comically large breasts) went from dating to being engaged to eventually breaking up when she left Wal for the male stripper at her hens night. The characters grew and changed and evolved over time, both in the way they acted and the way they were visually represented. As I myself grew from a kid to a teenager to an adult these characters grew with me and they seemed a reassuring constant in my life. Then there was The Dog.
The Dog. The main protagonist of the series whom we saw the majority of life in Footrot Flats through the eyes of. An intelligent and thoughtful character, who seemed to be beset on all sides by characters who were much tougher than he was that were likely to give him a good hiding if he looked in their direction. Yep, to a kid who was always the smallest and skinniest boy in his year level at school and seemed to lack the aggression that all the other boys had an abundance of, he was a character I could relate to. A character who would try to become friends with the tough PigDog Major and instead of receiving friendship would get beaten to a pulp. For little Trev, between the ages of 8 and 16 that seemed to be my life in a nutshell. Not only would The Dog make me laugh, but he gave me a character to identify with.
Even as I became a (reasonably) well adjusted adult who moved off to the big city and had plenty of friends and girlfriends, my love of Footrot Flats never waned. It was a little bit of country life I could carry with me always. I always checked the bookstores in case the newest compilation book had come out. Footrot Flats was pretty prolific, there was always a new compilation book each year as well as the odd Weekender book. When Murray Ball stopped writing Footroot Flats there was still the odd art book released and I bought the Footrot Flats movie the moment it came out on Blu Ray. Ah the movie, it was absolutely brilliant! Let me change that, it IS absolutely brilliant! To this day, despite the fact I know they survive I still get a bit choked up when the other characters think The Dog, Horse and Jess are dead and I groove along as they surf back into life! As for the song ‘Slice of Heaven’ – it’s hard to find a Gen X’er in this part of the world that doesn’t adore that song! Truly timeless.
When Ball finished writing Footrot Flats he wrote some other books, funny yet heavy with social commentary and a huge dose of his distinctive comic art thrown in. I have ‘The Flowering of Adam Budd’ and ‘The Sisterhood’ in my collection and every few years they get taken down for a read. Ball was a funny, intelligent and perceptive writer who used both the written word and the visual medium to comment on society in a way that kept you turning the page.
But it was Footrot Flats that always remained dear to my heart. It was a part of my childhood and a companion growing up. My bookshelf boasts nearly every Footrot Flats book ever written, even the books about the movie. So when I heard Ball had passed away this morning I felt an acute sense of loss, a man who had brought so much joy to my life, whom I had never met or had the chance to thank, had left this world.
So let me say it now: “Thank you Murray. Thank you so much for meaning so much to me for so long. I wish I had taken the time to track you down to at least write an email to say what a wonderful creation you had brought into the world. You may always remain a legend in New Zealand, but there is also one little Aussie boy, now a man, who will never forget you”.
Did you used to read Footrot Flats or any other of Balls work? Or have something to say about his passing? Would love to read it in the comments section below.
