More to Murray Ball than Footrot Flats: son

That Mason Ball clearly shares his cartoonist father Murray Ball’s humour is evident in his just-released warm, funny, honest biography, Murray Ball: A Cartoonist’s Life. Mason talks to Mark Peters about the creation of the book.

A border collie pup nuzzles an amused Murray Ball in the cover picture of Mason Ball’s biography of his famous dad. While the pup in this portrait of the cartoonist as a young man brings to mind Dog, one of Murray Ball’s most loved Footrot Flats characters, Mason felt a biography written by someone else would be dominated by the popular cartoon strip.

Mason’s book, Murray Ball: A Cartoonist’s Life, is a biography of the farmer, rugby player and cartoonist who made Gisborne his home. In his book, Mason tells the story not only of how Murray became one of the leading cartoonists of his generation but presents a warm, often humorous, portrait of his father and family life.

“Footrot Flats would likely dominate a biography written by someone else,” writes Mason in the prologue to the book. “I wanted something more for my dad. I wanted Footrot Flats to be part — but not the only part — of his epitaph. Footrot Flats was an aberration,” the author tells the Weekender.

“Dad was so politically motivated, and this was unlike other projects he put time into. But we’d come back to New Zealand and he found himself on a rough diamond of land in Gisborne. It was rough when we first moved in, but this was the 1970s, a time of self-sufficiency.”

That rough diamond provided the inspiration for an imaginary world comprised of memorable characters that included Wal, Dog, Cooch, Cheeky Hobson, Aunt Dolly, Horse, Pongo, Rangi, Charlie, Major, Jess and the Murphy family of Hunk, Irish and Spit.

Murray was a disciplined worker. He would rise at 4am, exercise before starting work on his Footrot Flats cartoon strips then milk the cows before coming in for breakfast, says Mason.

“He’d excelled in sport and applied those principles in cartooning. That’s the kind of thing he imparted to us as kids. He was hard to live up to. He was doing what he loved.”

Because Murray worked at home, Mason saw and heard a lot of his views, and experienced his moods, he says, “which in other lives might have been shared with a wider community”.

“I was spoiled in those days,” writes Mason in the book. “I had much of his time because he worked from home. He was under pressure because he badly needed to get work accepted. For four or five years he was not making much money but he was determined.”

Mason can’t remember how he started on the book, but he had a lot of raw material. At the same time, it was important to him to respect his father’s memory.

“I was writing what I knew. It was something I knew quite a lot about. As I wrote things down, the more I enjoyed remembering all this time I had with him.

“As a kid I never really appreciated how much his work was loved. Dad came to Ilminster School as guest speaker when I was there. I couldn’t believe how good he was at communicating and how much kids liked him. I hadn’t realised how popular he was.

“When I was a teen I didn’t have much time for him and he didn’t have much time for me — you know, sons and fathers — but we always had a good relationship. It wasn’t until he died that it seemed a natural thing to write what I remembered of him and the book snowballed from there.”

As work on the book progressed, it became broader than a personal memoir of his father and his relationship with him.

“I wanted to remember him and I had thousands of memories, but you have to bring them down to hundreds.

“I thought I had something reasonably right, but there was a lot of going back and rewriting parts Mum walked me through, especially with the Footrot Flats material.

“The book has gone around some corners since the original concept. Some of that was a tempering of the whole thing. Some of the first ideas were very raw. What I remembered wasn’t always what Mum remembered.”

A particularly profound moment during the research and writing process came about while Mason was cross-checking resources such as cartoons and photos used throughout the book. He found in a folder of fan mail a letter from Queensland man Ken Newton who wrote about a drawing of Dog Murray made for Ken’s terminally ill daughter Kathy. Kathy had been admitted to Princess Alexandra Hospital the previous day, but passed away a few days later. With Ken’s permission, his letter features in Murray Ball: A Cartoonist’s Life.

“There was one stage, on the Saturday,” says Ken in the letter, “when she was brought out of her drugged sleep, and your drawing (which I had framed quickly) was the first and only thing we showed to her, by way of giving her some encouragement.

“She was so excited by your drawing that her mother and I decided the frame with the original drawing should be buried with her.

“I guess many people tell you they are fans of Footrot Flats, but I can assure you no one drew the humour and strength from your drawings as Kathy did during her 12 months of illness,” Ken said.

“His was a letter to think about — what it meant to his daughter,” says Mason.

“He phoned me back and said he was in tears. I felt bad, but said ‘that’s love coming out right now’.”

Editor Maria de Jong helped Mason focus and polish the manuscript. When Mason decided to approach publishers with his manuscript, rather than self-publish, de Jong became his agent, and, so Mason followed his father’s advice to budding cartoonists.

“Dad would get letters from young cartoonists asking for advice. He said ‘you have to keep trying’ but he also said ‘get an agent’.

“He was always testing the market.”

When de Jong called Mason to tell him Harper Collins had accepted his manuscript for publication, he was both excited and relieved, he says.

“Until it happened it was pie in the sky. I’m pretty low key about things, though, so I kept to myself for a bit and to be fair there was heaps of work to do.

“There are a lot of moving parts. There’s no finish line with this. All the way through it I really wanted to make it partly about Dad the cartoonist, but more importantly about the person. I wanted to broaden the picture of Dad.

“The family is pretty happy for me. Mum saw how much time I’d put into it. She’d always backed me to tell the family story.”

■  The Gisborne launch for Murray

Ball: A Cartoonist’s Life will be held at Muirs Bookshop at 5.30pm, Friday November 17.

Murray Ball the man

Born in Fielding in 1939, Murray Ball worked as a cartoonist with the Manawatu Times before he left to work as a freelancer. As a once-aspiring All Black (Murray was selected for the Junior All Blacks in 1959) he channelled his passion for the sport in the 1967 Kiwi classic, Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest, a satirical look at New Zealand rugby with the All Black versus British Lions rivalry in mind.

“Rugby was the glue that held regional New Zealand together,” says Mason.

“Dad worked to support a possible future in rugby and did some farm work in that time, and worked for a time pulling intestines at the Freezing Works.”

After moving to England in 1968, with his wife Pam, and young family, Murray ghosted Billy Bunter and Desperate Dan comic strips for comics such as Beano and Dandy. Among his satirical cartoons published by Punch magazine was The King’s Comrades, which featured a tyrannical, black-cigar smoking executive, and the magazine’s longest-running cartoon, Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero. Stanley was a glasses-wearing caveman who struggled with his Neolithic times.

The cartoon raised questions about how society is run in the division of resources, inequality, wars between countries, and unnecessary suffering of ordinary people, albeit in a comic way, wrote Otago University lecturer in politics, Bryce Edwards in The New Zealand Herald.

“In a sense, he was one of New Zealand’s truly great anti-establishment thinkers.”

Footrot Flats first appeared in 1976 in Wellington newspaper, The Evening Post and soon dominated his cartooning oeuvre. The cartoon strip ran from 1976 until 1994 in newspapers and was released in book form.