cartoonist, illustrator, painter and printmaker, was born Oswald E. Paul in Ivanhoe, near Bathurst NSW, son of Alfred Paul and the painter and socialist politician Emily Letitia Paul, née Mutton (1866-1917) – whose portrait Mick drew for the Bulletin c.1912. Mick, who had one good eye and one artificial one, was a renowned Kings Cross Bohemian and drunk, a good friend of Hugh McCrae according to Unk White ('My rendezvous with reminiscence’, Second Laugh Anthology 1940, 20) – evidently before his marriage.

Paul first contributed to the Bulletin in 1904 then regularly for 40 years, although he was never a staff artist. The ML Bulletin collection has 177 original cartoons dated 1917-33 and undated, one political cartoon and 13 caricatures of 1917-30. Examples of his black-and-white work include: Mr. Bruce Smith’s Features (face made out of a Chinese immigrant with a pair of baskets, a reference to Smith as 'the selected Fusion candidate’), published 31 March 1910, 20 (original unlocated); A Postcard from Egypt 25 February 1915, 11; Judging Day at the Royal Art Society (caricatures of the all-male jury of artists looking at a painting of a female nude) 30 September 1915, 24; A Severe Test (re: pacifism) 16 December 1915, 14; Not to be Tempted (re: a Caucasian tropical Australia) 23 September 1920, 9.

Mick Paul also contributed to Lone Hand , including a series of caricatures of artists, e.g. Norman Lindsay , D.H. Souter and Harry Weston , and to the weekly Comic Australian (Sydney, 1911-13), e.g. The Craze for Up-To-Dateness; Dad Hayseed takes the family for a day’s dip at Manly 3 February 1912 and All 'Ot . '“Ere, Porkey, 'ave a bit o’ manners. Blowin’ all over a lidy. If yer corfee’s too 'ot, why don’t yer pour it inter yer saucer an’ fan it with yer 'at like a gentleman”’ 9 April 1912, 10. With Harry Julius and Hugh Maclean he illustrated A.G. Stephens’s Bill’s Idees (Sydney: NSW Bookstall Company, 1913).

Preceded by Cec Hartt , succeeded by Will Donald (Gibbney) and sharing the position with Claude Marquet , he was cartoonist on the socialist Australian Worker from about 1907 until March 1921, e.g. The Uproar: 'Australia’s fourteen Parliaments will soon be all talking at once’ 11 July 1912 (ill. M. Anderson et al., When Australia Was A Woman , WAM 1998, cat.72). His cartoon The Labor Confidence Men , presumably reprinted from the Australian Worker , appeared in the International Socialist on 7 February 1914 and presumably other publications also.

In 1924 Mick Paul was a foundation member of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists along with 24 other male cartoonists mainly from Sydney. All contributed to the Society’s first publication commemorating the visit of the US Fleet in 1925 (see Harry Weston ). From c.1924 he contributed to Aussie , often racial gags e.g. 1924 woman with drunken female Aboriginal servant re: theft of bottle of cooking wine (ill. Lindesay 1979, 171) and Englishman and coy Aboriginal girl under tree, “Bai Jove, that – er – looks like – er – mistletoe!” Aussie, 14 November 1926, p. 27.

Bulletin cartoons of the 1930s include: The Modernist (modernist painting with male artist and silly female): 'The Devotee: “Of course I just love it; it’s perfectly adorable. So you’ll forgive me for thinking it might be even more delightfully expressed in verse, or musically perhaps” (A3 original ML Px*D504/117) published Bulletin 17 May 1933; (two men in art gallery) “That’s 'The Judgment of Paris.’”/ “Lumme! Are them flash dames on the jury?” (A3 original ML Px*D504/115) published Bulletin 19 July 1933. In the late 1930s he drew occasional cartoons for Man , e.g. (lady to vicar) “Oh, Mr. Smeet, don’t you think sin is getting better?” April 1937, 69.

Mick Paul was also a painter, a member of the Dee Why group of artists. He and his wife Dorothy Ellsmore Paul , another Bulletin cartoonist whom he married in 1925, had an exhibition of bookplates at David Jones Gallery in 1932 but it is unknown if this was a loan exhibition of their collection or an exhibition they organised for the bookplate society.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007