Born in Yorkshire, he started painting as a 'primitive’ in the style of Douanier Rousseau after meeting Léger, Vlaminck, Marie Laurencin et al. when working in Paris as a house painter and marbler, but his work soon became more sophisticated. He migrated to Sydney in 1928 and held an exhibition of his abstract paintings the following year. From 1933 to 1938 he was an advertising director at Elstree Studios, Sydney. During the war he worked at Slazengers designing ships for the navy, drawing daily cartoons for editor Brian Penton at The Daily Telegraph in his spare time. He notes in his autobiography ( The Dinkum Pommie 1964, 177-8) that it was difficult to get them to the paper before the jokes dated: 'I would shove my drawings on Brian Penton’s desk at midnight or 7 a.m. and sometimes even my wife took them in for me’. When transferred to the Ministry of Munitions, however, he was far closer; the building was in the same street as the Telegraph . Examples of his Telegraph naive outline-style cartoons on postwar food shortages and manpower control in 1945 are illustrated in Coleman & Tanner (130-31). See also Hesling’s Cartoons Consolidated Press Limited, Sydney, 1945, 96pp.
Hesling also drew political cartoons, and said of them:
“Had I stuck to comic sketches of American servicemen buying tickets for Il Trovatore on the black market and such like, all would have been well. But my drawing had improved so much by now that I could get passable likenesses of Eddie Ward and Mr. Curtin. Brian saw me as one of those political bores – the scorched-earth boys who draw Russian bears and rising suns using soot instead of ink. What he didn’t like about me, of course, was having to write letters about art to pedantic readers who objected to a Prime Minister with six fingers on the hand instead of five.”
At the Ministry Hesling worked with George Molnar , who he claims he prodded into becoming a cartoonist (pp.182-6) and who gave him lessons in drawing in return. He left the Ministry to work full-time on The Daily Telegraph and was sent to Canberra (p.187) – which he hated. Sacked from the Telegraph , he moved to The Sydney Morning Herald , then to Smith’s Weekly to replace John Quinn (who moved to Woman’s Day in 1947) where he remained for four years until it closed (in 1950).
He also contributed occasional whimsical cartoons and articles to Australia: National Journal , eg. May 1947, and to Australia : Week-end Book . Vol.2 (1943) of the latter has seven cartoons, eg. couple looking at nudes, satyrs and pirates on beach and saying, “Aren’t those the people we met at Mr. Lindsay’s?” Vol.3 (1944) has 10 cartoons, eg rose plant growing hands, “We think it’s a Salvador Dali”. Vol.4 (1945) features only two works by Hesling. Another wartime book he illustrated with simple, whimsical, line drawings was These Beastly Australians (Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney, n.d.), short, light verse by Leon Gellert about various Australian animals. References to wartime and Macarthur make it clear it’s wartime.
Out of work in 1950, Hesling did a few recorded talks for the BBC at 30/- a time (p.197) and wrote a well-reviewed book, which still earned him less than 100 pounds. He wrote freelance articles for the Herald at about 8 quid per 1000 words, 'and, of course, I did joke drawings. There’s a terrific market for these; I remember once Man paying me three guineas for a whole page of them, one of which I later sold to the New Yorker (as an idea) for forty dollars.’ He also drew cartoons for Meanjin , Quadrant , Nation , the Manchester Guardian and the Listener (London). He wrote art criticism for the Sydney Observer until Donald Horne sacked him for reviewing an exhibition he hadn’t seen; his replacement was Robert Hughes (Humphrey McQueen, 'Rolling Column’, ABR 109, April 1989).
Hesling painted numerous murals between 1950 and 1955 in NSW, Victoria, SA and North Queensland (Emerald) and 'decorated his merry writings with his own curious humorous drawings’ (Blaikie, 132). He pioneered painting in vitreous enamels in Australia, exhibiting examples in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. He had a long association with Greenhill Galleries in Adelaide. In 1999, long after he died, Greenhill Galleries offered four of his enamel panels for sale at $100,000 (The Advertiser 2 Oct 1999 p60).
His first book, an illustrated account of Sydney, Sydney Observed (1953), was followed by several humorous illustrated autobiographies: Little and Orphan (1954), The Dinkumization and Depommification of an Artful English Immigrant (1963)(later published as The Dinkum Pommie), Stir Up This Stew (1966), I Left My Tears in the Fridge (1972), Around the World on an Old Age Pension (1974)(which includes My Picture Book) and Art Ruined My Career in Crime (1977). One of his plays, My Life with an Interval for Aspirin, was performed in 1972.
In a review in the SMH (Prof) A D Hope said of Little and Orphan that it 'tapped a vein of pure and natural comedy…It is one of the most engaging books I have read for a long time’. It was republished by Humorbooks in 1967. Clement Semmler praised I left My Tears in the Fridge and Around the World on an Old Age Pension in the SMH of 9 Sept 1972 p22 and 11 May 1974 p13, respectively.
Hesling and his wife Flo’ left their longtime home at Castlecrag, Sydney, in 1962 and moved to North Adelaide. Chris Butler’s article “Bernard Hesling: A self-confessed amateur nut-case” The Adelaide Review Dec 1984/Jan 1985, was a one-page biography. Hesling was awarded an OAM in June 1985 for his service to the arts. The Advertiser (17 June 1985, p2) noted the award and described Bernard’s varied life in its Monday Profile article “A colorful 80 years, and still making his mark”. He died aged 82 in 1987. Flo’ predeceased him. There were no children. An obituary by Tim Lloyd “Hesling: a versatile, lively life” was published in The Advertiser, 16 June 1987, p.17.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2011
