Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, illustrator and author, was another New Zealand cartoonist, born in Christchurch. 'Wep’ ( W.E. Pigeon ) said he worked as a junior law clerk ' before he took to quill driving for a jockey club’.

“Coming to Sydney he totted up figures for the Colonial Sugar Refinery, which sent him to Fiji for a spell as a laboratory clerk. Returning to Sydney he took up art, which he had studied under L.H. Booth in New Zealand and Julian Ashton in Sydney.”

This led to a job on the Woman’s Mirror . Later he freelanced. He drew for Aussie , e.g. 'And Yet if this Happened — !!!’ (re flappers), 15 February 1928, p.14 (from Liz Conor). He also did illustrations, including the single known issue of the children’s magazine Cobbers , published by the Triad Magazine of Australia Ltd in 1926, and for children’s books such as The Bubble Galleon: a holiday pantomime by Ernest Wells; set to pictures by R.W. Coulter (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934), Wells’s Master Davy’s Locker: a story of adventure in the under sea (1935) and Mervyn Skipper’s The Meeting Pool: a tale of Borneo (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1929, Sydney: A & R, 1940 and Czech and Finnish editions).

From the 1920s to the late 1950s Coulter was a regular Bulletin contributor, signing his cartoons, caricatures and illustrations 'R.W. Coulter’. The Mitchell Library [ML] Bulletin collection has 120 original drawings and 26 caricatures by Coulter, including a caricature of the art critic and historian William Moore. Examples of his cartoons include “Cripes, Mum, she could milk a few cows!” c.1926 – a bush couple contemplating an Indian 8-arm goddess – and 'The Descent of Man’, with the same couple looking at a painting of a centaur and 'The Cow Cocky’ saying, “Cripes, Mum, look at that! I s’pose we was cows ourselves once!” 8 April 1926. Cartoons from the WWII period include “An’ don’t bale out till you’re right over his centre of perduction” 1944 (little boys planning a military-style catapult raid on an orchard); “Don’t it remind you of home, Dave?” 1944 (two diggers contemplating a Japanese soldier caught in a man trap); very amusing cartoon of a tall, muscly serviceman lying in a dorm with real women tacked to the wall above his bed instead of pin-ups, 1944.

ML Bulletin originals include: “If only the Joneses would try to keep up with US!” (old house with overgrown garden in row of precise modern houses, Px*D458/86), published 1 November 1957, and a lady with a broom in her front garden on the edge of an unending stream of traffic to a female friend: “Yes, it’s very handy here. Just duck across the road and you’re in the surf” (Px*D458/56), published 29 April 1959. A ML Bulletin original included in Joan Kerr, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White (1999) showed two identical bearded male artists in berets, Grecian skirts and sandals and other identikit pairs of men gazing at one another in art room and beginning to paint their twin captioned: “This year the Mutual Admiration Art Society is going all-out for the Archibald Prize” (Px*D458/58), published 6 May 1959. Another, published 28 October 1959, shows 2 female astronauts in the sky (Px*D458/82) with one saying: “There! Just as I always said – blue velvet drapes and sequins!” A bigger undated Bulletin original (ML Px*D426/34) has a robot addressing a giant 'Galaxal-Sidereal Computer: “Oh, Sir Brain-what are we here for? What is our destiny in this vale of tears?” Another original is in unidentified Bulletin drawings (Px*D556/91).

Reg Coulter also wrote humorous short stories that were published in the Bulletin . His first novel, Everlasting Hurricane: a saga of the western Pacific , was run in the Sydney Morning Herald as a serial then published by Angus & Robertson in 1937 ('by R. Walter Coulter’). Date of death unknown, but in about 1988 his widow, Eve Coulter, was aged 90 and living in 'a Reg-built stone fairyland cottage perched on a Berowra Waters hilltop’ when David Swain visited her and she gave him some cartoons for the National Museum of Australia.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007