Cartoonist Michael Leunig returns from a near-death hit on the head

In January the cartoonist Michael Leunig was going about his more physical labour on his farm in north-east Victoria.

As he climbed into an underground bushfire shelter the steel trapdoor crashed down on him, "due to a design fault and my negligence".

Distracted by excruciating pain in his right wrist, he didn't realise he had also been hit on the head and was suffering concussion and bleeding on the brain.

After meeting newspaper deadlines for 40 years, Michael Leunig's life and values changed after an accident in January. Photo: Jay Cronan

Four weeks later he had a seizure and passed out – fortunately in the presence of a friend who was a former nurse – and woke up in an ambulance, which sped him to hospital for emergency surgery.

"Apparently I was very nice to everyone," he says. "Even when they told me they had to cut a hole in my head, I thought, 'Oh well, if this is the end...'."

While he made a quiet recovery, the Herald and The Age kept the Leunig whimsy flowing with "classic" cartoons from his 40 years drawing for the Fairfax papers as the grassroots philosopher of innocence, melancholy and disillusionment.

Today Leunig returns with a new cartoon in Spectrum, which he says "comes off the election. It has a bunch of rhyming couplets – I don't call them poems, they are verses in the folk tradition. It's a slightly gentle re-entry."

From his Melbourne studio he will dispatch two cartoons a week and start a monthly column of "observations on the continuing madness and joy".

Unable to tell if readers will see any change in his work, he is pleased to be back and says, "If I'm not enjoying it no one's going to enjoy it".

Leunig was concerned that the accident affected the part of his brain involved with vocabulary, but gradually the words returned. 

He recently gave his first public talk and "did it standing on my head". In August he will speak (and draw) at Byron Bay Writers' Festival.

During his convalescence he has been "dabbling with" a memoir and also painting, and in October will have an exhibition titled The Night We Lost Our Marbles in Brisbane.

The colourful paintings are "a bit Leunig-like, a bit primal," he says. "People say they are joyful."

Although he feels well now, he says, "There's a bit of an epiphany in a near-death thing. It's caused upheaval in my life and my values have altered."

At 71, "I've had my three score and 10, so I'm on borrowed time. But I still want to work and paint and write. Blessings come in strange ways."  

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/cartoonist-michael-leunig-returns-from-a-neardeath-hit-on-the-head-20160708-gq1eo3.html#ixzz4Dp5wjlPA
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