From the beginnings of white settlement, Australia has had, an economy based almost entirely on rural production. The effects of a rural economy and population influencing broad social attitudes, not surprisingly, has resulted in a culture wherein the ‘up-country bushman’ and the legendary ‘outback’ are the very essence of this nation’s lore. And comedy has been a significant element of the lore. The early Australian writers ‘Steele Rudd’, Edward Dyson, ‘Banjo’ Patterson and Henry Lawson among many have celebrated some aspect of country life, as it was, with comedy; and so, of course, have the black and white artists working for the Australian press. Indeed, Australia today is the last remaining country observing her rural origins in graphic satire. One of the more significant twentieth century creators of Australian bush comedy was the magnificent pen-draughtsman Percy Leason.

Like most artists, Percy Alexander Leason, when a young boy, began sketching the birds, animals, trees and other subjects around, in his case, his father’s wheat farm at Kaniva in Victoria’s Wimmera district where Percy was born in 1889. At the peak of his talent and popularity in 1925, writing of his youth, he stated: ‘Then something happened that nearly put an end to my interest in art. I was sent to an art school’. He travelled with the driver of a railway steam engine hauling the local train, for lessons twice a week at Nhill. ‘And the town’s name represents what I learnt there’ he added. During this period, a truly formative one for him, he was employed driving his father’s lorry loaded with wheat to the local rail-yards where he had the priceless opportunity of studying the types of farmers and country dwellers. ‘Between the loads I lay on the bags and listened to them yarning, unconsciously memorising their appearance and thus accumulating a fund of material that was to prove invaluable later on.’ This indeed was the case; Leason never at any time used a sketchbook. Those joyous days of his boyhood were again recalled when in 1934 he wrote some high quality fictional prose published over six issues of Mervyn Skipper’s magazine of the arts, and of protest, Pandemonium.