Former cartoonist, songwriter, folk singer, bookseller and latter-day recluse, Peter Mitchell, died last December. I knew him, but not well. I remember him mostly for his quirky cartoon contributions to The Newcastle Herald. But as with most people, there was more to him than met the eye.

It was somewhere about the mid-1980s when Peter Mitchell’s cartoons suddenly began appearing in The Newcastle Herald. In those days, the Herald’s Saturday Magazine was still quite substantial, full of fine reading material and a bevy of regular features that made it a staple for many Newcastle people. To have one’s work accepted for publication in the Saturday Magazine was no small thing. Poets, book reviewers and citizen journalists of many kinds jostled for the attention of the editors who ran the pages. So the appearance of a new cartoonist naturally aroused a lot of interest.

In Peter Mitchell’s case, a fair bit of the initial reader response was negative. His drawing style didn’t appeal to many, it seemed. Actually, he often seemed keen to lampoon the sorts of people that probably made up a solid proportion of the Herald’s readership. His cartoons appeared under the heading The State We’re In, and it generally seemed that he regarded that state to be considerably less than optimal.

My memory of his visits to the Herald office are fleeting, and I seem to have a mental picture of him emerging from the editor’s office – having dropped off his latest work – with a guarded smile, mirrored by a similar expression on the face of the editor, John Allan. It has occurred to me, in latter years, that perhaps Peter Mitchell’s frequently uncharitable views of the people he depicted were also indicative of the views of J.A. (we all called the editor J.A.).

John Allan was himself a somewhat polarising figure in the eyes of the older journalists at the newspaper. It was said of him – by some – that he had been recruited by Fairfax to fix the Herald’s sliding circulation and was trying to turn the paper into a sort of antipodean Manchester Guardian. It was also stated as workplace gospel that J.A. was not fond of many of the writing and reporting staff who had landed on the Herald after the closure of its sister paper, the afternoon tabloid The Newcastle Sun. The antipathy was obvious and mutual, from my observation. There was sometimes also a sense that J.A. didn’t ever really fall in love with the Newcastle newspaper reading public. Another Herald cartoonist, Peter Lewis, told me of a time when J.A. rejected an idea he presented for a cartoon in the next day’s paper. Peter was crestfallen, especially when a cartoon comprising the same idea appeared next day in The Financial Review. “I went and showed J.A. that the idea he’d rejected had been published by the Fin,” Peter said. “His answer to me was: ‘Yes, but The Financial Review is for grown-ups’.”

I should declare that I personally got on well with J.A., even though he gave me a startling orientation talk a day or two after I was employed, assuring me that when I left the paper I would no more be missed than a finger withdrawn from a bucket of water. It was not an encouraging pep talk, but I never forgot it and it helped me keep my newspaper career in a cold perspective.

Back to the point I was trying to make, which was that maybe – just maybe – hiring Peter Mitchell to draw The State We’re In was a sort of joke at Newcastle’s expense. Which is not to say that Peter wasn’t talented, in his own way. Some of his strips caused me a wry smile, or more often a wince, but sometimes I had to laugh, darkly. Newcastle historian Jude Conway looked at a number of his cartoons while researching her thesis, examining the women’s movement in the city. The cartoons hinted, she thought, that their creator may have felt threatened by feminism. Jude kindly supplied a few of the cartoons she found, to illustrate this article.

When longtime Herald cartoonist Peter Lewis started drawing cartoons for the paper as a freelancer in February 1986, Peter Mitchell was already working there, on the same freelance basis. “My first day – I think it was Valentines Day – there was a huge drama at the paper caused by one of Mitchell’s cartoons,” Lewis recollected. The strip showed a woman rushing up to a group, shouting that a crocodile had taken her baby. The reaction from the group was to say: “Oh no, not again.” This was after the “celebrated” Azaria Chamberlain case, so the point was blunt, and dark. Readers reacted badly and the Herald’s phones were busy all day. [I remember the strip very well, as a matter of fact, and actually think it was quite funny. One of his best, I reckon.]

Peter Lewis had actually encountered Peter Mitchell in the 1970s at Newcastle Art School when Greg Pead (later to become famous as Yahoo Serious) used to organise film nights every Monday. “A lot of the films were old silent movies, and Peter Mitchell provided the musical accompaniment, sitting down the front with a piano,” Lewis recalled. “He was quite brilliant. If he was technically a little rough around the edges he was amazingly energetic and he really brought a lot of life into the movies. Away from the piano he seemed very quiet and reserved, but musically he was very accomplished and played with tremendous verve.” “As a cartoonist I think he owed a lot to Michael Leunig, though he never reached Leunig’s level,” Lewis said. “Personally, I liked his toons because they were so mad.”

I don’t know how long the strip continued in the newspaper. Peter dropped out of sight (mine, at least) until I encountered him again selling second-hand books for a living, from a shop he named “Shy Books”, in Newcastle’s Civic Arcade and then later in Hunter Street East. I bought one or two volumes from him. At some point I realised that he was subject to bouts of serious melancholy. I gather, in fact, that he suffered from periodic depression. He came and went from the book-selling scene, leaving physical storefronts behind in favour of selling on-line from an upstairs flat in Station Street, Waratah. He was a knowledgeable and motivated bookseller. In 2006 he issued a press release announcing his creation of “Petebooks”, “a powerful, no-fuss multi-site search engine for used books.” It was probably a good idea, but it evidently didn’t catch on. Eventually I lost sight of Peter altogether until a few weeks ago when Newcastle book collector Ross Edmonds told me that he had died.

Fellow bookseller David McLean recalled Peter as being “very smart and inquisitive, with a broad-ranging mind.” He told me that Peter had been a member of the Newcastle Folk Club in the 1970s. When David knew him Peter was playing in a band called the Blue Emus. Peter wrote and performed his own compositions and he can be heard performing his Motor Car Song on a rare recording of the 1974 Newcastle Folk Festival. That song, plus his Librarian Lady also appears on Bob Hudson’s well-known Newcastle Song album. On the record Hudson introduces Motor Car Song as being “an old favourite by Peter Mitchell, the maniac of North Newcastle”. Both songs are witty enough, full of sexual double entendres.

Peter had a long-term relationship with Jill Wheeldon, who kindly filled in some biographical information for this article. Jill said that Peter was born on November 6, 1948. He had grown up, she told me, in the Newcastle suburb of Argenton. His father, Leo, was a fireman. His mother, Jean (nee Black) was a talented artist. He had two brothers, Geoff and Ray. Jill and Peter spent about a decade together until the mid-1990s, living for much of that time at Paterson.

Jill said that Peter was still playing piano at silent film nights in the 1990s, but he devoted a lot of energy to his band, Gringo Loco, which played 1950s-style music. “He was an intensively creative person,” Jill said. “Growing up he had a paper run and used the money from that for music lessons. He could play piano, piano-accordion and guitar.” Despite these creative efforts she said he was not a sociable person. “He actually didn’t like people much; only the ones who shared his interests, and the quirkier the better,” she said. For a time he lived on a 34-foot yacht at Port Stephens, which suited him well. He split his time between the boat and Paterson. He would take the boat from Soldiers Point and spend time at a secluded cove on the opposite side of Port Stephens.

“He was a lot of fun. He was good at silly walks. He was very interested in politics. He loved birdwatching,” Jill said.

As for his cartoons, Jill said he drew many of them at Paterson. She recalled that he got on very well with the Herald’s editor, John Allan. Jill sent me a couple of the cartoons that illustrate this article.

Ross Edmonds tried to stay in touch with Peter. “I saw a fair bit of him when he lived in Waratah but very little after he moved to a retirement village near Toukley. He rarely returned my phone calls and sadly became a recluse,” Ross wrote. Ross wondered if I remembered Peter from his time at the Herald. Well, yes, I do remember him. And for what it’s worth, I tip my hat to him. He was an unusual character. No Les Lumsdon, certainly, and no Peter Lewis either. But for a while his work added some idiosyncratic spice to the Saturday issues of The Newcastle Herald.

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