Emile Mercier

Emile Mercier (1901-1981) was an Australian cartooning icon who arrived in Australia as a young man from New Caledonia, hoping to find his fortune.  He found work as a full-time cartoonist for the The Sun newspaper in 1949. but steered away from cartooning cliches to produce cartoons that carried a gentle Gallic humour filled with absurdity and whimsy about his new life in a foreign country.

He was a shrewd observer of daily life in the inner suburbs of Sydney and his strokes of artistry and sense of the ridiculous, often lampooned our strange obsessions, such as pouring gravy on every meal.  His comic drawings of drunks, tramps, horse-racing, boxing, fashion, motoring, golf and stray cats show us a man who could not control his “natural Gallic naughtiness”, who dressed like his cartoon characters but earned the respect of all those who worked with him.