Author Archives: David

The trial of David Eastman

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My sketch of the Prosecutor’s closing arguments in the retrial of David Eastman. My Canberra Times colleague Alexandra Back wrote the inside story of the trial.

Sketch, the retrial of David Eastman

Eastman was originally tried and convicted of the murder of Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner Colin Winchester in 1995. He spent 19 years in prison before a judicial inquiry found he had not received a fair trial and quashed his conviction. Following a lengthy retrial in 2018, Eastman was found not guilty.

Courtroom sketching, like live caricature, are crafts unto themselves, so I was a little apprehensive in approaching this. I tried my best to ignore one of the more interesting visual elements in the room, the attentive jury, to preserve their anonymity, but I still had to remove some detail on advice from our lawyers.

This drawing actually records the very last day of ACT Supreme Courtroom One. Drab and windowless, and virtually unchanged since I was last in there 30 years ago, the courtroom was abandoned early on that last day as the buzzing from an old piece of tech in the room began to give one jury member a headache. The trial reconvened the following week in the new court building next door.

Sketch, David Eastman sitting through the retrial

(The Canberra Times, 22 November 2018 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)

The Gaza massacre

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Cartoon: the Australian Foreign Minister responds to the Gaza massacre

There was global outrage at the use of deadly force by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian protesters in Gaza (at least 60 protesters dead, more than 1700 wounded).

The response of Australia’s Foreign Minister was five bloodless sentences, none of which mention who, exactly, suffered the “loss of life and injury” and who did the killing.

If you are a human being, as you probably are, you might think it would be difficult to explain away the massacre of several dozen people… You would, however, be mistaken. Propaganda defending murder is both simple to produce and alarmingly common…
“How to defend a massacre”, Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs

The Foreign Minister is due to appear in the August issue of Vogue.

(The Canberra Times, 18 May 2018 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)

The politics of panic

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Peter Dutton has joined sections of the media in kicking off the new year with a new “racialised moral panic”, doing burnouts in the new modified Home Affairs Department to prevent any clear-eyed analysis of crime in Victoria.

Cartoon: gang hysteria

Cartoon: doing burnouts in the modified Home Affairs Department

On the theme of making stuff up, we also began the new year learning the government ignored advice from Treasury in order to whip up fear around proposals to trim negative gearing.

What better metaphor to use than the stuff made up by satirist Ben Ward about the US President’s obsession with a Gorilla Channel?

Cartoon: inside the Trumble whitehouse

(The Canberra Times, 5, 6 and 10 January 2018 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)