Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre - cartoon

[MiraiRonin]

Thoughts of a Baby Lying in a Child Care Centre

 

Interview: Late Night Live: Dec 5, 2007, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

 

Philip Adams: I’m talking to Australia’s most remarkable cartoonist, Michael Leunig.… The most hated cartoon of yours was the one that had a baby speculating on its absent mother. Could you remind the listener of this incredible attack on feminism and political correctness?

 

Michael Leunig: Without having it here in front of me, it was my way of kind of illuminating this emerging disaster I thought was happening in the culture of maternity and early childhood emergence and development. I thought ‘There’s a disaster shaping up here, and it’s the abandonment of babies, essentially, and the abandonment of mothering,’ and so I made this little tale of the baby and its imagined thoughts, as mother puts it in the crèche and goes off to pursue her career—it was a female baby, you see. So I was picking up—it’s a very elaborate idea and a cartoon can’t handle such a complex question. And lo and behold, there wouldn’t be too many early child development psychologists and people who have studied this who would disagree with it. They would say ‘Y-yes; the mother leaves, and something starts to change.’ And a lot of this came from my concern for the work of the great Donald Winnicott—the very wonderful British psychoanalyst of the 50s and the 40s, the man who did the great work—he was England’s answer to Freud and Jung and everyone else—so many women know the truth of this anyway.

[Stan Hunter]

That is powerful. Will the cartoon get cleaned up for publishing? Or is there a higher resolution scan?

[Matthew Ed Moran]

It's brilliant. I'm glad someone has the guts to put a cartoon like this together.

[MiraiRonin]

That is powerful. Will the cartoon get cleaned up for publishing? Or is there a higher resolution scan?

 

To the best of my knowledge that's as good as it gets; scanned from a newspaper roughly ten years ago.

[regevdl]

I'm surprised/not surprised but it made me cry and feel the deep pain in my childhood.  My parents both worked from home, I was not in daycare but spent so many hours alone.....I felt totally abandoned with my other 20 feet away.  It's left some deep deep scars....  Very powerful depiction here.