About Bill

Bill Leak (born 1956 in Adelaide, SA) was a painter, writer and the daily editorial cartoonist on The Australian from 1994 until 2017.

In the mid-1970s he studied drawing and painting at the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, and first started exhibiting his work in 1978 while living in Germany.

He returned to Australia in 1982, exhibited in Sydney and began his career as a cartoonist by submitting cartoons to The Bulletin. He worked on the Sydney Morning Herald from 1985 until 1994, when he joined The Australian.

Leak’s work as a cartoonist enabled him to cease exhibiting while continuing to paint. The critic Robert Hughes, whose portrait he painted in 2001, described Leak as “the best painter never to have won the Archibald Prize.” The Manly Art Gallery presented a retrospective of his portraits in December 2013.

Bill won two News Awards for Cartoonist of the Year, nine Walkley awards for excellence in journalism, nineteen Stanley Awards from the Australian Cartoonists’ Association and was an Archibald Prize finalist twelve times.

His portraits of Bob Hawke and Bill Hayden hang in Parliament House, Canberra, and his portraits of Sir Donald Bradman, Dick Woolcott and Robert Hughes are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, also in Canberra.

Leak’s novel Heart Cancer was published by ABC Books in 2005 and he published four collections of his political cartoons: Drawing Blood (Allen & Unwin, 1998), Moments of Truth (Scribe, 2005), UnAustralian of the Year (Scribe, 2012) and Trigger Warning (Wilkinson Publishing, 2017) which was launched by Sir Les Patterson only two days before his sudden death by heart attack on March 10, 2017.