To the world, Murray Ball was the celebrated creator of the comic strip Footrot Flats. For his son Mason Ball, it was a little more complicated. He talks to Joanna Wane about their challenging relationship and how it shaped his new book.
You won’t find much about Murray Ball’s final years in the new memoir by his son Mason, who’s written a warm and generous tribute to a highly principled and often difficult man.
His father’s life wasn’t defined by the Alzheimer’s that claimed it, says Mason, the eldest of the much-loved cartoonist’s three children. Nor, come to that, would he want to be remembered solely for Footrot Flats, the comic strip that ran for almost two decades and came to represent a certain aspect of our national identity almost as much as the Anzacs in Gallipoli did.
I ask about it anyway, those last eight years of mental and physical decline, because I can’t shake the image of this strong, rangy man who once trialled for the All Blacks slowly shrinking into himself as the disease took hold.
Murray was 78 when he died, still being cared for at home by wife Pam at Mikos, the lifestyle block just north of Gisborne where the couple had moved with their young family in the 1970s and never left. The place where Footrot Flats and an earlier comic strip The Kids (my childhood favourite) were first inked.
“It was a real shame, especially seeing someone who prided himself on his alertness and his independence compromised like that,” says Mason. “Is there a silver lining to it? Well, at least he sat still. That was unusual for him. We actually bonded quite a lot through that time.
“He was such a good soul, such a good-hearted person. It was quite lovely just to sit with him. Even when he was diminished, you could still hold his hand and feel these surges of emotion going through him, especially when Mum was around. So there was a certain beauty to it, although it was horribly regrettable, of course.”
A one-time journalist, Mason began writing about his father soon after Murray’s death in 2017. At first, it was a way of purging his emotions, not just the grief and loss but a lifetime of memories. The good, the bad and the ugly, he calls it. By the time Murray Ball: A Cartoonist’s Life landed in bookstores, after going through multiple drafts, some of those raw edges had been rubbed off.
Fashioned from different clay, the two men clashed at times, particularly in Mason’s teens and restless 20s, when he took a more free-range approach to life. He remembers once asking Murray if he’d heard of serendipity, the idea of stumbling across something interesting or valuable by chance. “I hate that word,” his father told him.
Much to his disapproval, Mason also lacked a disciplined work ethic, although Murray’s standards were almost impossibly high. In the book, Mason likens his parenting approach to the militaristic Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music.
Not one for mollycoddling his children, Murray’s daily schedule began with a first alarm at 4am and an exercise routine in the living room. After a couple of hours drawing in his studio, he’d take a break for a 30-minute jog before joining the family for breakfast.
Looking back, Mason thinks such a rigid routine was his father’s defence against the insecurity and vulnerability that stalked him. Despite the success of Footrot Flats, which ran from 1976 to 1994, he was terrified his pool of ideas might simply dry up.
“In the last 20 years of his life, we had a very harmonious relationship. A very loving relationship,” says Mason. “It’s just we didn’t see eye to eye a lot when I was younger. Dad was very highly principled and highly motivated to a level I just couldn’t match.
“He had his issues and his problems as well, but he was very well-organised, which I definitely wasn’t, and he had a bit of a gutful of me, to be honest. I did sort of flip-flop from here to there, although I did a lot of travelling in the meantime and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
Mason’s teenage years also intersected with a time when his father’s workload was immense, producing the Footrot Flats strip at the height of its popularity and then collaborating on the 1986 feature film A Dog’s Tale.
The movie was a smash hit, of course, but it was a mixed experience for Murray, who struggled with a lack of creative control.
“He was very busy and there was a lot of frustration, too, because he wanted to branch out into some of his other ideas as well and Footrot Flats had taken over his life to some extent.”
Now in his late 50s, Mason is happily settled into his career as an English language teacher, living in Wellington with his wife, Kuniko (they met when he was teaching in Japan) and their three children.
If he’s like his father at all — and he reckons that’d be a huge compliment — it’s perhaps the influence of his ecological views and the persistence that helped him push through rejection by other publishers, “some pretty harsh manuscript assessments” and his own doubts.
“All that uncertainty about whether it’s going to be worth doing in the end and whether anybody’s going to like it,” he says. “I think that’s one way he’s shaped me, just being able to keep on going and never throw in the towel.”
Mason talks the way he writes, with candour and insight into not just the life of his father but also his times. Murray’s formative years in Feilding, where he was born, and in apartheid-era South Africa, where his parents resettled and the roots of his passion for social justice bedded in. Later, he and Pam adopted a daughter, Tanya, whose Malaysian heritage would have seen her classed as “Coloured”.
A move to England with a young family of his own in the late 1960s cemented his leftist political views and led to the emergence of his breakthrough character, Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, which became the longest-running strip in Punch magazine.
Nothing demonstrates the depth of his convictions more than Murray’s outspoken opposition to the 1981 Springbok Tour, despite a lifelong passion for the game. His father, Kelly, had played for the All Blacks in the 1930s and Murray himself had just missed out after trialling as a teenager — although Mason suspects his father’s preference for a post-match strawberry milkshake instead of a beer back in the clubrooms didn’t help his chances.
Mason joined him on anti-apartheid marches down the main street of Gisborne and Murray protested at the opening game. A few years later, when the All Blacks were scheduled to tour South Africa, he withdrew the Dog from Footrot Flats as the team mascot. It was never reinstated.
“Dad had said when he was sending letters and cartoons in to the newspaper that if he had been selected for the All Blacks, he probably would have gone on tour,” says Mason. “He definitely felt for the players, but he felt much more for the injustice, for people who were being wrongfully detained, who were being executed, who were having their whole lives and families ruined by racist policies.”
Speaking of the Dog, one of the most shocking revelations in the book (for me, at least) is that Murray didn’t have a sheepdog of his own until long after Footrot Flats had become a Kiwi institution. It was only after he and Pam bought chunks of farmland surrounding their lifestyle block that Finn came into their life.
He, too, was a border collie, but any likeness to the endearing Dog ended there. Quick to flash his canines menacingly, Finn was a “pretty grumpy character”, reckons Mason, but Murray adored him.
“They were very loyal to each other. Dad had a real soft spot for Finn and stuck up for him, and he was always one for the underdog, Dad, even when the underdog was a dog.”
If his father were a cartoon character, says Mason, he’d be the one with a dark cloud over his head, a patch of rain surrounded by sunshine. A natural recluse who didn’t do small talk, Murray suffered from a melancholic disposition and had a dim view of human nature.
He hated patriotism in the flag-waving sense — “it used to make him want to vomit” — and in his later years, he fell out of step with liberal views on gender politics. Society had moved on and he hadn’t moved with it. Not that he minded upsetting people; that’s why he did cartooning.
“He felt like he had a moral obligation to say what he wanted to say. He didn’t do it to make friends,” says Mason. “I don’t think he was ever depressed, but he was deeply affected by the politics around him and the wider issues most of us just can blindly dismiss as we go about our lives. That door was wide open for him.”
Gareth, Mason’s younger brother, is still on what remains of the farm, running the stock and keeping an eye on their mother, who’s in her 80s now. He’s also archiving and digitising Murray’s work, thousands and thousands of drawings which are in the process of being put into storage at the National Archive.
Mason can picture his father out in the backyard at Mikos, nut-brown from the sun, his hairy chest bursting from the singlets he liked to make more comfortable by cutting them away at the neck. Always on the move, until those final years of stillness.
“I remember as a very young child thinking how heartwarming and how liberating it was to see my father smile because he was such a serious person and it was a rare kind of thing. Although if things turned to custard in family life, or one of us had a problem, he was a ray of sunshine.
“He tended to laugh at people rather than with them, so his laughing wasn’t quite as endearing. But when he was happy or moved, he did have a beautiful smile.”
• Murray Ball: A Cartoonist’s Life, by Mason Ball (HarperCollins, $45) is out now.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
