The Festival and a major bank review their advertising with The Australian following Leak’s cartoon, widely criticised as racist.

The Adelaide Festival has described Bill Leak’s Indigenous cartoon in The Australian on August 4 as “disgraceful” and is reviewing its future advertising with the newspaper. SunCorp Bank has also said that it has temporarily suspended any future advertising.

The cartoon, which has also been criticised by the Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion, The Greens, Greenpeace Australia and the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, among others, showed an Aboriginal man with a beer unable to remember the name of his son, who has been collared by a policeman.

Bill Leak cartoon published in The Australian on August 4

In a statement on Facebook, the Adelaide Festival said that its advertisements in The Australian on August 5 and 6 announcing Barrie Kosky’s production of Saul as the centrepiece of the 2017 Festival had been booked “well in advance of Bill Leak’s disgraceful cartoon”.

“The Adelaide Festival does not endorse the sentiments of Bill Leak’s cartoon. The Festival deplores all forms of racism and editorial commentary that vilifies Australia’s First Nations people: it betrays the complex economic, social, and cultural issues that face many Indigenous communities with racist stereotypes,” said the statement. “The Adelaide Festival and the Artistic Directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy have a long history of providing a platform for contemporary Indigenous creative expression, and will continue to do this proudly into the future. It is through the power of creative storytelling that the diversity of indigenous history and experiences have most successfully been shared with the broader Australian community.”

Meanwhile, in a social media campaign people have been posting loving family photographs with the hashtag #IndigenousDads. Playwright Nakkiah Lui posted photographs of herself and her father on Twitter. Dancer/actor Hunter Page-Lochard shared a photograph of his father Stephen Page, Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, tweeting: “This is my Indigenous dad…. And no, that’s not beer in his hand, it’s a Helpmann award.” Ray Giffen, the creator of the ABC TV series Cleverman about an Indigenous superhero posted a photograph of himself and his son. “No [sic] only I know my son’s name but I named a superhero after him #IndigenousDads #Cleverman” he tweeted.

Despite widespread criticism that the cartoon was racist, Leak and The Australian’s editor-in-chief Paul Whittaker have defended the decision to publish it. Writing in The Australian on Friday, Leak described his critics as “sanctimonious Tweety birds” having a tantrum and put up a new version of the cartoon showing himself being handed over by an Indigenous policeman to a man in a Twitter T-shirt with a club and a noose. “I was trying to say that if you think things are pretty crook for the children locked up in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from,” said Leak.

The Australian issued a statement saying: “Bill Leak’s confronting and insightful cartoons force people to examine core issues in a way that sometimes reporting and analysis can fail to do.” However, Roy Ah-See, Chairman of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, was quoted by the ABC as saying: “This type of cartoon helps no-one. In actual fact, it stokes the fire of racism and it plays into the stereotypical views of a lot of non-Aboriginal people don’t have a place in this society.”

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