Restless spirit.(Will Dyson: Australia's Radical Genius)(Book review)

Will Dyson: Australia's Radical Genius, by Ross McMullin; Scribe, 2006, $59.95.

WILL DYSON was one of the first of the talented Australian satirists who. made it on the world scene; alternatively one of the most notable of the network of artists, writers and political activists who flowered in Edwardian Melbourne, with its proliferating "little" magazines. His metier was black-and-white cartooning and etching, though he was a fair hand too as a poet and writer.

His best friend in youth was Norman Lindsay. He married Ruby Lindsay, sister of Norman and Lionel and a notable artist herself. His own sister married the socialist and School Paper cartoonist Dick Ovenden, known to generations of children. Other close mates were C.J. Dennis and Vance Palmer.

Like many of the others, Dyson was a "radical" in the old sense, in his youth an ardent socialist close to the Marxist Victorian Socialist Party circle, though he later moderated and seemed to lose his way politically, a supporter of the Social Credit movement of the interwar years that deteriorated into quackery.

His greatest achievement was as the Australian war artist on the Western Front during the First World War, where his sketches and etchings convey the horrors and bravery of the time as memorably as anybody has. Most of these are with the War Memorial in Canberra, though mainly in storage.

Bill, as contemporaries knew him, went to London in 1909 and quickly became perhaps the most prominent of its left-wing artists and cartoonists, welcomed in the ranks of the socialist and Labor pioneers who were then leading a revolution in British working-class sentiment, away from the historic cap-doffing tendencies towards the eventual day of the obdurate "Pommy shop steward" (and in turn much later, Margaret Thatcher).

His main employer was the Labour Herald, sometimes a daily, in more difficult times a weekly, but after the First World War the semi-commercial pro-Labour Daily Herald. It was reasonably prosperous at its peak, but struggling by the 1960s when it became the Sun and soon the most lowbrow of Rupert Murdoch's stable.