Well the judging was done in just under two hours. The winners can be found at the National Schools Cartooning Competition website. There were a couple of hundred entries to scan through and the primary school entries were absolutely amazing. I'm surprised that the better cartoons, gag wise, were from primary schools and not the secondary. Not that there weren't any great ones there but the level of humor is vastly different and certainly is outstanding in the competitions finalists. There were the usual political cartoons submitted. In the primary entries there was one entry labelled Bin Laden as a 3 yr old with a picture of a small child in robes throwing a paper aeroplane at two tall piles of lego stacked on the opposite sides of the room. Now I didn't know how to take it at first but then you could read it in many different ways. Was the child trying to convey to us that this person has had ill intentions since a young age? Were they referring to his bad upbringing? I came to the conclusion that this was one of the best cartoons I had seen. It made a political comment and as I stood there watching the reaction from other judges, it appeared that it hit the sore spot at first but made them think twice. And that is the impact an editorial cartoonist should have. We encountered the same issue with Princess Di's death. The hardest part is that we are so far away from these issues and with our battler instict we are from a society that can only show our pain through humour. Unfortunately it is the case that our colleagues abroad do not share or understand the way in which we prefer to deal with our losses. It's a hard thing to describe as I type but in general what I think I am trying to say is that we share the same feelings as those who have been mourning but deal with it in our own way.
Nonetheless there are more cartoons to see at the website if you are keen to see the work of these students. National Schools Cartooning Competition .
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