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Early Career
Born in Adelaide, Australia in 1935, Patrick Bruce Oliphant began to draw at an early age, inspired by his father's work as a government draftsman. Never a fan of higher education, he had no interest in college and decided early on to become a journalist. But it was not long before he found his home in the adjacent arena of editorial cartooning, honing his craft at the Adelaide Advertiser.
Oliphant has often described his early career as frustrating, due to the Advertiser's conservative editorial board, which regularly rejected his visual commentaries on national political controversies. This environmental stifled the young artist: "I had to wring [the cartoons] out. It was like wringing out a bottle." An international trip in 1959 convinced him that the place he would work best was the United States, where the politics were global and, crucially, the ideal of free speech had more influence on the newspaper industry. |