I wasn’t good at school – St. Mary’s, Ascot Vale – but was top of the class in Art and Religious Instruction.

Later on in secondary school I was very good at general knowledge, all pinched from reading Disney and Classic comics. At school I found History very much a mystery and couldn’t remember names or dates. Then one day in 5th Form, our history teacher brought in old copies of Punch Magazine to illustrate his lesson on Disraeli’s Prime Ministership.

Suddenly I understood.

I understood History as I’d never done before, because of those old cartoons. History was now talking my language! I suppose I was just one of those kids who learn by visualising things. After school I had many jobs, mostly labouring, gardening, Whelan the Wrecker, ‘garbo’, Railway Linesman’s Assistant and Ward Assistant in Willsmere Mental Hospital.
I kept reading comics into my twenties, got married and had four children – two girls followed by two boys.

And, then one day at R.M.I.T. during a Comic Conference, I met John Ryan who had just published his book on Australian Comics “Panel by Panel”.

We talked, and I said we should set up a museum/archive of comics and cartoons to help all those kids who weren’t any good at school. He said he would return to Melbourne in two weeks and discuss how to set it up. One week later I read of his death in The Age newspaper.

Something went off in my imagination, probably one of those light bulbs that you see in comics when somebody gets an idea.

I immediately went in to McGill’s Newsagent opposite the P.M.G. in Elizabeth Street and purchased all the interstate papers I could get my hands on. After two weeks the papers piled up and my wife asked me where the money was going. When I reluctantly told her, she hit the roof, and in the middle of this all out blue, her father rang and offered me a job as a cleaner on the planes at Ansett. I felt someone upstairs was looking after me, sending manna (cartoons) from heaven, because every time I ever went to the airport people left interstate papers lying around everywhere. So, now I would get them all for free. I would remove the newspapers from the planes and in between flights I would tear out the cartoons and date them.

Some days I took home between 200 – 400 clippings.

That was 35 years ago! Now I have the biggest collection of cartoons in the Southern Hemisphere. I’ve published books, curated exhibitions, given talks and taught all sorts of subjects in schools, all using cartoons. And, now thanks to Hume U3A (University of the Third Age) I take a class called “The History of Everything”, where we use cartoons to talk about our personal history within the big history that’s all around us.

We are now an Incorporated Not-for-Profit association called “The Australian Cartoon Museum Inc.” since 2011.

We have the biggest Australian Cartoon Website:

www.theaustraliancartoonmuseum.com.au

which is a blog and an online magazine called “The Cartoon Muse”. We do exhibitions but we don’t yet have our own building to house the archive.

This year we have plans for five exhibitions which hopefully will also travel around the world.

As Australia has the shortest history of any country on top of the oldest existing culture on earth and Australians don’t really know either of them. We want to change that using cartoons and we also want to raise the standard of visual literacy in Education in this country.

A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words but a cartoon in my opinion is worth much more!

Jim Bridges, President of the Australian Cartoon Museum