''Ben Bowyang'' was an Australian newspaper

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...

, first published in the ''

Melbourne Herald ''The Herald'' was a morning – and later – evening broadsheet newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia, from 3 January 1840 to 5 October 1990. It later merged with its sister morning newspaper ''The Sun News-Pictorial'' to form the ''Her ...

'' on Saturday, 7 October 1933, created by the cartoonist Alex Gurney, that followed the misadventures of two archetypical Australian bushmen, Ben Bowyang and his

mate Mate may refer to: Science * Mate, one of a pair of animals involved in: ** Mate choice, intersexual selection *** Mate choice in humans ** Mating * Multi-antimicrobial extrusion protein, or MATE, an efflux transporter family of proteins Pers ...

, Bill Smith, of "Gunn's Gully": characters that first appeared in the humorous ''Herald'' columns written during the 1920s and 1930s by

C. J. Dennis Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis (7 September 1876 – 22 June 1938), better known as C. J. Dennis, was an Australian poet and journalist known for his best-selling verse novel ''The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke'' (1915). Alongside ...

Ben Bowyang

Ben Bowyang, a philosophical farmer from "Gunn's Gully" first appeared as the author of "A Letter from the Bush" in C.J. Dennis's regular ''Herald'' column, ''The Mooch of Life'' on 12 June 1922. The characters, Ben Bowyang and Bill Smith, featured in so many of the comical letters published in Dennis' columns, and became such favourites among the ''Herald's'' readers that, a year later, the ''Herald's'' resident caricaturist

Samuel Garnet Wells Samuel Garnet Wells (a.k.a. Samuel Garnet Smith-Wells) (2 February 1885 – 12 March 1972) was an Australian cartoonist, caricaturist, artist, and draughtsman. Over a career of almost half a century, he worked at the '' Williamstown Chronicle'' ...

pretended to have visited Gunn's Gully "Correspondents have frequently asked what Ben Bowyang and Bill Smith are like. This is Wells's impression of them after a visit to Gunns Gully" and presented 'caricatures' of the fictional pair, as if they were, indeed, real people. Ten years later, based upon Dennis' columns and Well's (1923) caricatures, Gurney (at the time also a ''Herald'' employee) went on to create the characters for his successful comic strip.

Gurney's comic strip

Prompted by the fact that the last-ever letter written by Ben Bowyang, appeared in the ''Herald'' on Saturday, 30 September 1933, and the need for a seamless transition, Gurney's first daily strip was published in ''The Herald'' a week later, on Saturday, 7 October 1933. On Thursday, 23 November 1933, the Adelaide weekly, '' The Chronicle'', published the first of its regular single page presentations of five Gurney strips, each of which had, independently, appeared earlier in the Melbourne ''Herald''.

Later artists

The strip was also drawn by Mick Armstrong, Keith Martin, Sir

Lionel Lindsay Sir Lionel Arthur Lindsay (17 October 187422 May 1961) was an Australian artist, known for his paintings and etchings. Early life Lindsay was born in the Victoria (Australia), Victorian town of Creswick, Victoria, Creswick, into a creative f ...

, Alex McRae, and

Peter Russell-Clarke Peter Russell-Clarke (born 19 September 1935) is an Australian chef, cookbook writer, illustrator and media personality Biography Clarke is best known for his television cooking shows. He hosted a five-minute television show called '' Come a ...

. It ceased publication in 1979.

References

Australian comic strips 1933 comics debuts 1979 comics endings Gag-a-day comics Bowyang, Ben Bowyang, Ben Australian comics characters Bowyang, Ben Comics set in Australia {{Comic-strip-stub

Ben Bowyang

Gurney's comic strip

Later artists

See also

References