A man whose pseudonym is Johnny La Rue is holding a yellowed magazine with two toad-headed lovers embracing on the front. He reads aloud a headline that would likely trigger a firestorm on social media were it written today.
“Who wrote that?!” he exclaims.
“Definitely not me,” his friend and collaborator, Steven Stockwell, says innocently.
Instead he’s pointing at a double-page feature. Its intent appears to be to track an ideological path connecting the first “blood crazed Imperialist lackeys” who commanded the penal colony of Brisbane to the sunshine state’s peanut-growing former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. But the article is largely obscured by the cartoon of a man with bulging eyes and sweat leaping from his face.
“The wash [the late cartoonist] Damien [Ledwich] put over my story on Queensland paranoia made it totally unreadable,” Stockwell laughs. “How ironic!”
“Oooff,” winces writer and cartoonist Deborah Brown, flicking through another faded edition. “I wonder if this would fly these days?
“Would I have been cancelled for that?”
The magazines belong to the back catalogue of the Cane Toad Times, a satirical publication spawned in the febrile underground of 1970s Bjelke-Petersen-era Brisbane.
As to whether or not it would be cancelled in this, the year 2024, La Rue, Stockwell, Brown and the rest of the knot of old toads behind the CTT are about to find out.
That’s because 34 years after the magazine went into hibernation and this ragtag collective of cartoonists, writers and radicals pursued respectable careers, the toad has awoken.
And this time, with a lick of artificial intelligence-powered art generators, the warty amphibians are pictured as giants being revived by defibrillators and sporting jackalope horns as they breathe fire and ride the four skeletal horses of the apocalypse.
For this is the newly revived magazine’s “end times” edition.
“Mostly it’s a commentary on the ludicrous, the age of misinformation and disinformation, the climate crises, corporate greed, the post-truth world and the many, many things that we as young activists thought we would have fixed by now,” Brown says. “Like gender equality and racism and so on.
“But we’ve also all aged so much it might be our last hurrah!”
When not doodling cartoons and penning the odd pseudonymous insight into the maddening world of the modern academic campus, Brown moonlights as a philosophy professor at the University of Queensland.
Her published books include Descartes and the Ontology of Everyday Life; among her chapters in collaborative works is Agency and Attention in Malebranche’s Theory of Cognition.
“I’ve written on humour and the importance of ridicule as well,” she says of her academic CV. “Ridicule is very powerful against oppressive forces.”
While this professor took momentary leave from academia to work on a magazine to which she last contributed as an undergraduate, others had a bit more time on their hands.
Stockwell has retired from his role as associate professor in journalism and communication at Griffith University and recently released a book of sonnets inspired by the ancient Phoenicians. Earlier this year, he gave a lecture entitled “How to Be a Bard” at a medieval festival in Caboolture.
Stockwell played a pivotal role in the second revival of the magazine for its second run from 1983 to 1990 and says much of the fun of the 21st-century revival was getting the band back together.
“One of the best things we did was find Lisa Smith, who had been a very keen illustrator in the 80s,” he says. “Eventually, we tracked her down in Berlin.”
Other returning contributors included the biologist and award-winning science writer Tim Low. In 1985, Low wrote a guide to edible weeds in the CTT – in this edition he contributes a guide to safely foraging while the radioactive dust of a nuclear apocalypse is still falling.
“Not to worry,” Low writes. “There are ample stores of starch secured deep within the trunks of palm trees.”
But just as rewarding, Stockwell says, was unearthing a new generation of contributors “with totally new takes on cane toad themes”.
“Jack Daly’s done a couple of strips about ‘The Enlightened Centrist’,” Stockwell says. “And Mic Smith has these wacky ibis characters getting into all kinds of shenanigans.”
He says this is a continuation of the ethos of the CTT of the 80s.
“People were in their 20s and 30s … and it was a good opportunity for a lot of people to try out their writing skills and their drawing, cartooning skills in a place where there wasn’t a lot of judgment,” he says. “If things hung together, people would tell you: ‘you got something happening here’.”
“It was a pretty positive environment to get your work out into the public eye.”
The CTT may have embraced modern technology in putting together this most recent edition, but that definition of the public eye remains unapologetically 20th century.
Stockwell says, for now, the magazine will remain purely offline in an attempt to “go back to the joys of the magazine”.
“I’m very happy with the way the physical object has come together,” he says. “It looks great on the eye and has its own distinctive smell.
“Those are the sorts of things you don’t get on the internet.”
