Garrick Tremain’s Final Deadline
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Cartoonist Garrick Tremain is 84, widowed and fighting a highly aggressive form of cancer, but he has not lost his sense of humour.
Take this example. The local museum in Arrowtown asked him which night would be best for the launch of his new book.
“Which knight?” he replied. “You’d better make it Sir Grahame Sydney because Sir Michael Hill is dead now.”
And so it happened. Sydney, a very good friend, wrote the foreword to Tremain’s new book, an autobiography titled This is it Then. After that, he introduced a man who does not need much of an introduction in Otago.
Phillip Matthews at New Zealand’s The Press profiles Garrick Tremain (or here) as the editorial cartoonist faces his end times:
The book was written quickly and self-published because there is a very real deadline.
About a year ago, Tremain learned he has angiosarcoma, which he says affects about one in a million people. The timing was cruel as well, coming just weeks after the death of his wife, Jill. She died just shy of their 60th wedding anniversary.
Tremain resolved to do nothing about the cancer, but when he took his two adult daughters with him to Dunedin Hospital, “they wailed like banshees”. So he agreed to an operation, but not chemotherapy or radiation.
A six-hour surgery did the trick, but he was told there was a 50% chance the cancer would come back. And so it has.
The article also puts a spotlight on Tremain’s end of employment at the Otago Daily Times:
But his long career with the Otago Daily Times ended in 2019 following a controversial cartoon about the measles outbreak in Samoa.
The newspaper buckled following protests from a “rent a crowd” in Dunedin.
“They got their pants scared off them,” Tremain says. “It was not some sort of racial comment.”
The newspaper’s editors told him he could continue only if they agreed on a cartoon topic in advance. Tremain was not amused.
That was when he quit.
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