Peter Bromhead – RIP
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New Zealand cartoonist and designer Peter Bromhead has passed away.
Peter Bromhead
May 31, 1933 – August 25, 2026
From Gavin Ellis at Knightly Views:
“Peter Bromhead, the cartoonist who has died at the age of 93, would have appreciated the irony in the fact that his only newspaper obituary of any substance was written for the title he spent years competing against…and they put it behind their paywall.
“Shayne Currie wrote a commendable tribute to Bromhead for the New Zealand Herald…”
Shayne Currie for The New Zealand Herald in their obituary listed the papers he worked for (or here):
“Bromhead’s work – wry,…often minimalist cartoons of politicians and other wobbly characters – featured in New Zealand’s major newspapers and publications across many decades, including the [New Zealand] Herald, Herald on Sunday, Sunday Star-Times, Dominion, Truth and Listener.
“He was the daily editorial cartoonist for Auckland’s former evening newspaper, the Auckland Star, for some 15 years from the early 1970s.”
According to Wikipedia Bromhead’s Aukland Star tenure ran from 1973 to 1989. The Alexander Turnbull Library, where his archives reside, notes his first cartoon appeared in 1954 in the New Zealand Listener.
Jim Tucker Media gives a thorough run down of Bromhead’s career and life in New Zealand.
“In his autobiography, Bromhead, Scratching A Living, the cartoonist, designer and successful entrepreneur tells how his publishers withdrew one of his books from the shops, and had the rest of the print-run pulped. Called The King and the Dragon, it was a cartoon story clearly about Muldoon – and perhaps crossed a line between comment and defamation. In his biography, he says he believed Muldoon was responsible. Yet at least Muldoon said what he thought.”
“Bromhead reckons politicians in general don’t like him, many have said his deliberately simplistic cartoons did not resemble them. “They used to ask me up to [Parliament’s restaurant] Bellamys a lot [so he could see what they looked like]. But of course it was deliberate, it was just my way of insulting them,” he says.”
Bromhead’s Instagram account has some of his more recent thoughts.
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