Unfriendly Fire

In August 2018 Ben Roberts-Smith VC launched an unsuccessful civil defamation suit in the Federal Court of Australia against three newspapers who alleged that he had committed war crimes while on active service in Afghanistan. Peter Lewis’s cartoon appropriates a larger-than-life Michael Zavros portrait of Roberts-Smith, commissioned by the Australian War Memorial. The price tag alludes to the tens of millions of dollars spent on Robert-Smith’s legal proceedings.