“They just got us all in our bathers with all these other girls and boys and chucked us into the jacuzzi. These young Christians. We were just teenagers. We were like rabbits. It was so wrong and we didn’t know what our bodies were doing and no-one was explaining it to us.”

This is an excerpt from Oslo’s tell-all interview in the Dream Burnie book. There is something brilliantly charming, offbeat and intensely insightful about Oslo’s illustrations and cartoons. His artful comics have been published all over Melbourne, most notably in the ‘Overheard’ cartoon in the Sunday Age, where he visualises a colourful conversation witnessed in public.

Oslo Davis - Hire Me (2024) — Hire Me (2024)

His formative years (as Paul Davis) were spent navigating the tumultuous polluted undertows and religious overtones of a fairly conservative and working-class North-West Coast of Tasmania. Sex, death and the Burnie Park. It’s all there, seen through the soft lens of a greasy Datsun 200B windshield.

“I took Mum’s Datsun with friends and trashed it in the bush going down dirt roads,” Oslo laughs. “I remember driving my car way too fast. If you’d been drinking all night and went to bed at one and woke up at six, I didn’t realise you could still be drunk the next morning. It could have gone so bad.”

“Burnie seemed to encourage it, in a way. That messy world.”

Oslo’s art is wobbly yet sharp. Scuzzy and searing. He is Tasmania’s answer to David Shrigley. A wry, whimsical observer, wielding his pen as a battle-axe. Oslo draws parallels between the Jewish community’s iconic sense of humour and the prevalence of trauma in Tasmania. He’s funny like that.

“I remember really loving Woody Allen films when I was in high school. I found a connection with his dry, sarcastic, witty, pathetic, weaselly jokes. Looking at it now, a fifteen-year-old kid from Wynyard getting into the Upper West Side Jewish humour of New York is kind of bizarre. Maybe there is that gallows humour that he built a career on. A lot of jokes about persecution and misery. Perhaps there’s something relatable there.”