Sam Wallman is a writer and illustrator based in Naarm / Melbourne, on unceded Wurunderji country. He is a member of Workers Art Collective and the Maritime Union of Australia.
Sam is a committed unionist, having worked as an organiser for the United Workers Union, and a delegate on the shop floor prior to that. Over the last fifteen years, he has drawn for hundreds of trade unions and worker organisations around the world, and currently works out of an art studio in Melbourne’s Trades Hall, the oldest union hall in the world.
His work has been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, Labor Notes, the Age, the ABC and SBS. Three of his pieces of long-form comics-journalism have been nominated for Walkley Awards, including 'Winding Up The Window: The End of the Australian Auto Industry' and 'A Guard's Story: At Work in our Detention Centres', which won the 2014 Human Rights Award in the Media category.
His first long-form book, ‘Our Members Be Unlimited: A Comic about Workers and their Unions’ (Scribe Publications) was published in Australia, New Zealand, England, the US and Canada in 2022, and was nominated for a Victorian Premiers Prize, the Queensland Literary Award, and the Small Press Network’s Book of the Year 2023. It won Best Designed Fully Illustrated Book Award at the Australian Book Design Awards (2023), and received a Merit Commendation at the Australian Graphic Design Association Awards (2023).
His second book ‘12 Rules for Strife’ (Scribe Publications, 2024), was produced in collaboration with writer Jeff Sparrow. It was released in 2024 in Australia and North America, and will be translated into Greek for European publication later this year.
He is currently working on ‘All Out’, a book about the Pink Bans, to be published in 2025 by National Library of Australia Publishing and PM Press in the US.
In 2015, he was dispatched to Eastern European border camps by SBS, to produce a graphic essay called ‘Brick by Brick: Is This Really Europe?'. In 2016 he worked in the US, capturing everyday people's responses to Donald Trumps' Presidential election campaign for Australian, Italian and American media outlets. Around 2018, he spent a year working as a picker at Australia’s first Amazon warehouse. This experience formed the backbone of his first book.
Sam has presented work at the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Sydney Opera House, Dark Mofo, the Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, Old Parliament House, the British Library, the Labor Notes Conference in the United States and the Internazionale Journalism Festival in Italy.
Sam was the recipient of the 2022 Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli Fellowship for Writers at the Centre for Stories in Perth, and the 2023 Creative Arts Fellowship at the National Library of Australia.
He has worked for Overland Literary Journal for almost 15 years - previously as Art Editor, then a Contributing Editor, and now as a monthly contributor to the publication.
He co-founded the Workers Art Collective art studio at Victorian Trades Hall in 2014, where he continues to work. He works part-time as a wharfie / longshoreman.
The majority of his art is funded by supporters via Patreon. You can pledge to support him for $2 a month here if you like.
