

In January the cartoonist Michael Leunig was going about his more physical labour on his farm in north-east Victoria.

As he climbed into an underground bushfire shelter the steel trapdoor crashed down on him, "due to a design fault and my negligence".

Distracted by excruciating pain in his right wrist, he didn't realise he had also been hit on the head and was suffering concussion and bleeding on the brain.

Four weeks later he had a seizure and passed out – fortunately in the presence of a friend who was a former nurse – and woke up in an ambulance, which sped him to hospital for emergency surgery.