Australian cartoonist, filmmaker and satirist Bruce Petty has died at the age of 93.

In a statement, his family said Petty died peacefully this morning.

“He leaves behind his loving family and will be dearly missed,” the statement said.

Born in Melbourne’s north-east suburb of Doncaster in 1929, Petty began his art career at an animation studio in Box Hill in 1949.

He travelled overseas where his work was published in magazines such as The New Yorker and Esquire, before returning to Australia to establish himself as a prominent political cartoonist.

Petty was a cartoonist for The Age and The Australian, known for his sharp satire of Australian and world politics with artwork peeling back the curtain on the machinery of politics.

“I suppose it is traditional that political cartoonists take on people with power in the community,” Petty said in his bio for The Age.

“There is now even more important, more anonymous, figures who run our global, corporate world … We [cartoonists] keep drawing politicians but the real power is often with a different set of people. We draw them as a vague, ominous people.”

In 1977, Petty won an Academy Award for his short film Leisure, although according to Petty he never received the statuette.

“When I got it, the Oscar went to the producer. We got a picture of it, a very nice gold-framed picture,” Petty told The Age in 2004.

Petty was also the recipient of a Silver Stanley Award by the Australian Cartooning Association in 2001, a Quill Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 and a Walkley Award in 2016.