Wedd was born in
Glebe, New South Wales on 5 January 1921. As a school boy he was instructed in art by
Oswald Brock. He left high school during the
Great Depression and worked as a junior poster artist at Hackett Offset Printing Company before becoming a designer and illustrator for a furniture manufacturer, Corkhill & Lang (later Frazer's Furniture). After Nicholls closed his comic line, Wedd began supplying comics to Elmsdale Publications, including
Tod Trail and
Kirk Raven. for which he was paid £160 per issue.
Captain Justice appeared in the ''
Woman's Day magazine in September 1964, where it ran until April 1965. The strip ran uninterrupted for two years. Wedd retired from comics in July 1977, after working on the Ned Kelly
comic strip for 146 weeks. Replacing Ned Kelly
was another Wedd strip about bushrangers, Bold Ben Hall, which followed the same approach and format, running for 400 episodes. This was subsequently followed with another equally long running strip, The Birth of a Nation'', devised to coincide with
Australia's bicentennial celebrations in 1988. The strip was syndicated to several newspapers, and was later issued as a two-volume book,
The Making of a Nation, (self-published by Wedd) in 1988. Wedd's work has appeared in a range of Australian newspapers, including Sydney
Daily Mirror,
Sunday Telegraph,
The Sunday Territorian and
Sunday Mail. Wedd was a long time member and former vice-president of the
Black and White Artists' Club, and lived at
Williamtown, New South Wales. In 1993 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services as author, illustrator and historian. He won Stanley Awards in 1987 and 1989. In 2004 he received the Jim Russell Award for "significant contribution" to the cartooning industry from the Australian Cartoonists Association.
Personal Wedd married Dorothy and they had four children, more than 20 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. In 1960 the couple founded a museum dedicated to the Australian military at their home at
Narraweena, on Sydney's northern beaches. When they ran out of space it was moved and rebuilt at their property in
Williamtown. The Monarch Historical Museum re-opened at its current location in November 1988. Wedd died on 4 May 2012 at a nursing home in
Fingal Bay. ==Bibliography==