In the 2002 Queen's Birthday and Golden Jubilee Honours, Ball was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services as a cartoonist.
He grew up in New Zealand before spending some years in Australia and South Africa, where he attended Parktown Boys' High School and finished his education.
Ball's early cartoons often had political overtones; his mid-70s UK strips included All the King's Comrades, Stanley often expresses left-wing attitudes, and he described himself in the introduction to The Sisterhood (1993) as a socialist, and he was avidly anti-apartheid while in South Africa.
[4] Tributes paid to him included these:[5] Murray was a great influence to many Australian cartoonists and will be long remembered by his friends across the sea here in Australia.Ball was funny and goofy and generous, and incredibly serious about inequalitySheer brillianceAfter 1975 Ball wrote several comics in New Zealand (for instance 'Nature Calls'), but it was in 1976 that he first published the strip Footrot Flats in Wellington's afternoon newspaper, The Evening Post.
Footrot Flats characters include Wal, Dog, Cooch, Cheeky Hobson, Aunt Dolly, Horse, Pongo, Rangi, Charlie, Major, Jess and the Murphy family of Irish and Hunk and Spit.
"The heart of a cartoon is the idea, an artist can create a painting, hang it on the wall and be satisfied with what he has achieved even if no-one else sees it.
In an interview on Radio New Zealand National on 27 January 2016, Pam said that Murray's health had been poor for the last six years and that he was suffering from dementia.