Poster Boy

by Peter Drew

  I sat down at the table. ‘Why’s he always like this?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, but there was something in her demeanour that suggested she did know. So I waited.

  Then she came out with it.

  ‘You know he tried to leave us when you were little, don’t you?’

  I stared at her. ‘No …’ I said.

  ‘You would have been two, because it was just after Simon was born. He shacked up with an English girl he met on a diving trip. You can’t remember?’

  ‘No,’ I said again.

  ‘Well, Julian might remember because he would have been four. But you have to promise not to mention anything.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said without thinking.

  My dad was a high school art teacher, but his real passion was marine archaeology. He, along with his mates, had discovered and dived on dozens of shipwrecks in South Australia and the Solomon Islands. He was a real adventurer and he loved history. So it was a particular sting to discover that the thing I admired about him the most was also the source of our family dysfunction. But Mum was just getting started.

  ‘He was fooling around on this dive trip and everyone knew what was going on! These people were my friends too.’

  I could feel everything inside me flipping upside down. For as long as I could remember I’d resented my mother’s dominance. I could never understand why she gave Dad such a hard time and why he never stuck up for himself. I just thought she’s mean and he’s gutless, and that was that. But now I could see that she was still hurt by his betrayal and I suddenly understood why she didn’t have any friends. How could she trust anyone after that?

  ‘I asked them, “Who is she?” because Dad had moved in with her, leaving me with you three boys! I got her name and contacted her parents back in England and told them, “Your daughter is destroying my family.” Well, they set her straight and Dad came home. I mean, she was ten years younger than him!’

  I imagined my dad walking back into the house with his tail between his legs and everything suddenly made sense.

  I asked Mum whether she’d forgiven him and she said yes, but I knew it wasn’t true.

  ‘You can’t mention any of this to your brothers,’ she said again, and I agreed. At the time it seemed like the obvious course of inaction. There was no way we could talk about it. The only safe topic for passionate discussion in our house was politics. But for a rare moment my mum was speaking openly. I knew it wouldn’t last.

  ‘I had an affair too,’ she blurted out, apparently eager to unload all her baggage at once.

  ‘What?’ I said, dumbly.

  Mum nodded. ‘It happened years before any of you boys were born.’

  ‘Does Dad know?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, biting her lip.

  I asked her more questions but she was beginning to close up again. Her answers became shorter and shorter. We were standing in silence when we heard the front door open. A moment later Dad was in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s going to cost $600,’ he said angrily, but I could tell he was calming down. My parents retreated to opposite ends of the house and I caught a bus back to my place. My head was spinning the whole way home and it didn’t stop until I told my wife the story. Julie understood and I felt better, but I never spoke to my dad about it and I didn’t paint a roller that night.

  So why am I telling you about this family mess? Well, it’s hardly a coincidence that I spent the next six years of my life digging up and confronting Australia’s troubled history in a series of public art projects, while simultaneously avoiding any confrontation with my dad. You might say it was a classic case of Freudian displacement and sublimation, but stock psychological explanations only help in retrospect. At the time I felt as though I were groping in the dark at a redemption-shaped object that kept getting bigger and bigger.

  Why redemption? Because part of me believed that I could fix my dad’s mistake. If I worked hard enough at something really impressive, maybe Dad and Mum would have nothing to regret. Maybe their mistakes could be erased. But that was only half the chip on my shoulder. The other half was my drive to abandon them. If I worked hard enough at something really impressive, maybe I would reach such an altitude that none of their emotions could touch me. Both halves motivated the same basic imperative: Work hard. Be impressive.

  At that stage of my career I rejected overtly political art. Propaganda seemed distastefully one-dimensional. I disliked the sanctimony and the instruction. Even parodies of political art seemed lazy and sarcastic. But I was about to learn that politics can’t be avoided, and why should it be? Why let taste interfere with my growing need to be impressive?

  I couldn’t have guessed that I was going to Scotland to become an Australian – and nearly get kicked out of art school.

  Becoming Australian

  Adelaide is a boring city. That’s what everyone says, anyway. Sadly, Julie and I had bought into the lie, so we applied to study at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art. Julie was accepted with a small scholarship for her work in fashion. I was merely accepted. We couldn’t have been more excited. We were getting the fuck out of Adelaide!

  We’d been to Glasgow on our honeymoon two years previously. It must have been the one weekend of the year that Scotland enjoys decent weather, because we were smitten with the place. Once the second city in the British Empire, Glasgow today is half the size of Adelaide and struggling to reinvent itself. In its heyday it was the shipbuilding centre of the world, with direct sailings from Glasgow to Adelaide. In the mid nineteenth century, one in every ten Adelaidians had been born in Scotland. For some reason there’s never been much traffic in the opposite direction. Unless otherwise stated, the rest of this chapter takes place in the rain.

  I’d been accepted into the art school on the merits of my uncommissioned (illegal) street art projects, so I expected they wouldn’t mind those shenanigans continuing in Glasgow. The school provided me with a small studio where I could prepare my work. The city itself provided plenty of ugly walls that could only be improved by street art. Over the next few months my posters could be seen all over Glasgow. I was in heaven – until the media noticed.

  I like being in newspapers. I like reading the fumbling quotes from city councillors who say, ‘Obviously the images are of artistic merit, but they were installed illegally so fumble, fumble.’ I like putting people into a position where they’re forced to admit that they value property over expression. That’s what graffiti and street art are all about. That’s what my art school thesis was all about. Unfortunately my supervisor hadn’t read it, because the day I appeared in the Scottish Herald, she cracked the shits.

  ‘Peter, you’ve had your fun but now you need to stop,’ she said as we sat in her office.

  ‘But that’s what I came here to do,’ I said petulantly.

  ‘No, Peter. You’re here to complete my course, which you will not be allowed to do if you continue with these … illegal activities. We’ve been very tolerant but enough is enough.’

  When you’re 10,000 miles from home with 12,000 pounds invested in a degree that’s going to add absolutely nothing to your employability, silly threats become ominous. There had been zero complaints about my work. I’d deliberately switched to paste-ups, a paper-based form of street art that’s easily removed. Everybody liked them, yet the school seemed serious about kicking me out.

  I considered stopping, but at the time the street art was the only thing that made me happy. My other passion of washing dishes for six pounds an hour had given me dermatitis on both arms. I was smoking constantly and feeling depressed. We can all agree that depression is boring, so I did the mature thing and twisted my depression into anger. What added to my agitation was the situation back in Australia.

  Ever since arriving in Glasgow I’d become ‘the Australian guy’. The label gets imposed upon you. It forces you to think about what it means to be Australian, what you like about your homeland and what you’d lik
e to change. I decided to take ownership of that label. After all, I was Australian.

  But 2013 was the year of a contentious federal election in Australia. Both major parties were promising to ‘stop the boats’. That anti-immigration slogan struck me as particularly absurd coming from a nation of immigrants. So I made this …

  … and took the train down to London to stick up a few dozen posters. It felt great to blow off some steam, but I’ll never forget a man I met that night. He asked me what my poster meant. He was a black guy. Middle-aged. Thick London accent. I told him the poster was about asylum seekers being prevented from entering Australia.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Keep the country pure.’

  ‘What?’ I said, confused.

  ‘I think it’s good. They need to stop ’em, or else it’s chaos.’

  ‘But the poster’s about the Aborigines,’ I said dumbly.

  ‘Yeah, I get it. But what happened to them was going to happen no matter what. What’s happening now is different,’ he replied.

  I thought about that man on the train back to Glasgow. I knew my poster would amuse the cynical, but the design had little persuasive power. It sneered at the dark irony of Australia’s identity but failed to cross the political divide. I tried to think about it practically. Functionally. But my mind went to the obvious place. Empathy is the key, I thought with glowing satisfaction. But my revelation would have to wait. It was time to deal with the school.

  I went back to the newspaper and told them about the school’s threat to kick me out over the very thing they’d embraced me for. Unsurprisingly, the story blew up. I was contacted by a popular Brooklyn-based blog and pretty soon everyone was talking about it. The school didn’t like that. They asked me to come in for another meeting.

  ‘Every time someone googles our name, that story is the first thing they’ll see!’ the head of school said.

  ‘Well, if you’re embarrassed, maybe you shouldn’t do embarrassing things,’ I suggested.

  But I was over it. They were petty. I was petty. The whole thing was stupid. I feel obliged to tell you only because at the time I felt like the world was about to cave in. But it didn’t. I agreed to stop putting up my posters for the last month of school and they actually gave me a decent mark. Looking back, I regret irritating my teachers, but it’s my nature. I seek out and learn from conflict and I learnt a lot from Glasgow. I learnt to humiliate the petty inflexibility of power. I had a new tool, but I still lacked the confidence to find out what it could really do.

  The Burden of Empathy

  After a year in Glasgow, Julie and I came home to Tony Abbott’s Australia.

  We had a plan to save up fast and bounce back to London. We were determined to charge ahead with our glorious careers, but after a few months the strangest thing happened. We discovered that Adelaide wasn’t boring anymore! Maybe it had barely changed and we’d just been jerks all along? Who can say? The important thing was we were ready to stay put. After years of flighty excuses we were ready to commit to our work … I needed a new project.

  I thought about the man I met in London who wanted to keep the country ‘pure’. The word ‘empathy’ popped back into my head and I had an idea. I went to an art supplies shop and bought twenty books and twenty pens. I contacted a community group called the Hills Circle of Friends and told them I wanted to meet some asylum seekers. The books and pens were for them. I wrote a note that read: Please tell me your story with pictures. I will make your pictures into large posters and tell your story to the people of Adelaide.

  I needed to find someone who really loved to draw. On Australia Day 2014, I met Ali. We were in the park at a large event put on by a group called Welcome to Australia, and a friend introduced us. Immediately I knew I’d met someone special. Ali is the kind of person who immediately puts you at ease with his warmth and generosity. He took two books and promised to draw his story. A week later the books returned. They were full.

  Ali’s father was murdered by the Taliban when he was a boy, so his family migrated from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Ali grew up there as an asylum seeker. Then his brother was murdered. Ali’s mother decided Ali must go to Australia. So Ali went across the sea and was placed in detention, where he started to draw.

  I collected eight more notebooks from other asylum seekers, all with amazing drawings. Together with Ali’s images, the project became twenty-four large-scale posters on the streets of Adelaide.

  For people who were prepared to stop and take it in, Ali’s story was a bottomless reservoir of emotion. You couldn’t be human and not feel empathy for him. But Ali’s images took time. They couldn’t be absorbed at a glance.

  I was also beginning to suspect that appeals to empathy carry a deeper problem. Empathy often leaves you feeling vulnerable, and if you’re already gripped by fear, the last thing you want is more vulnerability. To those who view asylum seekers as a threat, appeals to empathy can actually be repellent. In this way, the conservative mind is prone to read empathy as weakness. Even liberally minded people can find empathy burdensome. I realised that myself the day I invited Ali to meet my in-laws.

  I’d become quite close to Ali. The project had obviously been a boost to his confidence and his sense of belonging in Australia. I wanted our friendship to continue so I naively attempted to bring him into the fold of my own life. I considered introducing him to my family, but quickly decided against it. Instead I invited Ali to dinner at my wife’s family home. It was a special place, the home of four happy children, and now grandchildren. It was a place where anyone would feel safe and welcome.

  But despite everyone’s best efforts, dinner was uncomfortable. Julie’s family were nested within a multi-generational embrace of love and security. They wanted for nothing. By contrast, Ali was alone and had nothing. He hadn’t seen his own family in years and his migration status meant he had little hope of visiting his homeland any time soon. It was clear that Ali was aching to be loved but we were divided by an embarrassment of riches.

  I came away feeling guilty for having put everyone in that position, especially Ali. Julie insisted that everyone had a wonderful time and I was overthinking it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all wrong.

  The immediate effect of empathy is actually pain. Warmth and security only come if we’re brave enough to recognise our own vulnerability in the story of another person. Traditionally it’s a connection that carries an intimation of the sacred. Perhaps it’s something too valuable to be given away through a poster on the street? Perhaps it’s something that’s fundamentally corrupted the moment it’s politicised?

  Later that week I saw an elderly woman break down as she looked at one of Ali’s images. She was standing there with her husband, and suddenly she lurched forward and started sobbing. I watched as her husband put his arm around her and ushered her away. I felt guilty again. I decided it wasn’t the effect I wanted to have on people. I told myself that the decision wasn’t personal, but practical. If you had asked me, I would have explained how the images didn’t work.

  I might have said something cold like, ‘In the game of image virality, the aim is to flatter or empower the viewer, compelling them to share your image with their social network – and they won’t do that if they’re crying. You want to keep your message fast, shallow and ironic.’

  When I think that way, I feel detached and in control. Emotions become like chess pieces. Luckily for me, today’s culture rewards the fast and the shallow. If you generate enough noise you can distract yourself from the slow, cumulative effect of detaching from your own emotions. That was my hope, anyway. Because I had plans to make enough noise to escape my own burden of empathy.

  In other words, Ali’s images were great art, but not great propaganda – and I was beginning to suspect that something in my personality was pulling me towards the propaganda business.

  Great Propaganda

  So what is great propaganda? How about something like, Fuck off, we’re full! They’
re fun words to fart out of your face because of the Fs. Give it a try.

  It’s fun to pretend, to imagine what it’s like to hold the exact opposite of your convictions. It’s fun to get as close as you can, to really feel what they feel. You owe it to them, because that’s what you’re asking them to do for you. That’s how I came up with this …

  For anyone unfamiliar with the often forgotten second verse of the Australian national anthem, it goes like this:

  For those who’ve come across the seas

  We’ve boundless plains to share;

  With courage let us all combine

  To Advance Australia Fair.

  Pretty solid stuff, right? My favourite part is the suggestion of courage. Because why courage? Why not kindness or caring? The suggestion of courage simultaneously admits that fear is inevitable while also providing a solution to fear. You can’t cure fear with kindness. But courage, on the other hand, flatters the conservative mind. It’s quite different to an appeal to empathy, which can leave the viewer feeling vulnerable and actually more susceptible to fear. Obviously the bit about having ‘boundless plains to share’ is a bit problematic, but we’ll get to that.

  I invoked the anthem in my launch video for the ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ campaign because I think one of art’s jobs is to reach back into our history and interrogate the values we claim to protect. I wanted to use the anthem to show that sentiments like ‘Fuck off, we’re full!’ and ‘Stop the boats’ are actually debasements of Australian values. Removing the burden of empathy and appealing to the very same patriotism that conservatives want to protect, I thought to myself, could be a novel strategy.