Poster Boy

by Peter Drew

  At the end of 2014, anyone whose senses were working correctly could detect the storm that was brewing on the Australian political landscape. ISIS beheading videos began appearing in August, and December brought the sixteen-hour Lindt Café siege in Sydney, which shook loose an avalanche of fear. Before we had time to comprehend that the gunman was mentally ill and had no real connection to ISIS, seemingly every Australian had considered the possibility that this was the new normal, that we’d all need to get used to terrorism on Australian soil. Then, on 7 January 2015, the Charlie Hebdo shooting erupted in Paris. That sort of fear doesn’t just evaporate overnight. It hangs around and searches for answers.

  Some people found the answer they needed in the fact that the Lindt Café gunman was Muslim and a refugee. Some of those people joined groups like Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front, which quickly attracted media attention despite their meagre membership. Into the limelight leapt Pauline Hanson 2.0. Gone was her anti-Asian rhetoric of the 1990s. The new Pauline was a near carbon copy of her former self, only now she feared ‘Islamic terrorism’. Further up the food chain of political influence the rhetoric was less blustery. Those with real power could exploit the growing anti-Islamic sentiment by gradually increasing restrictions against asylum seekers, thereby winning votes.

  The feeling was reminiscent of the Cronulla riots ten years earlier, but this time was different. This time all Australians were feeling the fear. Everyone was afraid, but the majority of Australians were able to control their fear and, as a result, resented all the more those who surrendered to their xenophobic impulses.

  I don’t hate bigots, I hate the bigot in me.

  The above phrase popped into my head just now as I am writing this. I think it captures the feeling I’ve had for a very long time. I know it’s not the most popular sentiment, but I really believe that it’s the most powerful way to confront bigotry. ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ is a way of expressing that idea.

  At this point I need to be careful because it’s very easy to bestow upon oneself a sense of retrospective self-awareness that exceeds the reality of the moment. In early 2015 I simply had a gut feeling that my poster could capture the mixture of frustration and dismay many Australians were experiencing. Part of me wanted my art to effect ‘positive change’ on the Australian political landscape, but another part of me wanted something personal. I want to be honest about that part of myself because I think it’s something I have in common with many of the people whose views I oppose.

  Beneath my carefully crafted image of noble political intentions, I was also hiding a personal desire for self-transformation. At the time I didn’t think it had anything to do with my family. It was just a feeling. I wanted to leave my old self behind and this poster seemed like the perfect way to do it. All I needed to do was paddle it out far enough to catch a big wave in the approaching storm. I wanted to play in that storm. I wanted to meet some monsters and do battle. I wanted to see what I was capable of. Above all, I wanted the experience to change me into someone new. Until now my work had attracted the modest attention you might expect for an Adelaide-based street artist. I was a nobody. But I did know a few things about art, especially the power of the spectacle.

  Street art is a bit like real estate: it’s all about location. If I’d simply hung my poster in my local gallery, it would have been ignored. If I’d stuck up my posters without announcing my intentions, the response might have been similar. Instead I packaged the whole project into a story, which I could feed to media outlets. I created a spectacle of one artist on a righteous crusade to hold Australia accountable to its own national anthem. In this sense, the artwork is not just the poster design, it’s also the journey the audience is invited to follow. By creating a spectacle, my posters could be seen on the street, online and in the news. Multiple locations, multiple exposures, until the person on the street is forced to turn to their friend and ask, annoyed, ‘What’s with that poster I see everywhere?’ And with that, you’ve got them, whether they like it or not.

  In March 2015 I launched an online crowdfunding campaign promising to stick up 1000 ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ posters across the country. The campaign made no mention of asylum seekers. I used footage of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games in which Julie Anthony sang the anthem. The tone was warm, inviting and playful. The strategy worked. I raised $8384, more than I needed. It was time to hit the bricks.

  Meeting Australia

  On 4 April 2015, Reclaim Australia held its first day of nationwide rallies. The next day I checked into the Sydney Central YHA with a roll of 250 ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ posters in my duffle bag.

  The staff at the hostel knew by my hi-vis jacket and workboots that I wasn’t there for a holiday, so they put me in one of the dorms filled with labourers, mostly Europeans. It stank, but I knew I was about to make it stink a whole lot more. I went to the nearest supermarket and bought 10 kilos of flour. Back in the hostel kitchen I started to cook my glue, which I poured into the 15-litre bucket I’d brought with me. Someone said, ‘That’s a lot of porridge! What do you need all that for?’ I told them it was glue for my posters. ‘Oh,’ they replied … and that was the basic pattern of my youth hostel life for the next three months as I travelled Australia.

  I would wake at four a.m. and jump on a train heading in a random direction. Between five a.m. and midday I would stick up thirty posters in good locations as I walked back towards the city. After lunch I’d grab more posters and glue and stick up another twenty in the afternoon. I’d cook more glue in the evening, eat a big meal, then fall asleep early so I could do it all again the next day. It was punishing. After a few days my clothes had built up a layer of organic glue crust. I smelt like blue cheese. I grew blisters on my toes and feet but I didn’t care. I was intoxicated by my mission. Nothing could slow me down, except the occasional man on the street.

  On the very first morning I met a man in the beachside community of Manly. He was glaring at me as I finished sticking up a poster, his hands in tight fists.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Sticking up posters,’ I said in an overly friendly way that was intended to irritate. He looked sixty years old and a few inches shorter than me. Not exactly the monster I’d been hoping to do battle with.

  ‘Oh no, you’re not! Not here, you’re not!’ he shouted as he tried to grab my glue trolley.

  ‘Nah, mate!’ I said, blocking him with my body. ‘That’s not happening.’

  But he grabbed the scruff of my jacket and growled in my face, ‘You’re coming with me!’

  By now half a dozen people were staring because he was making a lot of noise. In another thirty seconds he’d have help, and then I’d be fucked. Day one of the project, and I’d be in prison. I had to think fast.

  ‘Get off me!’ I said with a tone of authority, and broke away from him. In my own head I’d become a man just trying to do his job. But the old guy was persistent. He started to run after me. I ran too, and then I could hear laughter. People up and down the street were watching as the Manly village idiot chased what looked like a council worker with his hi-vis vest and trolley. The man tripped and fell, to the sound of more laughter, and I made my escape. It was pathetic and, as you might have guessed, I felt guilty. Sadly, it became a familiar pattern across Australia.

  But I shouldn’t overstate the conflict. For every angry old guy, I met a dozen calm ones who weren’t too sure about my poster and wanted to chat about it. I’d mention the anthem, they’d say something about ‘illegal boat people’, and we’d both get on with our day. I was rarely approached by anyone under thirty, and almost never by women.

  Picking spots to put up posters is easy. I simply walk through the urban landscape looking for ugliness. If a wall’s appearance could only be improved by one of my posters, I make the improvement. That being said, there are a few ground rules. I avoid places of worship and residential homes, although some unit blocks are screami
ng out for a poster. Government buildings and public infrastructure are up for grabs. I don’t think twice about putting up posters on the property of large corporations but I tend to avoid small businesses, unless they have a side wall that’s already covered in graffiti. The best spots of all are hoarding boards, abandoned building and underpasses. You’d be surprised how many ugly walls you find once you start looking.

  After day four, something unexpected happened: I started to receive messages from asylum seekers who had found me on social media.

  This image, featuring the now-actor Ali Morad, was taken in Merrylands, and was sent to me with this message:

  Hi Peter. I just thought I’d say thanks … As a teacher of small children who battled the journey here by boat, and my boyfriend, who lost several immediate family members to the Taliban and had every right to seek a peaceful life here … by plane, boat, whatever – that’s irrelevant when your life is in immediate danger and there is NO QUEUE to join.

  This gave me something real to focus on: the everyday act of welcoming those who needed to hear it. This could sustain me through the daily grind when the major goal of swaying the wider Australian polity seemed hopelessly out of reach. I didn’t realise it yet but I was going to need that grounding, because the project was about to be yanked out of my control in the best possible way.

  A Meme Is Born

  According to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, all forms of human culture can be broken down into units called memes. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins hypothesised that all culture is simply an abstraction of, and reducible to, the biological mechanisms of gene replication. At the time his idea didn’t exactly catch fire, but forty years later the idea of the meme found its soaring vindication in the world of online jokes and trolling. I like to think of Mr Dawkins casually perusing these offspring of his intellectual labours. Perhaps he wonders whether the aesthetic quality of Pepe the Frog or Grumpy Cat reflects poorly upon his ultra-rationalist worldview?

  I created my first meme back in 2009, while I was going through a stage in which all my work was bike related. After I sprayed the above stencil on a few dozen footpaths in Adelaide, I uploaded the image to Facebook and it quickly found its way onto cycling blogs. People around the world started printing it onto T-shirts, coffee cups, bike helmets and tea towels. At the time it was a thrill to witness the idea take off and find a life of its own. If you google ‘this one runs on fat’ you’ll see that it’s still alive and well.

  To most people, a meme is simply an image-based joke. However, to a certain subculture of millennials, meme creation and dissemination are almost what rock ’n’ roll was to the baby boomers. They hang out on online forums, trading, adapting and evolving memes to shock, amuse and sway their friends. Occasionally a meme floats to the mainstream world of social media, where it attracts a much broader audience. The meme is a powerful concept for thinking about the way culture operates in a post-internet world where every consumer is also a creator, and the entire cultural landscape is democratised into one big toilet wall. In theory, they seem like an attempt to collapse culture into materialism. In practice, though, memes are rarely edifying. Commonly they’re malicious. They’re all about reduction and debasement.

  I’ve been fascinated with the idea of memes ever since I read Dawkins while I was studying Philosophy back in 2003. And I was thinking about memes the day I designed ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’. That’s why I made it absurdly plain. The design is almost fascistic in the way the text fills all the available space, leaving no room for any other thought. It’s partly that way to ape the xenophobia it aims to parody, but it’s also designed to be a successful meme. Without beauty of its own, it can’t be reduced. The obvious way it can be successfully adapted into a meme is by adding beauty, which is exactly what happened.

  On 12 April 2015 I arrived in Melbourne with 200 ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ posters and quickly commenced the lonely task of sticking them up. Each day I’d try to convince people on the street to hold the poster for a photo. Sometimes people approached me, which made it easier. The point was to show that people supported the project, that ordinary Australians were literally getting behind the poster to demonstrate their resistance to rising xenophobia. Ultimately, I wanted other people to take ownership of the project. That way its momentum wouldn’t be reliant upon my ability to stick up posters. My effort would just be the fuse to light a larger explosion.

  On 16 April Julie called my phone after a rough few days of relentless postering.

  ‘Ahhh, have you checked your Instagram recently?’ she said.

  ‘Why, what’s happening?’ I’m usually pretty short with her if I’m in the middle of sticking up posters.

  ‘Have you heard of The Design Files?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Should I have? Can you please get to the point!’

  Julie explained that The Design Files was the largest design blog in Australia, and they were encouraging their hundreds of thousands of followers to redesign my slogan. They’d issued a callout to ‘all the talented Australian artists, illustrators, designers, typographers, stylists, photographers and image makers out there’: ‘If YOU create a flyer for Facebook or Instagram bearing this message, we’ll share it across @thedesignfiles social media, and we’ll encourage our followers to share your image too. Any takers?’

  ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ I said with polite indifference. So Julie slowed down and gave it another try, the way a millennial might explain the internet to a grandparent. She told me that The Design Files is a platform that every young, aspiring creative in Australia dreams of being featured on. While I was approaching people one by one on the street, The Design Files had just incentivised mass creative participation in my project. In 2015, it was what annoying people called a ‘game changer’.

  ‘Oh, cool,’ I said again, stubbornly. I was probably irritated at the suggestion that Julie knew something I didn’t. Understandably, Julie gave up.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Check it again tomorrow and you’ll see what I mean.’

  So I went to bed and slept the blissful sleep of wilful ignorance, only to receive a call from an ABC journalist the very next morning. The avalanche of attention that followed was pretty staggering. Dozens of artists, designers and illustrators, whom I’d never met, would re-create and embellish the slogan. My original design is crude to the point of comedy. By contrast, their creations were beautiful.

  The project had become newsworthy. SBS, The Guardian, Buzz-Feed, Mashable, Junkee and ABC News all ran stories. It was beginning to look less like one artist’s crusade and more like a movement. #RealAustraliansSayWelcome was trending across every social media platform. It had taken on a life of its own. It had become a meme.

  I promised to be honest, so I should tell you that all that attention was a rush. That kind of attention shakes you up a bit. It’s actually frightening, like a new drug. You don’t know what it will do to you, so you try not to think about it. You just enjoy the ride as it changes you into someone else. Everything in your mind jumps a gear as obstacles seem to vanish, replaced by opportunities. All the people who know you the best suddenly seem irrelevant, especially your family. Just when I should have called Julie to help calm me down, I didn’t. I’ve done it on my own, I told myself. This was exactly what I’d been hoping for. I was inflating into a big, stupid balloon.

  Australia the Fascist Construct

  One of the first things you’ll notice about success is that there’s always someone waiting to hate you for it, especially in Australia. I first noticed the contrast while travelling in the United States, where perfect strangers are eager to use you as a springboard for their own optimism.

  ‘You’re going to be a great artist,’ an American girl once told me. At that exact moment I was more focused on the possibility of becoming a great kisser.

  ‘How can you say that? You barely know me,’ I said, a little incredulously.

  ‘I just know,’ she said, looking
back at me with that self-generated certainty with which great nations manifest their destiny and young Australian men reach out and kiss American girls when they’re clearly being invited to. But I couldn’t, not back then. I was stuck at that stage when I knew everything but understood nothing. Despite being in my early twenties, I was still nurturing the cynicism of a precocious child. I was all intelligence and no confidence. Who can be confident in a world of infinite possibilities? Obviously she could. She had the warm glow of the believer.

  These days I often meet smart kids who are miserable in the way I was for the longest time. That’s not to say that I’m perfectly happy now. I just know a kid trapped in a nihilistic funk when I see one. You’ve got to be careful when talking to them; they’re like a person drowning. Sometimes they’ll try to pull you down without realising what they’re doing. Other times they know exactly what they’re doing.

  I met some smart kids at the University of Melbourne a few days after ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ had blown up in the media. I was exhausted after what had been a hectic week and was keen to put up my last few posters in a safe spot where I could be sure they’d find a receptive audience. I knew the campus had plenty of Morris columns made especially for displaying posters in high-traffic areas, so I spent the afternoon making good use of them.

  On the way out I passed Union House, where I’d stuck up a poster on one of the best Morris columns. I gave my poster a self-indulgent glance, only to discover that it had been covered with glossy A3 posters promoting the student elections. I rushed over to investigate. There was plenty of free space on the column, but they’d deliberately gone over my poster. Some student politician was picking a fight with me. Naturally, I took the bait.