Poster Boy

by Peter Drew

  I stepped into Marsden’s Seafood with my posters and glue to discover a short Vietnamese lady behind the counter. I stumbled around for a moment, then nervously bought a fish burger combo.

  ‘Do you own this shop?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes, my husband and me,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know who used to own it?’

  ‘Yes! Very famous lady,’ she said, lighting up with pride.

  I discovered that Mrs Huynh and her husband had arrived in Australia twenty-two years ago, seeking asylum. I told her about my posters and she was more than happy to get behind the poster.

  As you might expect, the image went viral and provoked a fresh round of media interest. I knew it would. The image was too perfect to resist. As I left Marsden’s Seafood Mrs Huynh seemed excited, if a little doubtful at my suggestion that she too might become a ‘famous lady’.

  As I walked back to the Ipswich train station I began to realise that I’d probably dodged a bullet. If I allowed myself to get sucked into the game of manufacturing and harvesting outrage, there would be no coming back. I’d be complicit in a toxic cycle. Gradually, my self-interest would push me further towards maintaining outrage rather than resolving conflict. I’d be just another political profiteer. Besides, what could be more condescending than a city boy perpetuating a narrative of rural racism? I had been the daft one, expecting to find racism out in the open. Real racism is usually hidden.

  As I returned to my hostel I was reminded of everything that had happened over the last two weeks. It wasn’t a neat narrative. It was a swirling mass of hot-blooded nonsense. Alone in my room, I tried to make sense of it all. I wanted to know that there was something in me that was good and strong and impervious to the forces I was playing with, but my doubts were growing.

  For the first time since the project started I had a powerful impulse to call home and speak to my parents. I hadn’t spoken to them in weeks, which wasn’t surprising, but I suddenly wanted to let them know I was okay. I wanted to hear myself tell them, ‘Everything’s going great.’ Maybe that would make me feel better?

  However, I had a strong suspicion that my family wasn’t at all impressed with what I was doing because it conflicted with their views on immigration. I’d deliberately avoided any discussion of the topic for fear that it would open into a bottomless chasm. I was perfectly happy to confront strangers, but not my own family. Ours was a power hierarchy carefully established over years of polite hostility. Disruption might unleash reservoirs of resentment. It wouldn’t even occur to us that we had the ability to heal one another. That was just hippie bullshit.

  Being conservative can be a great excuse for avoiding feeling. In my family, the ethic of self-reliance fits perfectly with our emotional estrangement because none of us knows how to express our deep need for one another. We keep it locked up inside until it explodes in weird ways, sometimes with a lot of anger. But I wasn’t there yet, so instead I pushed it down and tried to focus on the task at hand. I could always talk to my parents once the project was over.

  I was done in Queensland. From Surfers Paradise to the Valley, I’d stuck up a tidy 135 posters. Not bad. My inbox was full of messages of gushing praise and hysterical rage. It was becoming too much to make sense of but, from the outside, the project looked like it was cooking nicely. Media enquiries kept coming in and my social media accounts were growing rapidly. I told myself there’d be time afterwards to figure out what it all meant. For now I just had to focus on the road ahead. Next stop, Tasmania. Then Canberra. I was on the home stretch.

  Why I Make Posters

  When I got back to Adelaide, Julie noticed straightaway that I was starting to fray at the edges. I was leaving the next morning, so she took me out to our favourite sushi place and we tried to reconnect. It wasn’t easy because I was so locked up. I still couldn’t tell her everything. The truth is, I haven’t even tried to explain it to myself until now. So we ate sushi and the next day I was gone.

  It was my first time travelling to Tasmania, and as the plane crossed Bass Strait I could feel my worries disappear behind me. Pretty quickly the snow-scattered landscape below had me feeling like a kid. It didn’t look like Australia at all. On 1 June I arrived in Hobart with 120 posters. When I stepped out on the first morning it was painfully cold, and electrifying. I was surprised by Mount Wellington’s dominance. Hobart is the only city in Australia where nature seems to loom larger than man. Feeling energised, I got to work. Within two days I’d gone through a hundred posters. Now I had time to take in some contemporary art.

  I’d been fascinated by David Walsh since he opened the Museum of Old and New Art back in 2011. It was fun to witness his effect on the Australian contemporary art scene. Here was this math-whiz, millionaire gambler who’d built a world-class contemporary art gallery in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere and given everyone a huge kick up the arse. Suddenly the state-run institutions looked even stuffier. Curatorial staff around Australia could point to MONA and tell their board of directors that it was time to shake things up or get left behind.

  I visited MONA with the scepticism of an artist who had gravitated away from contemporary art a long time ago. Much of the reason I make posters comes down to my dislike of galleries. I don’t like their assumed authority. I don’t like the political games you have to play to please the cultural gatekeepers. But MONA was just the extravagant folly of an atheist millionaire who wanted to use his money to take revenge on the town that had wasted his childhood. That was a folly I could relate to.

  As I descended the spiral staircase into the gallery I met some Hobart locals. They were able to attend for free and it was obvious they’d come to have a laugh. I had too. It’s a fun gallery. It reminded me of the accessibility of British contemporary art. Now, that attitude is everywhere. Compulsory accessibility. These days people forget that contemporary art once had to be taken seriously.

  It’s worth remembering that the public art museum is a modern invention. Before the Louvre opened to the public in 1793, the only place most people viewed art was inside a church. A year to the day after King Louis XVI was imprisoned, the French Republic threw open the doors of the Louvre and its citizens rushed in. The first public art museum was born, forever wedded to our concept of the nation state. Just as the Church used art to transmit its values, so too would the nation. But over the next 200 years artists had their own revolution – against the nation, against the museums, against the new establishment. If art was to be a secular religion, it must worship the human imagination, the artist’s imagination! That’s how we got today’s avant-garde, always pushing forward, crossing boundaries, deconstructing, disenchanting and generally running out the clock on the humanist wet dream.

  David Walsh gets it. His whole museum is like a thin chuckle into the void. I think of contemporary art galleries as luxury theme parks, only less nourishing because at least theme parks encourage kids to make believe, whereas most contemporary art is designed to strip away our beliefs. Contemporary art galleries are usually just smorgasbords of novelty, a collection of expensive gags – which is fine, but it’s not avant-garde. Contemporary art is not leading anything. It’s just a luxury subculture like couture fashion or yacht-collecting … That’s one perspective, anyway.

  Another perspective is that the art world is a laboratory for political dissent. But it’s hard to launch a revolution of any integrity from a position of such glamorous privilege. From the Russian Constructivists to the Situationist International, art history is littered with the revolutionary aspirations of those who mistook aesthetics for a valid means of dismantling the levers of power. At some point the truly revolutionary artists give up, sell out or, saddest of all, join the communist party. They realise that the art world is a laboratory for dissent, but only enough to inoculate the state against any real revolution. The art world is like the kidneys of the state, filtering out the malcontents in a steady stream of warm, sterile piss.

  By now you’re probably thinking, ‘I
’m getting pretty sick of this puerile, anti-art rant. Peter’s clearly a part of the “art world”, so why doesn’t he just get off his high horse and say something nice?’ and I sympathise. My posters are part of a counter-cultural movement called ‘street art’ that grew out of the graffiti culture of 1970s New York. Like all counter-culture, street art and graffiti have been thoroughly co-opted into mainstream culture, but what keeps street art interesting is its connection to vandalism. When freedom of expression meets private property you get vandalism. It’s an indelible fault line between two of the bedrock values of Western civilisation. It’s a form of art that institutions can only pretend to condone because, when push comes to shove, institutions will always protect their capital investments over the will of an artist.

  Sorry. I went negative again. Perhaps this isn’t the place for a comprehensive explanation of my political worldview. Perhaps that comes later in the book. Instead I will tell you how I stuck up posters outside MONA and how they got pulled down the next day. At the time it reminded me of a confrontation I’d had the previous week. I was finishing off a poster outside the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane when a security guard ran up behind me and yelled, ‘Right! Stop! You can’t do that here!’

  ‘Yes, I can. This is an art project,’ I said, because sometimes that line works. But not today.

  He pulled out his two-way radio. ‘I’ve got him here. Call it in.’

  I decided it was time to leave. I started to take down my poster.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ he barked, but I kept going.

  ‘The poster’s gone. No offence had been committed and now I want to leave,’ I said.

  ‘Stay here. We have you on video attempting to vandalise this precinct. The police are on their way.’

  It was obvious he wasn’t allowed to restrain me physically, otherwise he wouldn’t be trying so hard to intimidate me. So I started to run. He started to chase. My kit is compact enough that I can move pretty fast, but I could hear his boots hitting the pavement right behind me. Suddenly, on the corner of Grey Street, he grabbed me.

  ‘Stop! Now!’ He’d taken hold of the duffle bag on my back. It yanked at my shoulders. I yanked back. Pulling with all my weight, I charged into the oncoming traffic. A car slammed on its brakes and the security guard let go. I tumbled onto the asphalt, got up and ran off.

  I’m not going to lie – it was heaps of fun. And that’s one of the main reasons I stick up posters. At the end of the day I want an adventure with a touch of physical danger, and sticking up posters provides it. Even when you’re not being chased there’s always a lurking potential for confrontation. I love sneaking about at night, on the lookout for danger. It tunes up your senses and reminds you that you’re just an animal.

  David Walsh seems obsessed with the idea that we’re just animals. Overall his museum reads like an attempt to expose the vanity of human spirituality in favour of free-market nihilism. I enjoyed his cabinet of curiosities but the only value holding it all together is the wealth that acquired it. I left feeling entertained, but that’s about it. The next day I caught the Redline bus up to Launceston and stuck up what posters I had left. That night I was invited to dinner at the home of local activists. A group gathered and we spoke about asylum seekers trapped in offshore detention. Hadn’t that been the reason I started on this journey? I realised that I needed to get my head back in the game. I’d already wasted enough time pondering the political impotence of the art world. I had a campaign to run.

  In a week’s time I’d be in Canberra, where I’d try to meet politicians. Over the past ten weeks I’d made as much noise as I could and gathered support from thousands of Australians. Every time I logged on to social media I noticed a new Real Australians Say Welcome meme. The hashtag kept growing in popularity and my inbox was filled with more messages of support than I could possibly answer. I was bringing all that support with me to Canberra and offering it to any politician prepared to take it off my hands. I asked my social media followers which ones I should meet. Some politicians contacted me. I contacted all the rest. A handful responded. This was to be the finale, where all the effort came together to mean something. When I started the project I imagined that the finale would feel something like surfing a wave. In reality I felt more like a pine cone trapped in an avalanche.

  The Political Ecosystem

  I hadn’t been to Canberra since 2007. At that time my dad and I had driven across from Adelaide to pick up my brother Julian. He had been working in Canberra for two years when, at the age of twenty-six, he lost his job and retreated to Adelaide. I wasn’t surprised that Julian had lost his job. Julian was weird. All three of us boys were weird, but Julian had it the worst. He was the oldest, so he took the brunt of Mum and Dad’s struggle to save their marriage. He was our big brother, so Simon and I were meant to look up to him, but we didn’t. Anyone who met Julian would notice that he was academically gifted. He’s brutally intelligent. At first he used it to defend himself from Mum and Dad’s expectations, but he also used his intelligence to separate himself from other people. That’s how he got weird. Throughout school he stayed aloof and couldn’t handle criticism. As the years slipped by, he never quite managed to join the human race. It was only a matter of time before he got found out as someone who didn’t quite fit.

  I guess our drive over to Canberra was a rescue mission. I was there to keep Dad company, but we talked even less than usual. Our family wasn’t equipped to deal with failure on that level. As the oldest and brightest, Julian had always been expected to achieve great things and, in doing so, provide tacit validation for our family. Now that he’d failed it felt like we’d all failed. Not that we ever spoke about it. We just processed it in private. We met Julian at his apartment, loaded his possessions into the trailer and left early the next morning. The air was thick with tension on the drive home. Between Mildura and Euston we clipped an emu. It jumped out and hit the edge of our trailer with an explosion of feathers. We didn’t have time to react. I watched it disappear behind us. The bird was still standing. It seemed fine, but how could it be? I knew it would find a place to die quietly, out of sight. We got back to Adelaide and Julian moved in with my parents. He’s been there ever since.

  It had always been my plan to finish off the project in Canberra. I’d decided that this was a political project and it needed a political conclusion. It needed a visible win. However, I also had a personal resentment towards Canberra. I think that part of me wanted revenge for what had happened to Julian and it didn’t matter whether it made sense. It was easy for me to access the old anger, and that fuel burns slow and steady. On the flight across from Adelaide I psyched myself up for the final push. I would spend the nights putting up posters and the days collecting photos with politicians. I didn’t care who they were. I just wanted names. I wanted to push my poster in Canberra’s face until I heard ‘Okay, enough! We get it!’ Then I might feel satisfied.

  I checked into the Canberra City YHA and got to work. Before leaving Adelaide I’d posted a call-out to any Canberra-based videographers who’d be willing to document my visit. I received a handful of credible offers but I chose Oliver because he seemed the keenest of the bunch. I needed someone who wasn’t squeamish about the illegalities. If I’d known that Oliver was still in school, I might have picked someone else, but I’m glad I didn’t. He showed up, keen as mustard but much more level-headed than I’d expected. Strange, I thought, for an eighteen-year-old. He had a calming effect that seemed to balance out my crazy. We made a good team.

  Oliver’s sister Rosie drove us around between appointments at Parliament House. I met and took photos with various Greens politicians and a couple of Labor backbenchers, but there were no surprises. In their eyes the poster was obviously an oblique reference to Australia’s policy of offshore detention and neither the Liberals nor Labor wanted to weaken their ability to service Australia’s xenophobia. The truth is that it’s a popular policy. It’s an election-winning policy. Everybody kno
ws it’s cruel, but it’s still popular because it’s seen to work.

  In the last few years I’ve often been asked to speak on panels about Australian identity in front of audiences with a strong left-wing bias. Whether it’s a community group, church gathering or activist organisation, the pattern is generally the same. The event begins with some throat-clearing exercises, where speakers call attention to the ‘loss of empathy’ and the troubling ‘rise in fear’ within the polity. Then, as momentum builds, notions of ‘equity’ and ‘open borders’ are thrown about with ahistorical abandon. If spirits rise too quickly, someone will offer the obligatory acknowledgement of Indigenous dispossession as it relates to notions of belonging. ‘After all, who really has the right to offer welcome?’ This creates an opportunity for someone else to say ‘intersectional considerations’. Everyone hums in agreement and the discussion spirals deeper into puritanical irrelevance. Hardly any attempt is made to understand the conservative perspective. Even describing it leads to suspicion. Ironically, the real leftists love ‘othering’, and even dehumanising, the conservatives.

  Meanwhile, the conservatives have a different means of self-gratification. At Parliament House I spent a lot of time between appointments hanging out at the Queen’s Terrace Café. It made more sense than passing through security eight times a day. There I met a couple of journalists, who gave me a quick tour of the media wing. I also met a man called Keith, who told me he was from the Institute of Public Affairs. Only later did I discover that the IPA was a think tank where people like Keith got together to agree with one another. Keith was small in stature with short white hair, thin-framed glasses and a Canberra paunch. He looked to be in his early sixties but possessed the energy of a younger man. There was a touch of self-parody in his Gordon Gekko–style pinstripe shirt and gold tiepin. He clearly loved being conservative and, without a public profile, saw no harm in showing it off. He had an attitude of amused condescension that suggested he knew who I was, yet he still seemed willing to chat. I invited him to sit and, with little encouragement, he proceeded to politely explain the irrelevance of my project.