Poster Boy

by Peter Drew

  ‘Border security as a political issue is irrelevant now,’ he told me. ‘The boats have stopped! Offshore detention works as a deterrent and Labor agrees. They have to agree if they want a chance of getting elected. Of course the Greens will squeeze some political capital out of their moral posturing, but that’s their game. Even they know their insane policies will never see the light of day. That’s why it’s called posturing. Like your poster. It’s just a pose.’

  ‘What about our national anthem? Is that a pose?’ I asked, before refreshing his memory of the second verse that boasts of our ‘boundless plains to share’ for ‘those who’ve come across the seas’.

  ‘Well, that’s the difference between a song and a piece of legislation,’ he replied. ‘I think you know that the anthem’s talking about our cosmopolitanism. It’s not a blanket invitation to anyone with a boat. Australians are beneficiaries of Western civilisation – we’re more than willing to welcome people who share our values.’

  ‘I think you have an impoverished view of Western civilisation,’ I told him. ‘I also think you have an impoverished view of Australia. We’re more than just beneficiaries. We’re contributors.’

  Keith laughed. ‘Well, you might be right about that part, if nothing else.’ He got up to leave, still amused as he shook my hand. Then he was gone. Five minutes later I was having a very different chat with Richard Di Natale, leader of the Australian Greens.

  The more time I spent in Parliament House, the less secure and permanent it felt. I left with the impression that Australian democracy is a delicate miracle. It seems obvious that humans are a power-hungry species, and democracy works by forcing the most power-hungry among us to share the power we desperately don’t want to share. In this sense, Parliament House is a habitat built to manage our will to power, the same way an ecosystem manages a bunch of animals. I had a strong feeling that my natural habitat lay elsewhere.

  That night I hit the streets of Canberra for a savage postering spree to end the project. The one-thousandth poster found its home on the front of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

  I was on such a high that I couldn’t stop. Then I got arrested and fined for vandalism. Oliver and I got caught on Northbourne Avenue. I felt really guilty about Oliver. He was just there taking photos, but they still took his details. I remember the younger of the two cops saying angrily, ‘I’ve seen these posters everywhere!’

  It was time to go home.

  Enough

  Dad picked me up from the airport. It was something he was always willing to do. Whenever my brothers or I asked for practical assistance of any kind, my dad would always say yes and put his shoulder to the wheel. He must have a sense of duty in that respect, though I’ve never asked him. We don’t talk to each other about our values. We just show them through our actions.

  Julie must have been working, because Dad was waiting alone. He spotted me as I walked up the ramp and he seemed really happy to see me. He knew the project was over. He asked me the standard safety questions: was I arrested, did anyone try to punch me, etc. I gave him the facts and we collected my bags. I was tired.

  Even though he’s now in his seventies, my dad’s still a handsome man. His hair is white and thinning and he has a bit of a paunch but he looks pretty good. The way he moves suggests a life spent in pursuit of physical challenges. He shuffles in a hulky kind of way that conveys a lack of self-consciousness. His mind is always set on the task at hand.

  I’ve inherited most of that. I also have his square features, especially his hands.

  As we drove up Sir Donald Bradman Drive, away from the airport, Dad suddenly broke the silence.

  ‘You know Mum and I don’t necessarily agree with what you’re doing, but we’re both very proud of you and what you’ve achieved. You know that, don’t you?’

  I suddenly felt weightless. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘You’ve always made us proud with what you do. You work hard and we don’t know where it all comes from, but we think it’s great.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said again. On the outside I was just sitting there but on the inside I was floating. It felt so good that I immediately questioned whether I deserved it. I started to feel guilty. I wanted to tell him about everything that had happened, about all my mistakes. I wanted to explain how I slipped up with Julie. I wanted to forgive him. I wanted to tell him about all the people I’d met and everything I’d learnt about Australia. It was a powerful rush, but instead of letting it out, I just held on to it. I couldn’t speak. It was too much.

  I gave Dad a hug when he dropped me home, then he was gone. I didn’t want to sit alone in our little apartment so I went for a walk around Victoria Park and tried to make sense of everything that had happened. I felt like a different person to the one who had designed that poster. Wasn’t that what I had wanted in the first place? To be transformed? I couldn’t remember.

  I sat down under my favourite tree, right in the middle of the racecourse, and wrote in a notebook.

  Playing with forces more powerful than yourself will shape you in ways you can’t predict …

  Pffft! No shit, Socrates, I thought as I read back what I’d written. I thought about all the people I’d met and how they’d often confounded my expectations. Now that I was home I had a strange feeling of sympathy for them all, especially those I’d upset the most. I guess listening to Dad in the car had left me feeling vulnerable, but it seemed there was more to it than that. I was reminded of the notion of universal weakness I’d felt after betraying Julie and, once again, it rang true. I still couldn’t grasp how it might apply to my own life but I knew I wanted to find out. I knew that I needed to keep moving forward. I had to push deeper into Australia’s identity and my own history. I had a feeling it was going to get harder. I suspected that it was going to twist me in and out of shape, but I had to keep going. There was no point in sitting still.

  A bit later Julie came home. It was a Thursday so we went out for sushi. I told her about an idea I was working on for a new poster about Afghan cameleers in Australia. She listened, but it was clear she was running low on patience. I’d been in a self-absorbed bubble for a few months; it was time for me to listen to her for a while. So I did.

  Recently I showed Julie those texts to Sarah in Perth. I’d never told her about my moment of weakness, and even though it had been slight and happened three years earlier, it upset her and shook her confidence. Then she opened up about her own moments of weakness. Suddenly it wasn’t so bad. As it turned out, neither of us was really that pure. We made an unspoken pact: a loss of innocence for a gain in security.

  There’s a pattern here. I can’t put it into words yet, but I can feel it. Maybe if I explain everything the form will emerge. I need to explain everything about my family and how I grew up. I need to explain everything I’ve learnt about Australia. You’re not going to like it all. I don’t like it all myself. But I’m going to stick to my promise to be honest. That’s the only way I know to figure it out.

  The Kamikaze Run Squad

  At Glenelg Primary School in 1989 there was a gang called the Kamikaze Run Squad. They terrorised the school for weeks, maybe even a month. The object of the gang was to run out of bounds and yell ‘Kamikazeeeeee!’ with arms outstretched, like fighter planes. Teachers would shout ‘Stop that now!’ but the Kamikaze wouldn’t listen. They just kept running and yelling. That was their secret weapon. That’s what made them Kamikaze. I know all about it. I was the leader of the Kamikaze Run Squad. I was six years old.

  I got the word Kamikaze from my dad. As I’ve mentioned, he was a scuba diver. He especially enjoyed diving on wrecks, and his favourite place in the world to dive wrecks was the Solomon Islands, especially Ironbottom Sound off the island of Guadalcanal. Within a radius of about 50 kilometres, you can dive on dozens of American and Japanese ships and aircraft from one of the largest and most decisive naval battles of the Second World War. Our house when I was growing up was scattered with artefac
ts, books and stories from there. It seemed like underwater adventures were all my dad did before we were born. One photo shows him, underwater in full scuba gear, standing on the wing of a Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane. In his arms is the Zero’s 20-millimetre cannon. It’s almost as big as he is.

  ‘The Kamikaze would crash their planes into the American ships deliberately,’ Dad explained.

  ‘But they’d jump out first?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they’d kill themselves as well as everyone on the ship.’

  I can clearly remember the feeling of not understanding. I kept asking Dad questions until he started to lose patience. Or maybe he started to regret giving the lesson? Once that innocence is gone you can’t get it back and I was the kind of kid who cried when I was stung by a bee – not because it hurt but because the bee died. It seemed pointless and sad. I imagined being a Japanese pilot at the end of the war. They’d tell me to fly my plane but I’d run away and hide.

  The gang started out as me, Tim and Dominic. At recess and lunchtime we’d dare each other to run out of bounds. We’d jump the front fence, run around the block and back into the school through the lane on Williams Avenue. We drew up a map and called it the Secret Circuit, or the Circuit for short. Completing the Circuit later became the initiation test of the Kamikaze Run Squad.

  One day, Mr Teasdale caught me running the Circuit. He was smoking in the lane when I rounded the corner.

  ‘Stop right there!’ he roared through his ZZ Top beard.

  I froze, terrified. Mr Teasdale was a scary teacher. He had once shouted so loud that David Oakley pissed his pants in the quadrangle. David now works at Deloitte.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Mr Teasdale demanded, still holding his cigarette.

  I said nothing, sensing my advantage. There was nobody else in sight. It was just him and me, but he didn’t know my name!

  ‘What’s your name!’ he demanded a second time, but now I heard fear behind his anger.

  It occurred to me that I should enjoy the moment, so I smiled up at him to let him know I wasn’t afraid. I watched his own expression break into rage and he lurched out to grab me. I bolted. As I ran away, the feeling that filled my tiny body was the exact opposite of what David Oakley must have felt the day of his quadrangle humiliation. I felt far more powerful than a six-year-old boy should feel. After that day I stopped respecting teachers who tried to intimidate me. They just seemed silly. I felt like I’d discovered a secret.

  We started recruiting gang members. At first it was just our friends, but later other kids wanted to join. We decided girls could join too, but they had to be tough. Rebecca Clark was the only girl who asked and she was pretty tough, so Rebecca was in. I wrote every gang member’s name on the back of the Circuit map and hid it in my book box. Sometimes we had as many as ten Kamikazes running at once. We’d run the Circuit. We’d run the junior primary area. We even started to run the corridor during class. Word spread and soon other kids were doing Kamikaze runs, kids who weren’t in the gang, older kids. That’s what did us in.

  During assembly, Deputy Principal Dowdy declared, ‘This running and shouting must stop.’ He seemed pretty serious. I decided it was time to cool off for a bit. I took the Circuit map home. Dad found it immediately.

  ‘Peter, what is ‘the Kemekasi Run Scwod’? he asked with wide-eyed amusement.

  ‘It’s my gang,’ I said sheepishly.

  ‘Oh, your gang! And what does your gang do?’

  ‘We just run out of bounds!’ I pleaded, but I knew he’d keep pushing.

  ‘You know what Kamikaze means, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, you told me,’ I said petulantly.

  ‘I don’t think you do understand.’

  I’d expected him to be angry, but this was different. I knew it wasn’t safe for us to be running around on the street, but apparently I’d missed something.

  ‘Kamikaze pilots never came back. It wasn’t a game. They died, and their family never got to see them again,’ said Dad.

  ‘It’s just a name!’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s not. You need to think about it, and never leave the school grounds again! You could get abducted and there would be nothing your mum and I could do. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  I still didn’t understand, but I had a feeling that I’d crossed an invisible boundary. I didn’t regret it, though. I hadn’t hurt anyone and I’d made new friends. The rest of my primary school years would be dedicated to building a resumé of mischievous schemes, mostly harmless. But another part of me went searching for those invisible boundaries. They were hidden in words. They were hidden in pictures. Most of all, they were hidden in history.

  Strip-Mining the Archive

  When I completed the ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ poster project in July 2015, I was keen to build on its momentum. I needed a new project, but it had to be better than the first. It had to avoid rehashing the same message, but I did want to maintain the confrontational but optimistic tone. If I was going to push deeper towards the root cause of xenophobia, I had to explore Australia’s history and expose the invisible boundaries that linger within our national identity.

  I was propelled by the same naive optimism with which I now write this book. Part of me believes that all social problems have latent solutions that can be solved through a kind of devout honesty. If we simply tell the truth, our honesty will manifest miraculous solutions in a way that’s so unpredictable it requires a kind of faith. However, the other part of me suspects that we thrive as a species in spite of the truth. That illusions, great and small, are essential to our way of life and can only be replaced by more cunning illusions. That part of me wants nothing more than to humiliate my own naivety by watching how this whole honesty thing plays out. I guess the two halves of my character are united by curiosity. I’ve drawn a diagram to show you what I mean.

  In mid-2015 my curiosity led me towards one of the most infamous episodes in Australia’s history of xenophobia, the White Australia policy. When people talk about the White Australia policy they’re actually referring to a collection of changing policies over a 100-year period that deliberately excluded non-white people from entering Australia. I’m not surprised by its racism. I’m more surprised by the strange idea that anti-racism should be taken for granted rather than being considered a historic milestone, paid for by the moral striving of a species of primates who are constantly struggling to overcome the exact same impulses that put them at the top of the food chain. Because that’s the difficult truth about racism: it actually works as a survival strategy between tribes. Just not within civilisations. Could I condense that notion into a poster? Probably not. I had to start small. I had to do some research. My goal was simple – find some photos of Afghan cameleers who worked in Australia during the White Australia policy. It was an idea that first occurred to me when I was riding on the Ghan.

  I created a research account at the National Archives of Australia. I also had some help from a couple of historians at the South Australian Museum. You have to find the reference code for the documents you’re interested in. Once you have the code you can request to view the documents. The archivists will pull the documents from the archive and you’ll receive an email when they’re ready for viewing. You then put aside a few hours to sit in a quiet room at your state library and flick through boxes of manila folders.

  During my degree at the Glasgow School of Art, we got rigorous training in academic research practices. We were taught to approach the research objectively, almost scientifically. We were taught to leave our own values at the door and let the research material guide us. We learnt that a good researcher should strip themselves naked until nothing remains but a disembodied eye, floating in space. But I think it’s silly when art attempts to be science. After all, empiricism is nihilistic. It’s all ‘how’ and no ‘why’. Sure, I approach my research with an open mind, but ultimately I was in that archive to find gold. I’m not a scientist, I’m an edu
cated vandal. My research ethic is simple: get in, get out, just don’t get caught.

  These are what I was looking for. Under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, people entering Australia could be issued a dictation test that was actually a covert tool of racial exclusion. If you failed the dictation test, you would be denied entry to Australia. If you passed the test in English, you could be asked to repeat the test in French or German or any other European language until you failed.

  During my research I encountered the story of the SS Clan Ranald, a Scottish ship that sank in 1909 off the Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. Of its sixty-four crew, only twenty-four survived the wreck. Twenty of those survivors were ‘lascar’, an old term used to describe Indian or South-East Asian sailors. They were taken to Port Adelaide, where they sat the dictation test. The report from the Australian Customs Service reads as follows:

  Nineteen of the colored crew failed to pass the test although some of the men speak good English. The quartermaster (Lucano Orico) known as No. 18 on examination showed that he not only could read and speak English fluently but could also write the dictation test without any hesitation. Consequently the test must be put in another language than English and one with which he is unacquainted. I would suggest that detective Segerlind be employed for this purpose.

  Why the subterfuge? Why bother with a test at all? Why not simply put up a sign saying ‘Whites Only’? The dictation test reveals Australia’s desire to conceal its racism. The test promised to keep Australia white, while providing an adequate veil of deniability to the charge of racism. It serviced Australia’s ugliest fears without offending the nation’s progressive vanity. Sounds familiar, right?