by Peter Drew
He found me on the back lawn, where I was playing games with the kids. He looks a lot like our mum, only pale. He’s fastidiously well groomed, with sharp, handsome features, but his body is soft from lack of use. With manic intensity he accosted me, launching into an anecdote from some dark corner of the internet, oblivious to the atmosphere of jovial harmony. I wasn’t sure what meds he was taking but I was sure he was taking too many. Or too few. He was fizzing at the edges like a volcano of words, wrapped in skin. My immediate thought was to attempt to calm him down or tire him out. He was already on to his second anecdote.
‘I found the funniest video the other day, it’s soooo bad but soooo funny. There’s this black guy at the supermarket, and he’s going through the contents of his shopping trolley but it’s all the worst food with, like, zero nutritional value, but he’s just soooo happy to be …’
All of Julian’s ‘funniest’ stories are told for the purpose of laughing at the poverty of black people. Whenever I’ve confronted him about this pattern he replies that it’s ‘just interesting’, as if his own interests play no part in the matter. Given the slightest encouragement he’ll mention Charles Murray’s work on the racial differences in IQ scores, as if this controversial research justifies his personal delusions of innate superiority. But I don’t hate his bigotry. It doesn’t seem right to hate something that’s so clearly born of weakness. It’s just a wall he’s built around himself to fend off his fear that he’s fundamentally unlovable. Of course I’m only speculating, but it’s based on a strong intuition that my brother and I aren’t so different. I stick up posters, he trolls the internet. We might seem like we’re on opposite sides of a political divide, but in reality we’re both trying to shake off the same feeling of helplessness.
‘You know I’m working on a new poster project,’ I said, cutting him off mid-sentence. ‘It’s about a Muslim man who lived in Australia over a hundred years ago.’ I guess I felt like throwing some sand in his gears.
‘Really. That’s interesting. Who was he?’ replied Julian. His expression had dropped into seriousness and I could see his mind clicking into focus. This actually seemed to be a good way to calm him down.
‘His name was Monga Khan but he was no one really, just a man who was born in India and died in Australia. I found his photo in the archives because he’d applied for an exemption to the White Australia policy … I’m going to stick up his photo all over the country.’
‘Why are you going to do that?’ Julian asked flatly.
‘I want to show that Muslims have been a part of this country for a long time and all the xenophobic hysteria directed at Islam is a debasement of our own identity as Australians.’
Julian drew breath, and then … ‘Well, that’s a nice idea but unfortunately it’s a naive fantasy. Australia is fundamentally Western, so Muslims can never really integrate without abandoning key parts of their ideology. It’s a clash of civilisations. The Islamic civilisation is 1400 years old and it’s struggling with the overwhelming force of modernity. They’ve also been engaged in civil war ever since the death of Muhammad. But the good news is that Islam’s problems aren’t our responsibility.’
‘But the West is not homogenous, it’s pluralistic. And so is Islam,’ I replied. ‘Don’t you think there can be positive cross-pollination of ideas? Maybe Islam’s traditionalism can counterbalance the West’s terminal progressivism, and vice versa?’
‘Islam is not pluralistic,’ he shot back. ‘Islam is totalitarian to its core —’
‘Well, what are you suggesting?’ I cut in. ‘You can’t ban a religion.’
‘But it’s not a religion, it’s an ideology.’
‘Oh great, semantics! So how are you going to control this “ideology”?’ I asked, beginning to lose my temper. This was exactly what I feared would happen. I just wanted to play with the kids and have a laugh. Instead we were discussing the fate of Western civilisation under a lemon tree, holding paper plates.
‘Well, there are many things you can do, the most obvious of which is to stop Muslims entering the country,’ said Julian.
‘What, just ban them?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Julian, slightly amused.
I shook my head and looked away. I could feel my anger draining out into a cold and heavy sadness. I couldn’t look at my brother. I had to stop myself from crying. In that moment I had an intuition that our whole conversation was a substitute for the things we couldn’t say. It was all cowardice dressed up as intellect. What we really craved was a personal connection, but instead we argued about politics. I’ve never been good at reaching out to my older brother. He’d always been the dominant one, the smarter one, the one I looked up to. That admiration had flipped on its head years ago but I hadn’t learnt to adjust. What I really wanted to tell him is that he’s loved. Because I do love my brother. But the only emotions we’ve ever exchanged are expressed through conflict. He uses conflict to feel connected, the way healthy people use affection.
‘Can we please stop talking about this shit?’ I said quietly as I regained my composure.
‘Okay,’ he said, looking confused.
We separated. I needed a couple of minutes before rejoining the family fun. Little nieces and nephews were rolling around on the grass as the adults chatted, zippole in their hands and smiles on their faces. In this warm bounty, I felt like an emotional pauper. I could argue with Julian anywhere else, but here at Mamma’s the contrast was too jarring.
I think it’s a lazy misnomer to describe bigotry as a mental illness. It certainly doesn’t help to have an overactive sense of paranoia, but the most important ingredient in bigotry is emotional and spiritual poverty. Zippole at Mamma’s house is a culinary feast, but it’s also a feast of family affection. It can be confronting to newcomers, especially those brought up under the tyranny of Anglo-Saxon table manners. The culture at Mamma’s is Italian, but it’s also distinctly Aussie. In addition to the pile of zippole there are prawns and pavlova, Malaysian cold rolls and fairy bread. Everyone brings something different and everyone is welcome. I liked that word, ‘Aussie’. I decided then and there that ‘Aussie’ was the only word I needed for Monga Khan.
I didn’t have the courage to confront my brother about how I really felt. Besides, he’s not my responsibility, I told myself. What does spiritual poverty even mean? I didn’t know. But I felt there was something in those words, some potential that was struggling to manifest in me, in my family, in Australia. As the year came to a close, I could feel it growing in me like a storm. Actually, I felt more like a battery, fully charged and filled with acid.
The Legend of Monga Khan
Each week at the end of 2015 brought another heart-crushing image from the refugee catastrophe that was unfolding in the Mediterranean. For every image that provoked empathy, many more provoked fear. That year over a million migrants and refugees entered Europe via illegal channels. Most came from Syria and Afghanistan. Every night the world news supplied a televised tsunami of dark-skinned desperation crashing through the borders of Europe. Conservative Australia sighed its concerns, but the prevailing sentiment remained ‘thank god we have secure borders’.
There was little hope to be found in the here and now, which made me all the more driven to launch a project with some historic scope. The photos I’d found in the archive were an escape hatch from our present reality. They offered a chance to escape my life in Adelaide and embark on another adventure on the streets of Australia. I wanted to forget about my family. I wanted to forget about work and my crummy little apartment in the suburbs. By the time 2016 rolled around I was aching to break out. I wanted to re-enter that bubble of my own creation and stay there for as long as possible.
The year began with three solid weeks of studio time, in which I smashed out hundreds of new posters. I entered a kind of productive bliss. The only limitation was my physical stamina, which I was free to test. Each morning I bounced out of bed knowing exactly what to do. I allowed no time fo
r hesitation. Stress became excitement. Fatigue became contentment. Every fibre of my imagination was pointed in one direction, like a trillion tiny compasses. I was ready to stake everything on the project I was building. It was a great feeling. I was consumed with anticipation.
On 25 January 2016 I launched my second national project, featuring Monga Khan and six other images from the national archive. Once again my goal was to stick up 1000 posters across the country, visiting all the capital cities. I released a punchy campaign video that was quickly picked up by a few media outlets. In the video I posed the question: ‘Did Australia inherit its identity from the people who created the White Australia policy, or does “Aussie” have more to do with the people who survived it?’
The aim was clear – reform the meaning of ‘Aussie’ by making Monga Khan famous.
This time the financial support was more than double that of the previous year. I raised $19,426 in two months, twice as much as I needed. The runaway success of the project meant criticism came quickly. In the first week I was reprimanded for not including enough women in the poster designs. Of the seven posters, only one woman was featured. A handful of people took this as an example of a male artist perpetuating women’s invisibility in history. I explained that women made up perhaps three per cent of the images found in the archive, meaning that I’d actually presented three times more women than the historical ratio. Still, the resulting discussion did highlight women’s lack of mobility at the time the photos were taken.
Another criticism pointed out that Monga Khan did not actually ride a camel, as I had originally suggested when I first publicised the project online. Monga Khan worked as a hawker, selling general goods door to door. While hawkers in South Australia did use camels, in Victoria where Monga Khan worked, hawkers used a horse and cart. So I had to make a few corrections and apologies before pressing ahead. Ultimately, the constructive criticism improved the project, as is usually the case. The real challenge would be separating the helpful critiques from the malicious detractors. That would come later.
The immediate problem was deciding what to do with all the excess funds. Not a bad problem to have! I thought back to what made the ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ project such a viral success. How could I add an element of participation to the ‘Aussie’ project? RASW became a meme because it was easy to embellish and adapt, but how could you adapt Monga Khan? The image was difficult to embellish without degrading the exact aesthetic qualities that gave it historic status. Then I remembered how I felt when I first discovered Monga Khan’s portrait. It was a sense of wonder. I wanted to imagine what it was like to be that man. I wanted to go beyond the knowable facts and imagine a personality, to create a myth modern Australians could connect with. After all, we have ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to embody Australians’ contempt for authority. Why not create a new folk hero to embody our contempt for the White Australia policy?
So with the excess funds I began to commission artists to create works that ‘imagined the life of Monga Khan as an Aussie folk hero’. I started by reaching out to the people closest to me. James Cochran painted a stunning large-scale portrait, and Manal Younus penned and performed a poem in the voice of Monga Khan. It was powerful stuff. Through Manal’s performance I grasped art’s power to reanimate values lost to the past. Manal gave voice to the resilience of Monga Khan the folk hero in a way that my poster could only hint at. We were creating something that everyday Australians might accept, embrace and maybe even carry forward. I was very excited – but I would need more help.
Still from Monga, written and performed by Manal Younus
I planned a series of collaborations that I would roll out over the year and that sought to give Monga Khan a life beyond the posters. The ultimate goal was to create a living myth that would take root in the collective Australian imagination. But first I had to get out there and make him famous.
Cronulla and Class
I arrived in Sydney on 1 April 2016 with 250 posters crammed into my brown duffle bag. As I walked into the lobby of the Central YHA I experienced a powerful feeling of déjà vu. So this is a routine now, I thought. This is my routine adventure. Once again I bought flour from the Woolworths in Haymarket and cooked glue in the hostel kitchen. I was standing by the hot stove, stirring my glue and contemplating the contradiction of my ‘routine adventure’, when a voice beside me said, ‘That’s a lot of porridge … ’ At that moment I knew I needed to mix things up.
Since launching the project I’d received dozens of messages from people offering assistance. It was hard to tell who was serious, so I sent out a bunch of replies to test the waters. A message came straight back from Hannah offering a spare bedroom in her family home in Double Bay. I’d actually met Hannah in Adelaide. She was a successful fashion designer and someone I felt I could trust. I looked at the map and it seemed like Double Bay was pretty central. So I checked out of the YHA and jumped on a train.
As I pulled my luggage through the streets of Double Bay towards Hannah’s apartment, it occurred to me that I was entering a world where I didn’t belong. This was the world of inherited wealth. Palatial homes hid behind perimeter fences on streets lined with cars that cost more than my education. There was zero graffiti, which always makes me nervous. Instead, the landscape was covered with the oddly understated hue of old money. Shining above it all was Malcolm Turnbull’s face. His electoral poster smiled down at me from his office on the corner of Edgecliff and New South Head roads. I stopped for a moment and thought to myself, I’m really going to enjoy postering this area. I had a week to introduce Monga Khan to all of Sydney but I promised myself to save Double Bay for dessert.
On the following morning I woke before dawn to take the train to Cronulla, arriving just after six a.m. The dawn light was rising over the Pacific Ocean as I passed through Cronulla Park and came to the beach. I was completely alone, with the Art Deco surf club to my right and the rock pools to my left. My immediate thought was, No wonder they wanted to protect this place. I’m admittedly a soft touch when it comes to dawn light on a still ocean, but Cronulla beach really is beautiful. Of course, that’s not the reason for its reputation.
I savoured the moment. This was to be the location of Monga Khan’s debut, but where exactly? I followed the promenade past the rock pools to where North Cronulla beach begins its long impressive arch around Bate Bay. I recognised the surf club from the riot footage.
Back in 2005 the word ‘Cronulla’ became synonymous with ‘race riots’. Tensions exploded after a group of volunteer lifesavers were involved in a fight with beachgoers of ‘Middle Eastern’ descent. In the hands of radio shock jocks and tabloid media, the fight became an ‘attack’ perpetrated upon the lifesavers, upon an Australian icon – upon Australia! A text message spread virally across Sydney, calling ‘Aussies’ to lend their support to ‘Leb and wog bashing day’ in Cronulla. Thousands of white, angry yobs showed up covered in patriotic paraphernalia. They wrote xenophobic messages on their chests and in the sand. Then they got drunk and started bashing people with brown skin.
Images of white, primal rampage filled the media and shamed Australia. Over the nights that followed, groups of Lebanese yobs carried out retaliation attacks at beaches across Sydney. Then the NSW police came down hard before the violence could escalate. Prime Minister Howard refused to point any fingers and missed yet another opportunity to cut out the rot. Communities have been working to mend the rift ever since.
What’s obvious about the Cronulla riots – but rarely said – is that they had as much to do with class as with race. The rioters were losers trying to use patriotism and ethnicity to feel like winners. They weren’t protecting the beauty of Cronulla beach; they ruined its name for decades to come. They also vandalised the unifying power of the Southern Cross, and the word ‘Aussie’. During the 2000 Sydney Olympics a chant of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie’ virtually meant ‘Welcome to Australia’. After Cronulla, it meant ‘Fuck off, we’re full’.
I was
sick of thinking about it, so I just got to work throwing up posters. I was nervous at first. Then a nice couple on an early morning walk asked me about the poster. I told them about Monga Khan and asked if they’d have their photo taken with the poster. They were happy to. I asked why and they told me, ‘Because we’re multicultural.’ Their names were Lisa and Min.
I left feeling silly for how much time I’d wasted thinking about the riots. For the sake of contrast, I decided to spend the afternoon in Sydney’s western suburbs, beginning with Auburn. Every time I unrolled the poster I met a Muslim. It was hard to get any work done. I was going back over territory I’d visited with the RASW posters, but this time there was intense interest. That’s how I met Bassam.
Plenty of the people I met knew all about the history of Muslims in Australia, but some of the younger guys had no idea. Obviously I wasn’t there to hand out history lessons but it was fun to spark some curiosity and learn some things myself. One man in Lakemba told me about the Makassan fishermen who started visiting the Australian continent decades before European settlement. I’d never heard of them.
In the days that followed I took the Blue Mountains Line out to West Penrith and left a breadcrumb trail of posters across the western suburbs. I liked to think about my images reaching people I’d never meet. Despite the glut of media in today’s world, people are essentially information foragers. We’ve evolved to collect nuggets of information across the landscapes we inhabit. Advertising exploits that impulse, and so does street art, but I think there’s something distinct about a message that’s placed in a landscape by an individual’s own hand.