by Peter Drew
For the second half of the week I focused on Sydney’s North Shore. I visited the SBS building in Artarmon, where Abdullah Alikhil invited me for a radio interview that would later be translated and broadcast internationally in Monga Khan’s native language of Pashto.
More help came from a Muslim mother of three who offered to drive me around the Hills District. Mina picked me up in her family wagon with her one-year-old in the back. This isn’t going to work, I thought, but I was wrong. We covered more ground that day than I thought possible. Whenever I jumped out to hit a spot, Mina came too, pram in one hand, phone in the other. She had that ‘get it done’ attitude of a mum with a million things on her schedule. By the end of the day I was embarrassed to admit I was exhausted while Mina seemed fine. She introduced me to her family over a delicious Afghan meal. She was an interesting lady.
‘I’m a proud member of the Liberal Party because I believe in the empowerment of individuals for the collective good of society, and not the other way round,’ she told me, to my surprise.
Mina’s ancestors were Arabs who came to Afghanistan to teach Afghans about Islam. They adopted the Afghan (predominantly Zoroastrian) culture while maintaining their religion.
‘That’s the beauty of Islam,’ Mina explained. ‘It’s dynamic. You can adapt it to any society and any culture. I do whatever I can to highlight that.’
We spoke about Islam’s internal struggles to remain pluralist and how federal government grants had been used to recruit Muslim Australians into surf-lifesaving clubs across Sydney, following the Cronulla riots. ‘That’s how the burkini was invented,’ said Mina with great satisfaction. She sent me back to the south side with my stomach full and my head spinning.
On my last night in Sydney I decided it was time to hit Double Bay. I’d had a wonderful stay with Hannah’s family. They’d been extremely accommodating of my comings and goings at odd hours and my transformation of their kitchen into a glue factory. So when their eighteen-year-old son asked to come out postering, I thought it would be nice to have some company. Besides, what could go wrong? Well, obviously we got arrested. It was boring and embarrassing, as being arrested usually is, but we did manage to hit some great spots. I was charged with vandalism, to which I would later plead guilty in absentia and pay a fine.
The next morning I said my goodbyes to Hannah’s family. It was a little awkward considering I’d got their son arrested, but they were polite enough to downplay their disappointment. I walked back to the Edgecliff train station through the opulence of Double Bay, collecting photos of my posters as I went. Outside the Woolworths I noticed that one of my posters was already starting to peel at the corner, so I decided to make some quick repairs. But just as I jumped atop a bin beneath the poster, I heard a voice behind me.
‘Don’t you dare!’
I turned to see a woman of about fifty glaring at me through her Gucci sunglasses. I heard the beep of her camera phone as she thrust it forward. Evidently I was being recorded.
‘I’m fixing it,’ I said over my shoulder.
‘Oh no, you’re not,’ she said. ‘You’re leaving it right where it is. This area’s white enough, thank you very much! The poster stays!’
She enunciated each word with such drawn-out self-congratulation that I was tempted to tear up my own poster just to piss her off. She was, by all appearances, a rich white lady. Her clothes were ostentatiously eclectic. I was still wearing my dirty work gear from the night before. Standing atop a bin, I probably looked more like one of the yobs from the Cronulla riots than her idea of an artist. How best to dispel her misconceptions in a mature and peaceful manner? I wondered. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything so I just got to work fixing the poster.
‘You’re being recorded!’ she announced.
I finished the job and jumped down. She stood there staring at me through her phone. I couldn’t help myself …
‘Please don’t use my poster to racially self-flagellate,’ I said, and watched her mouth drop open.
‘What did you say to me?’ she said.
‘It’s on your video,’ I told her, then walked off towards the station. I wish I’d told her that she should buy some more faux tribal beads if she really hated her own whiteness that much, but the best lines always arrive late.
On reflection, I was surprised that I’d treated her less generously than I had some of the more conventional racists I’d encountered, but at least this time I hadn’t flipped over anyone’s table. It was irritating being talked down to by someone who clearly had more money than me, but ultimately I was irritated at the failure of the poster itself. I realised that I couldn’t stop people from using my posters to assert the superiority of their class.
On my flight home to Adelaide, I breathed a sigh of relief. Sydney had been a lot to take in. I was leaving behind hundreds of Aussie posters across the city, but I had a growing feeling that something was catching up with me. I still wanted to believe that my posters were bulletproof, but I knew they weren’t. There was no way to get involved in this muck without bumping into everyone else’s ideas. Wasn’t that half the point? Wasn’t I meant to be learning? I thought back to Mina, to Lisa and Min on Cronulla beach, to everyone I’d met from Penrith to Lakemba and finally the rich lady in Double Bay. It was too much to process. What had begun as a simple mission to oppose the xenophobes already seemed like a tangled web of invisible boundaries. I decided that there’d be time later to make sense of it all. At the very least, I knew that the Aussie posters were an effective tool for revealing people’s true colours.
In the coming weeks I’d stick up hundreds more posters across Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Canberra. But first I had to go home and get those collaborations rolling.
Cultural Appropriation
Back in Adelaide I made an effort to escape the noise that was growing around the poster project. Just like the previous year, my inbox was full of offers of assistance, media inquiries and rage-filled criticism. I needed space to think. I also needed time to wash down my equipment, deal with the blisters on my feet and print more posters. For a few days I answered media enquiries and offers of support from random individuals and community groups. Once I had my head above water I contacted the writer Royce Kurmelovs. I had a collaboration to propose.
I’d met Royce years before when he wrote a story about my poster project with Ali. I wanted to commission Royce to edit a book about Monga Khan – a collection of short stories and poems imagining the life of Monga Khan as an Aussie folk hero. We met at a café and I explained to Royce that I had no idea what I was doing. He pretended to believe me and our working relationship developed on that basis.
On the surface the process was simple enough. First, Royce would put a call out for written submissions, then pick the best ones. I’d commission visual artists to produce illustrations. Royce would find a designer to pull it all together. I’d send it to a printer. Everyone would get paid and we’d have a book. Easy! However, beneath the surface of our voyage awaited the sinkhole of political correctness. One wrong move and our project would be sucked down into the vortex. Royce was smart enough to know that it was a real concern. I was smart enough to play dumb.
From the beginning I insisted that we seek as broad a range of submissions as possible. I wanted a cross-section of voices, and I knew that meant risking accusations of cultural appropriation. It’s true that Monga Khan was a Muslim and a migrant, but should that restrict non-Muslim non-migrants from imagining his story? I’m neither Muslim nor migrant, yet I’d declared Monga Khan an ‘Aussie’ and endeavoured to make that claim famous. Surely I’d already decided where I stood.
Of course I had, but I’d never put it into words. So let me be clear right now: I think cultural appropriation is an anti-cultural concept that seeks to subordinate culture to politics. By confining creativity within political boundaries, concepts like cultural appropriation inhibit our ability to reimagine and transform group identities. Ultimately, the
power of the creative individual is reduced and the power of art to transcend political boundaries is diminished. If you want to make the world less offensive, you need to find a way that doesn’t erode the power of art.
I keep circling this point, but notions like ‘cultural appropriation’ are really just symptoms of a larger spiritual malaise that slides towards nihilism. If you follow it through you’ll notice that ‘cultural appropriation’ presupposes a worldview in which society is just a game of power. That kind of thinking is an impulse we all share, but ultimately it’s a reductive way to view the world. Luckily we have the circuit-breakers of imagination, art and culture to keep us safe from ourselves. That said, I don’t necessarily fault people who are seduced by ideas like cultural appropriation, especially when they’re seeking to protect cultures that have been historically oppressed. I just don’t feel comfortable perpetuating the assumption that those cultures are ultimately fragile. To me, that seems a little paternalistic and, ironically, suppressive.
I hoped our little book could pull together a variety of voices and grant the reader permission to imagine Monga Khan as their personal hero, capable of solving their personal crises. Better yet, it might grant the reader permission to identify with Monga Khan, to enter his character via the imagination, thus dissolving the boundary between self and other. To my mind, that seemed a worthy aim, more worthy than obeying the politically correct orthodoxies of the moment.
One day I received an email from Royce explaining that we’d hit a snag. Apparently one of the contributors had pulled out because the book had no Aboriginal contributors. This was actually my fault; from the beginning I’d intended to approach someone I knew personally who was of both Afghan and Aboriginal heritage, but I’d been putting it off out of fear of rejection. But the damage had been done. The vacancy did make room for another Aboriginal contributor, though, so it actually worked out quite well. In the end we brought together eleven short stories and poems and twenty-four illustrations. The back cover reads:
Monga Khan was born in British India in the area of Batrohan in Punjab. He arrived in Australia in 1895 and worked as a hawker in rural Victoria. In 1930 he died in the Ararat Hospital, aged 68. These are the facts; what follows is LEGEND.
There’s also a note on the final page of the book stating:
The Publisher and the Authors acknowledge that the copyright of the fictional character name ‘Monga Khan’ hereafter belongs in the public domain, meaning that anyone can publish works of fiction featuring a character of that name.
My original impulse had been to go the opposite way. When Royce and I were working out the initial contracts, I tried to insert a clause that would protect the name Monga Khan as our intellectual property. I struggled with the idea for a week or so before realising how wrong-headed it was. The entire ethos of the project was to launch Monga Khan into collective ownership. I guess I was afraid that if we didn’t protect what we created, it might be swept away by a larger entity. Thankfully I realised that the best way to protect Monga Khan was to ensure that he belonged to everyone.
Seven months after my first meeting with Royce, a truck pulled up outside my apartment and delivered 1000 freshly printed copies of the completed book. It would take another year to sell them all, but that first read-through was pure joy. I felt we’d somehow got the balance right. Some of the stories were very dark. Others were filled with whimsy and humour.
Illustration by Andrea Smith for The Legend of Monga Khan
Paul Kisselev’s illustration of Monga Khan saving Bonnie Hanson from the River Russell as described by Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa in her poem ‘Monga Khan & The Humble Hansons’.
Gabriel Cunnett’s illustration of Zhen’s schoolbag for Elizabeth Flux’s short story ‘One’s Company’.
I’m particularly proud that Elizabeth Flux’s short story ‘One’s Company’ was later included in the Best Australian Stories 2017 anthology, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke.
Publishing The Legend of Monga Khan was a fun experiment in the creation of a folk hero, but I felt that we hadn’t risked enough. By all accounts the book was a success, but it wasn’t a particularly ambitious project. If I’m honest, the book’s greatest weakness was my own lack of expertise as a publisher. If I’d been a little more ambitious and a little less protective, I could have pitched it to a larger company that might have found a wider audience. Instead I did it myself because I thought I could. As a result it became an adjunct to the poster project rather than taking on a life of its own as I’d hoped it might. For all my theorising about cultural appropriation, we actually experienced very little pushback. The conflict was all in my head. We weren’t getting in anyone’s face. We weren’t ruffling feathers. It was fun but it wasn’t like putting up posters. That conflict was a real and reliable source of the kick I thought I needed.
Oi! Oi! Oi!
On 12 April I checked into the Melbourne Central YHA with 250 posters ready to go. After my experience in Double Bay I’d realised that I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be away from nice things and nice people. I’d decided that putting up posters is an uncomfortable business and the only way to do it well was by taking pleasure in that discomfort. I wanted to stay in that bubble where my feet ached, my clothes stank and I didn’t need to apologise to anyone. I wanted to feel completely disconnected. It’s an angry place to be and that anger keeps you going. In the pit of my stomach I had a reservoir of warm acid that was leaking out, one poster at a time.
Days passed with a minimum of human interaction. On social media I would post happy images of people holding my posters, but that was all a performance. On the inside I was obsessed with my imaginary battle against the city. There were five million people out there and it was my mission to reach every one of them – without letting anyone reach me.
Occasionally people would shout at me as they drove by, or try to start a confrontation only to discover that I wasn’t the artist they were looking for. I was just a man trying to do his job. Every day I’d wear hi-vis for protection. Practically, it stopped me from getting arrested, but hi-vis also, ironically enough, makes you invisible. It separates you from everyone. You become alone in the crowd, and Melbourne, with all its trams and busy public spaces, is a great city for indulging in that kind of separation. Day by day I drifted further away from people.
By the end of the week I’d almost run out of posters. It was Sunday and Collingwood were playing Melbourne at the MCG, so I decided to put up my last dozen posters around Richmond and catch the football crowd. I had just finished putting up three in a row on Stewart Street when an elderly man snuck up behind me.
‘Who are these gents, then?’ I heard over my shoulder.
I was caught off guard. He was a small man wearing a red and blue Demons scarf and seemed to be in good spirits. Something about him seemed gentle, so I opened up.
‘Well, that’s Monga Khan in the middle, Balcoo Balooch on the left and Ackbar Khan on the right. I found their photos in the National Archives.’
I found that I couldn’t stop talking. I went on about cameleers, hawkers, mythology and folk heroes, and all the while football fans were walking past the posters on their way to the match.
Finally the man said, ‘The shout of “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” is so Australian, and combined with those images it really gets to you.’
It took me a moment to realise that the three posters next to each other created the three Aussies of that chant. I honestly hadn’t made that connection before, but suddenly it was obvious. Footy fans kept walking past and I’m sure they all made the same connection. There was so much togetherness and warmth in their faces that I had to get away. I packed up my gear and went back to the hostel. I still had a few posters to put up but I couldn’t do it. My precious anger had vanished.
The following week I stuck up posters in Adelaide before jumping on the Ghan and heading north. In Alice Springs, Katherine and Darwin I kept putting up posters but I was running on empty. The conflict in me was
waning but I didn’t want it resolved. Every day I’d receive new messages of encouragement and criticism on social media but I couldn’t connect with any of it. More than anything, I felt confused. I didn’t know it yet but I needed help.
John
By the time I reached Darwin the wheels were starting to come off the wagon. On the second day I saw a man tearing down three of my posters from across the street and I felt the rage rise up again out of nowhere. Suddenly I was racing towards him. Then I noticed that the police were at the end of the block, and I got control of myself before walking by. The man barely noticed I was there. Back at the hostel I realised it was time to get some perspective on what I was doing. I needed someone to talk to and the only person I knew in Darwin was John, my old uni lecturer. I hadn’t seen John in ten years. I don’t keep in touch with any other teachers. In fact I barely keep in touch with John, but I knew he’d be good for a chat.
If you’re lucky, you’ll have at least one great teacher in your life, someone whose enthusiasm for understanding the world is contagious. I was in my early twenties when I found John at Adelaide University. As an impressionable undergrad I’d leave John’s lectures with a feeling that the world was somehow larger than I’d been led to believe. Contrary to the spirit of the times, John gave the impression that history was still happening and we were in the middle of it, like voyagers on a vast ocean of hidden currents. The big ideas of history were our vessels and every idea had a lineage and a personality of its own. Best of all, John would listen. If, during a tutorial, you reached out to grab an idea, John would help you catch it from across the room. He’d throw out a multitude of connections and you’d go home wanting to read, read, read!