Poster Boy

by Peter Drew

  Canberra

  By the time I made it to Canberra, it was the end of August. My inbox was full of messages of support, especially from people of a migrant background, but I’d lost my personal drive. I’d lost that sense of certainty that what I was doing was right. But I had to finish what I’d started.

  Unsurprisingly, politicians were far more enthusiastic to have their photo taken with Monga Khan than a slogan like ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’. I sent requests to every MP and senator and managed to set up over twenty meetings. This time it was an even split between Labor and the Greens, with a couple of independents thrown in for good measure. Not a single Liberal stepped up, though I did receive a letter of apology from Malcolm Turnbull’s office, citing ‘existing programme commitments’.

  Again, I set up shop in the Queen’s Terrace Café. This time I found a nook behind the life-size statue of Queen Elizabeth, cast in bronze by the South Australian artist John Dowie, who’d managed to make the monarch look oddly dynamic. By contrast, I was feeling like a puppet to my own ambition. But there was certainly enough kinetic energy in that building to animate some of the wind-up toys who worked there. Surely I’d fit right in.

  Not really. I stood out like an artist in a building full of suits, so it wasn’t surprising that Keith found me. I hadn’t seen him since we met in the café the year before. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to talk to me until it became obvious that it was for his own amusement.

  ‘I saw your Jihadi Jake posters in the paper. Very cheeky,’ he said.

  ‘That wasn’t me.’

  ‘Of course, but it’s always fun to see the left eat itself,’ said Keith.

  ‘Well, you must be equally amused when the right does the same?’ I asked. ‘Last time we met, the top job still belonged to Tony.’

  Keith smiled. ‘They won the election, didn’t they? But I take your point, the centre’s looking a little wobbly these days, but that’s exciting! It means there’s work to be done.’

  ‘I don’t find it fun,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’re in the wrong place,’ said Keith. ‘Your problem is that you’re a child of the ’90s. You’ve got to realise that the world is unlikely to ever be that peaceful again, at least not in your lifetime.’

  I was looking at a man at least ten years my senior, so why did I feel like I was talking to my brother?

  ‘Well, thanks for the tip, Keith,’ I said. ‘Any other helpful advice?’

  ‘Have you met with Sam Dastyari yet? I’m sure he’d be sympathetic to your cause, although I fear he’ll be having a very busy week.’

  ‘We’ve got a meeting scheduled for Friday,’ I said. It was Tuesday.

  ‘Oh, that should cheer you up. Sam’s a fun guy.’

  Later that night the story broke that Senator Dastyari had asked a Chinese donor with deep connections to the communist government to pay his bill after exceeding taxpayer-funded travel entitlements. The story detailed a disturbing pattern of donations from Chinese interests. Keith was right. Sam did have a busy week. Cory Bernardi and his goons tore Sam down.

  For half a second I considered cancelling our meeting. A photo with a disgraced senator was of no use to me, but my curiosity won out. What does a disgraced man look like up close? Besides, who was I to turn up my nose at this guy? Maybe I had more in common with him than I cared to admit.

  On Friday it was dark outside by the time an exhausted member of Sam’s staff showed me to an empty office.

  ‘Sam will be with you in five minutes. Can I get you anything?’ he asked.

  I was happy to wait. It had been a long week for me too. I sat alone in the office and stared at the shelves. I noticed they looked strangely bare. On the table in the corner there was a large open box, so I walked over to peek inside. It was filled with Chinese paraphernalia that had obviously been stripped from the shelves. Among the ornaments were photos of Sam standing next to Chinese men in suits. I even recognised a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. Keith would love this, I thought, but mostly I thought it was sad.

  Sam showed up looking sweaty but still managed to pull his lips back over his teeth in something resembling a smile. I’d expected to meet an older man but apparently we were the same age. We chatted briefly. He’d seen the poster of Monga Khan in Sydney. We had our photo and I left. The following week he resigned from Labor’s frontbench. A year later he was forced to resign from the Senate amid further controversy. Apparently Sam didn’t know how to stop either.

  I am fascinated by people who can’t stop themselves from going too far and I feel a certain affinity with that self-destructive drive, but I’m even more fascinated by people like Keith. I couldn’t shake the impression that he was just like Julian, only more functional. I thought about him every day until Keith became one of the characters who lived inside my head. I indulged in imaginary confrontations, long arguments where Keith and Julian were one and the same person. My wife noticed that I was twitching again. She’d ask me what was wrong, what I was thinking about. I’d tell her it was nothing and try to chat about something neutral but it was only a matter of time before I’d go back to thinking about Keith.

  My poster project had come to an end but I didn’t feel resolved. After what had happened in Brisbane, I knew there wasn’t going to be a happy ending. From the outside everything looked fine. My social media displayed a triumphant victory. I’d stuck up well over 1000 posters across the country. Monga Khan was on his way to becoming famous, but something was missing. I thought back to zippole day at Mamma’s, when my disagreement with Julian had solidified my plans for Monga Khan. Maybe my obsession with Keith really came down to my unresolved conflict with Julian? I couldn’t be sure. It just felt like a tornado inside my head.

  Sometimes I receive emails from high school students who want to know about the ‘inspiration’ for my posters. It’s a fair question for which there’s never a fair answer. All of my posters begin with a disorganised storm of frustration that won’t let me sleep. Then I make something without really knowing why. Then, much later, I convince myself that I knew what I was doing all along. If you asked me why I launched my next poster using a weather balloon in Broken Hill I could probably string a sentence together, but in truth I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I couldn’t sleep and I needed to make a new poster that had something to do with family.

  Broken Hill

  One night, while Julie was sleeping, I stayed up looking through the photos I’d collected from the archive. As raw historical documents they were still so powerful. You could stare straight into the subjects’ eyes and they stared right back into you. One person stared into me more than any other. Her name was Wizaree Khalick.

  Wizaree was born in Broken Hill but her nationality was listed in the archive as ‘British Indian’. The same was true of her brother Abdullah. Their father was Abdul Khalick, who came to Australia in 1880 to work as a cameleer. There was no photo of the children’s mother. Their photos appear in the archive because they were travelling to Karachi to meet relatives and to buy camels. Just like the people in the images I’d used for the Aussie posters, these Australian-born kids had requested special exemptions to ensure they wouldn’t be denied re-entry into Australia because they weren’t white.

  Without thinking I took the images of the two children and their father and compiled them into a family photo. I liked the way they looked together. The boy seemed distracted, while the father and daughter’s stare looked almost accusing. This was a different image to the heroics of Monga Khan. I added ‘AUSSIE’ beneath their photo and went to bed.

  When I woke in the morning I got straight to work. The first thing I did was call my dad. This was to be a poster about family. I wanted my dad’s help. I needed my dad’s help. There were technical challenges that were beyond my abilities. The plan was to print a series of very large posters, twice the size of the ones I usually make. Using balsa wood and twine, we’d construct a ‘kite’ to hold three of the posters together in
a freestanding, triangular formation. Above the kite we’d inflate large red balloons, the kind used for collecting weather data. We were going to launch the Khalick family atop the Line of Lode Miner’s Memorial in Broken Hill. Also, we needed camels.

  Within a week we had the oversize printing frame back from the welders. It measured 2.2 metres square. I found a manufacturer in Victoria who could mesh the frame and a commercial printer in Adelaide who could expose it. Using pine and MDF board from Bunnings, I constructed a rig to hold the frame during the printing process. Finally I ordered a 140-centimetre squeegee, and the longest roll of kraft paper on the market. When it all came together in the studio we were ready to print some very large posters. I asked my mate Tomasso to help with the printing. Tom normally prints custom T-shirts, which makes him a perfectionist. I knew his critical eye would offset my stress.

  After some initial hiccups the prints came out looking great. We ran off thirty or so, hosed down the screen and packed everything away. The prints were done. Now we just needed some balloons. We also needed those camels.

  I wanted to do a test flight, so I bought a tank of helium and a bunch of balloons and drove with Dad out towards Clare, 140 kilometres north of Adelaide. We were well out of any flight path, down a dirt road, surrounded by paddocks. For the next two hours we proceeded to lose our temper with one another as we struggled to build our replica kite out of wood, twine and enormous sheets of paper. It was a shambles, but it came together eventually. The light was fading when we finally released the balloon and it drifted off into the deep blue sky. Only then was I confident it would work. Dad was even happier than I was.

  I called Camel Treks Australia. Karen and Paul were based in Hawker and they’d been following the poster project all year. They loved the idea and couldn’t wait to be involved. It was Karen who suggested I get in touch with the descendants of cameleers still living in Broken Hill. I made some inquiries and sent out some invitations. The date was set for 10 September, right after I’d be done with Canberra.

  I’d timed the event to coincide with the Broken Heel Festival, so I was able to convince a gang of my friends to come along for the ride. Mum and Dad came too. Supporters made the drive from Melbourne and Sydney. Among the crowd that gathered outside the Palace Hotel were the Shamroze family, descendants of the cameleer Shamroze Khan. Some of the locals just came to see the camels.

  Dad and I pulled together the kite in the lobby of the hotel before handing it over to the crowd. The balloons twisted wildly in the wind but it somehow held together. Slowly, the crowd and the camels and the kite shuffled down the main street of Broken Hill behind a police escort. It was quite a sight. I had my camera to film the odd parade.

  The crowd had halved to about thirty people by the time we reached the top of the Line of Lode. Robert Shamroze said a few words, then we released the balloons and a cheer went up from the crowd. Together we stood and watched it disappear into the infinite expanse. I finally had a chance to chat to the Shamroze clan and Robert invited me to visit the town’s mosque.

  The following day I interviewed Robert and his son Randell at the Afghan Mosque, a very small building built in 1891 and now a museum where visitors sometimes worship. Randell explained to me how his Australianness is occasionally questioned on the basis of his appearance. ‘I just tell them I’m a descendant of the Australian cameleers,’ he said with quiet pride. And then he added with a chuckle, ‘I’m not a terrorist.’

  Then it was over. The next day I was back in Adelaide.

  Even when it was over I didn’t know exactly why I’d done it. I was so caught up in getting it done that I didn’t give myself time to think. I had told people that it was ‘a celebration of the Khalick family’ and nobody really asked any questions. I don’t blame them. Looking back, it’s obvious that I’d deliberately made myself unavailable for discussion. I had to follow it through before I could know what it meant.

  It was only when I reviewed the footage and the interviews that it all came together. This wasn’t a story of triumph. It had everything to do with alienation and loss. This was the hard truth missing from the pumped-up optimism of Monga Khan. These two Aussie-born kids were denied their sense of belonging in Australia because of the colour of their skin. I couldn’t imagine their confusion as they searched for that belonging on the streets of Karachi. All I knew from the records was that Abdullah died aged sixteen, just five years after his photo was taken.

  I used my footage and the interviews to create a short film. The Khalick Family Kite won Best Documentary at the following year’s St Kilda Film Festival. Later I changed its name to Broken Hill as it toured festivals in the United States. The film captures the melancholy, but also the resilience. While echoes of the White Australia policy still sound in the prejudices of daily life, people like Randell Shamroze seem able to put that prejudice to shame through proud celebration of the deeds of their ancestors. Does pride in survival dishonour the memory of the oppressed? Not if you’re able to tell the whole story. Of course, you can never tell the whole story, but you can wage a relentless attempt.

  And there you have it, my tidy explanation for why I launched a poster on a weather balloon in Broken Hill. It all came down to another sweeping political metaphor for Australian identity.

  Do you feel satisfied? Do you feel that I’ve been sufficiently open and honest, fulfilling my promise made at the beginning of this book? Well, you shouldn’t. At the very least, if you’re anything like me, you should be getting a little tired of sweeping political metaphors. Surely I owe you something more. Surely I owe myself a deeper explanation. Isn’t it a bit suspect that I became so interested in the Khalick family, then the Shamroze family? I have no personal connection to Broken Hill or the cameleers. Why should I care? Why should their family histories be more important to me than my own?

  I drove all the way to Broken Hill and back with my parents. That’s eleven hours on the road! Eleven hours with the three of us trapped in the same vehicle. Don’t you think that might have been a good opportunity for me to bring up our unresolved family history? But why do something like that when I could try to exorcise my own demons by honouring someone else’s family? Why should I show courage when I could celebrate someone else’s?

  That’s the real reason I launched that balloon and I’m here to tell you that it didn’t work. When I watched that balloon go up and drift across the sky it felt great, but it didn’t change a thing. I looked at my dad and he was happy. Together we’d achieved something, but it wasn’t the thing we really needed to achieve. I was still furiously groping for that redemption-shaped object, convinced that the darkness was real, oblivious to the fact that my eyes were simply shut.

  I can say all this in retrospect. At the time it did feel like progress. I felt that I was deepening my understanding of Australian identity, that I could understand more and more if I simply stretched my arms further to take in everybody else’s trauma.

  Meanwhile, my own family was trapped. Part of me still believed that I could help my parents, that I could fix their mistakes. If I worked hard enough at something really impressive, maybe they’d have nothing to regret. But the part of me that wanted to abandon their problems was still winning out.

  And there were other questions I still hadn’t addressed: if our family dysfunction was the root cause of my own weirdness, how had it affected my brothers? How could I help them? How much responsibility did I want to take for it all? That was the key question. At the end of 2016 my answer was ‘none’. I would take another two years to find a better answer.

  The Racist Publican

  I began this book with a promise to describe my difficulty in becoming a man. I said it had everything to do with accepting responsibility and overcoming a kind of spiritual poverty.

  Given the political nature of my posters you might be disappointed that I’m aiming at a personal conclusion. That’s fair enough. At face value my posters appear to offer simple solutions to large and complex problems
. There’s something seductive about those broad strokes. There’s even some utility in using bold statements to blast through all the muddy nuance and reach out towards an ideal. But without the counterbalance of self-reflection, there’s really nothing to stop us from mistaking our personal pathologies for righteous virtues. Ultimately, political art like mine is lacking in self-reflection. Hopefully I can make up for that here.

  People my age care a little too much about identity and not enough about character. My dad once told me a story about character. It wasn’t intended that way but that’s the way I remember it. It was actually a story about my dad’s friend and why my dad didn’t trust him. Let’s call him Ross Dempsey. Dad loves to repeat stories but he’s only told me this story once. Even so, it stands out in my memory.

  I would have been about twelve when Dad told it. We had just finished lunch on the back verandah.

  ‘It’s a stinking hot day in 1976,’ Dad began, ‘and we’re on a diving trip heading for Port Lincoln when Ross Dempsey and I go into this pub. We walk in, sit down at the bar and order beers, but the bloke behind the bar won’t serve us because we’re both wearing thongs.’

  ‘Was it a nice-looking pub?’ I asked.

  ‘No!’ laughed my dad. ‘It was ordinary looking. No one there was dressed up. In fact, I could see someone else who was also wearing thongs! So Ross and I think, This is bullshit. We tell the bloke, “It’s hot. We don’t want to put shoes on. We’ve been driving all day. We’re not causing any trouble. We just want a beer.” But he still won’t serve us. Instead he goes to get the publican.