by Peter Drew
‘By this stage we’re thinking this must be some kind of joke. We’re two scruffy-looking guys from out of town and this is how the locals make fun of people from the city. But the publican comes in and he’s all apologies. He says, “So sorry about the misunderstanding, fellas, we’re happy to have ya. It’s just that we need to maintain some kind of standard, otherwise the next thing you know there’ll be Abos in here.”
‘I stand up and say, “We’re not drinking here,” but Ross just acts like it’s no big deal!’ Dad shook his head with an expression of disappointment, bordering on contempt. ‘That was Ross Dempsey.’
I remember the surprise I felt when I heard this story. I remember the feeling of a new rule clicking into place: When someone says something racist, don’t stand for it. That’s what Dad does. That’s what you should do. It’s that simple when you’re young and you want to be like your dad. I couldn’t wait to grow up and live in Dad’s world, where a man’s actions decide his character.
The rest of my dad’s stories are all about mischief and glory. There was the time he and his mates at teacher’s college attached a gelignite fuse to a giant balloon of oxy-acetylene gas. The balloon floated off into the night sky and exploded with enough force to wake the entire town of Meningie. ‘Everyone knew we’d done it,’ whispered Dad with glee, ‘but they couldn’t prove it.’ More edifying stories came in the form of discovering shipwrecks and recovering artefacts from the ocean floor. We’d visit maritime museums and see the exhibits that Dad had helped to build. My dad was my hero. In the schoolyard I would say, ‘My dad has swum with whales and found shipwrecks,’ and the other kids would always be impressed. Dad made great efforts to encourage us to take up scuba diving but I couldn’t because I had asthma. I knew I’d find some other means of adventure.
Now that I think of it, Dad has a couple of other stories that don’t fit under the category of mischief and glory. I’m talking about the stories where Dad got hurt, where somebody hurt my dad. I was once walking with him down Grenfell Street in the city and two men were walking towards us. One of them looked at Dad and said his name. My dad returned the stare and said the man’s name, but we just kept walking. Then he turned to me and said, ‘That was the student who broke my nose when I was teaching at Elizabeth.’ The student had punched Dad in the face, crushing his upper lateral cartilage and leaving him with the boxer’s nose he has today.
At the same school, Dad had stood in a picket line when the teachers went on strike, only to have a scab drive his car into Dad’s legs, busting his knee. Later he discovered that the union had made a deal before the strike even started. The strike was just for show, so Dad’s busted knee was for nothing.
If he’d left us, I might not have heard any of Dad’s stories. I value those stories. More than any of the books I’ve read, artworks I’ve seen or movies I’ve watched, those stories give me a little picture of my place in the world and how I should act.
I have one more story from him that’s worth telling. Dad’s father was a dressmaker. He ran a workshop that made clothes for Myer as well as military uniforms during the war. One day, when Dad was in primary school, all the students were asked to bring in an object for a show-and-tell about what their fathers did for work. My dad brought an iron. Not an electric iron; this was a cast iron. Small but heavy.
On the tram home from school, an older boy made fun of my dad. ‘Ironing, that’s women’s work,’ he said, but Dad just ignored him. The taunting continued. ‘Sounds to me like you’ve got two mums,’ the boy said. Dad stayed silent. The older boy got off the tram with my dad and still the taunting continued. Then, when the older boy wasn’t looking, Dad held his schoolbag by its straps and swung it round his body like an Olympic hammer thrower. The boy went down hard. The weight of the iron made all the difference. Luckily the boy wasn’t seriously injured. He never bothered Dad again.
Whenever my dad told that story it always made him a little bit sad. For a long time I didn’t understand why. When I was a kid I just wanted to hear how the bully got what he deserved. Instead, Dad made me feel sorry for the bully. He didn’t like encouraging us to use violence, but he didn’t forbid it either. Knowing when and how much violence took character. Pretty quickly I understood that the threat of violence is the bedrock to all authority. If you don’t understand that, someone else is understanding it for you.
However, there’s one category of stories that’s missing from my Dad’s catalogue. I’ve never heard the stories where my Dad really did the wrong thing, where he hurt someone else who simply didn’t deserve it. He must have those stories. Everyone’s hurt people when they shouldn’t have. I feel like I’m old enough to hear those stories. I want to know what not to do. I want to know what I’ll regret. I want to hear a story about doing the wrong thing and finding forgiveness. When you’re a child your parents are there to forgive you, but who forgives you when your parents are gone? Who’s going to forgive the racist publican? Who’s going to forgive Australia – God? I once asked my mum about God.
‘Mum, is God real?’ I said.
‘What do you think?’ was her only reply.
Australia Day
By the end of 2016 I was twice as exhausted as the previous year but no more fulfilled. I’d come to realise that it’s impossible to tell a sufficient amount of truth in any one poster, but if I pushed ahead, uncovering more boundaries, maybe I could still find that feeling of transformation I’d set out to discover in the first place. By evoking the theme of Australian identity, I felt I’d obligated myself to produce a complete picture of Australia. So what pieces were missing from my picture? Alone in my studio, I went back to the beginning to inspect those lines from the anthem that had inspired it all. Very quickly, I found something …
We’ve boundless plains to share …
Really? It seems a little hyperbolic to claim that the Australian landmass is ‘boundless’. Maybe our anthem’s fondness for superlatives betrays the dubious methods with which the land was acquired? To an ear attuned to history, maybe our anthem sounds more like the spruiking of a street vendor as he tries to offload stolen goods? But I didn’t want to go there. Who does? Wouldn’t we all rather just get on with our lives and leave the most difficult aspects of history to someone else? After all, if we do a complete audit of human history we might find that none of us are innocent. Perhaps we’re all complicit. Perhaps that’s the secular version of original sin.
With these, and other, confusing questions, I shied away from my initial impulse to address Australia’s legacy of colonisation. With the end of the year approaching, it seemed like a good time to focus my attention on my personal life. If my little outburst in Brisbane revealed anything, it was the possibility that there were still unresolved resentments lurking deep inside my own personality. Maybe I should iron out those kinks before heading off on another foolhardy crusade to fix everyone else’s problems.
On Christmas Day, Julie and I went to my parents’ house for dinner.
We all got along fine as long as we didn’t talk about anything meaningful. Instead we talked about the cats.
‘Oh, look at Mr Fluffy! Isn’t he gorgeous?’ said Dad.
In defence of Mr Fluffy, he really was a beautiful cat, but not quite beautiful enough to distract from the fact that Simon was wearing a MAGA cap. Trump had won the US presidential election a month prior and Simon was delighting in the absurdity of being the only gay man in Australia who would have voted for the orange narcissist given the chance. Julian stayed in his room. He’d emerged earlier to accept his gifts but saw that as the extent of his familial obligations.
‘Where’s Sweet Pea?’ asked Mum without any real interest. Sweet Pea was preening in the lounge.
Simon kept sneaking off to his room to fill his cup with something strong. I didn’t realise what was happening until his speech slowed right down and he started repeating himself. He was too drunk to realise that he wasn’t getting away with it. Being around him when he’s drunk just r
eminds me of being punched. It was time to leave.
On the drive home I gave up on finding solace by resolving my family conflict. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted from them but I felt sure I wasn’t going to get it. The task of untangling Australia’s identity suddenly seemed more feasible. On Boxing Day I returned to my studio, determined to find an idea that would get me back on that wave of public enthusiasm.
I was sketching ideas for new posters when my memory bumped over something that had happened much earlier in the year. I’d been invited to attend a protest to disrupt the official Australia Day parade on King William Street in Adelaide. Why not? I thought, expecting a monocultural parade of hateful bogans. But when I arrived I discovered the opposite – a multicultural kaleidoscope of newly naturalised Australians from all over the world. Thousands of people were celebrating while thirty or so protesters were psyching themselves up on the sidelines, preparing to ‘disrupt’. I couldn’t join them. I wasn’t interested in shouting at confused immigrants, but I couldn’t leave either. I just found a place to sit and watch the conflict unfold.
I wondered why so few of the protesters were Aboriginal, but I didn’t wonder for long. Only privileged white kids can muster the moral vanity required to appropriate the outrage of Aboriginal people, believing that they are addressing the legacy of dispossession by scaring a bunch of immigrants on Australia Day.
‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land! Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land!’
I usually liked that chant, but not that day. As the protesters grew louder, they locked arms and moved in to block the road. With the parade halted, the protesters’ chant roared even louder, but then everything got quiet and awkward.
The protesters had found themselves face to face with the Muslim Women’s Association of South Australia – not exactly the enemy they’d been hoping for. The women held their confused children closer as they attempted to find a way around. Even the protesters were visibly conflicted. That changed when the police arrived. Suddenly they felt much better. The chanting returned to full volume as they clashed with police and the press photographers arrived right on cue.
The protest was a dishonest spectacle, but so were the official celebrations. Using multiculturalism to distract from the crushing effects of colonisation seems disingenuous, especially since you could easily celebrate multiculturalism on any other date. But most Australians would rather stay connected to Britain than truly take responsibility for our history. So Australian identity remains stuck, while Aboriginal identity is forced to degenerate into a politicised shadow of itself, dependent upon its opposition to ‘whiteness’. Clearly Aboriginal identity is more than that. Clearly Australia is more than just a British colony. So why can’t we move beyond what is clearly a lose-lose situation?
How could I express all that in a poster? I had a feeling that I couldn’t, but I didn’t care. I was going to try. I was going to push ahead because I’d already come too far to stop.
Real Australians Seek Welcome
The new year arrived on a wave of hysteria. Somehow, Donald Trump had won the US election. On 20 January 2017 he was inaugurated. After eight years of Americans patting themselves on the back for electing a black president, they now had to admit that their post-racial utopia had been a fantasy. The shockwaves of disillusionment rippled around the world. All that energy had to go somewhere and it quickly became the fuel for movements promising social change. This was boom time for counter-culture.
The real action was happening on the battlefield of gender politics. The worldwide Women’s March, on the day after Trump’s inauguration, lit the fuse that would explode into the #metoo movement later that year. This was the year of compulsory feminism. As a white, middle-class male I saw no room for my participation. My role was to shut up and listen. Unfortunately posters don’t listen, so I turned away from the spectacle of the moment and recommitted to addressing Australia’s colonial legacy.
Before the year began it was clear that the government-funded ‘Recognise’ campaign was failing to attract the broad support it needed. Since 2012 the campaign had been raising awareness of the need to change the Australian constitution to acknowledge the Indigenous presence. Everyone agreed that Australia needed a referendum on this, but the ‘Recognise’ campaign didn’t go far enough. It seemed many Aboriginal leaders wanted structural reform, not just symbolic change.
I wanted to avoid getting caught up in the big fight. I really just wanted to make a small statement of my own, off to the side where nobody was looking. If I could hit upon a useful insight, maybe I could contribute something relatively uncontroversial, then slowly back away from the whole ‘Australian identity’ thing.
My starting point was the perverse spectacle I’d witnessed the year before, when anti-Australia Day protesters clashed with newly naturalised migrants. Surely these two groups weren’t really enemies? Surely they needed to act as allies if reconciliation was the goal. Was reconciliation still the goal? I assumed so. Ever since primary school I’d been hearing about reconciliation. Whenever the teacher read us an Aboriginal Dreaming story we were reminded that we all had to ‘work together for reconciliation’. Everyone seemed to be on board, so why were those wounds still open? What was missing from the reconciliation process?
These were the questions I was asking myself as I sat in the studio sketching ideas for the project. The first design came easily. I liked the way it presented the inverse of the original poster. I hoped that together they conveyed the paradox at the core of Australia’s identity.
However, on its own, ‘Real Australians Seek Welcome’ was too ambiguous. The casual passer-by might not catch its meaning. It had to be more direct, so I designed this:
But still, this poster hardly said anything new. We all know Australia was built on Aboriginal land, and acknowledging that fact is a well-established cultural practice. I really wanted to make a statement addressing the conflict I’d seen between protesters and migrants on Australia Day. Surely Australian multiculturalism is something we’re all proud of? Maybe I could put forward the idea that Aboriginality was at the core of Australian multiculturalism. I started writing what would become the script for the project’s launch video.
Hello, my name’s Peter Drew and for the last two years I’ve been sticking up thousands of posters all over Australia that celebrate our multiculturalism. But what are the origins of Australian multiculturalism? Before Europeans invaded, this island continent was home to upwards of 250 distinct language groups, each with their own customs and culture. One custom was to acknowledge other groups’ traditional ownership and to seek welcome in those lands. So this year I’ve designed a new poster. Actually, I’ve designed 250 new posters, one for every language group, and I need your help making sure they get to where they belong. I’m going to be travelling to all the capital cities sticking up 1000 posters across the country, but I need volunteers in all the remaining areas … Ultimately this project celebrates the origins of Australia’s multiculturalism, but in reality it’s about our future. Today fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remain in daily use. So what we’re really talking about is 60,000 years of cultural survival and that’s something that we can all admire and learn from.
Was the diversity of Aboriginal culture really the origin of Australia’s multiculturalism? I could see good arguments for and against the notion, but it did seem like a powerful rhetorical tool for evoking a potential continuity between modern Australia and the deep history of the First Peoples.
I made a few calculations and figured I’d need to raise $13,000 to print and distribute 250 separate designs, as well as travel to the capital cities and stick up posters myself. This was a vast miscalculation – not only of the project’s popularity and my consequent ability to raise funds, but also of the costs inherent in its execution. However, the real problem was the concept.
Over the next six months my project would unravel under the weight of its own ambition. I was completely unprep
ared for the realities of the political landscape I was entering. Naivety had never stopped me in the past, but this time was different.
Launch
I put a call out on social media asking for volunteers to be in the campaign video. For the previous two years I’d been the only person speaking in my videos, but for this project I knew I had to place the audience front and centre. I was planning to make one of those painfully sincere videos where the camera cuts between multiple people reading the same script in front of a neutral backdrop, while staring down the lens with an earnest expression. I hate those videos. I can’t stand the conceit of presenting a multitude of people who apparently think in unison, but that’s what I was planning to do.
It was a very hot day when the volunteers showed up for the shoot at Tooth & Nail Studio. It was a diverse group of about forty people. I handed everyone a script and asked them to read it over. Only then did they discover the project’s concept. Anyone who was unsure about it could leave. No one left. One volunteer suggested a minor adjustment to the script, but that was all. The only paid actor was Natasha Wanganeen. I asked her to go first, and she made it look easy, giving everyone else a little more confidence. Also, the fact that Natasha was Indigenous surely helped the whiteys feel less hesitant to speak. The biggest problem was the heat. Tooth & Nail was a tin hot-box packed full of people. It took almost three hours to get through everyone. There were many pauses to wipe away sweat.
I launched the project on 23 January, amid the annual conflict that precedes Australia Day. It garnered considerable attention in the press but not the level of support I’d anticipated. It didn’t catch fire like the previous two projects. I wasn’t surprised – in the days before the launch I’d been extremely nervous and felt little confidence in the project’s success. I thought it was too complicated, too ambitious and too ambiguous. How exactly should real Australians ‘seek welcome’? I doubted whether the posters themselves carried the point about multiculturalism. Actually, I knew they didn’t. But I pressed on with the project regardless, because I felt I had to keep moving, if not to succeed then at least to understand my mistakes.