by Peter Drew
Eventually Julie called and gave me the address for our accommodation. I tried to hide the fact that something was wrong, but she wasn’t fooled. Later she found me hidden in bed. I was an inconsolable mess, confused and overwhelmed. But when Julie arrived, a question appeared in my mind that made sense of what I was experiencing. I asked Julie if I was good enough. I simply felt unworthy to participate in the abundance of love that flowed through the occasion. Again and again Julie assured me that I was good, that I did belong, and I surrendered to her words. As the boundary between us collapsed, my panic broke into euphoria so powerful that I quickly fell asleep.
I woke early the next morning and the euphoria continued on the drive home. I explained to Julie that I’d never felt that way. It felt like an ecstatic sense of gratitude for absolutely everything, like being on drugs, only clean and guilt-free. Why hadn’t someone told me that all this was waiting for me? All I had to do was surrender to love.
There’s a good chance you’re reading this and thinking, Silly boy! Everybody knows that love is waiting for all those who surrender their pride. To that I say, don’t be so sure. For every person who is reading this with amused benevolence there is someone else reading this with cynical contempt because, subconsciously, they view themselves as unlovable. It’s the kind of pain so overpowering that we hide it from ourselves until it leaks out in hatred or breaks out in violence. For many people it’s their default mode of being because they’re simply unaware of an alternative. I’m not going to suggest that what happened between Julie and me was as simple as flicking a switch. I fall back into cynicism on a daily basis, but before I met Julie I truly didn’t know there was another option.
One of the best things about love is that it doesn’t require a rational justification involving trollies. My silly story about Susan and the stockman could only happen in a world without love. In that sense, love is a necessary counterpart to reason.
As I skipped about Hobart Harbour, I suddenly remembered that John had told me something about love while we were sitting on the wharf in Darwin. Loving acts are all that matter. How had I missed that? Then another thought occurred to me: maybe love is what’s missing at the core of Keith’s worldview. Maybe, without love, the cold scalpel of reason eventually twists around and dissects itself. I wasn’t sure how to express that in a poster. Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe it was time that I did a little work on myself before heading out to teach the world another lesson.
Buying In
After the Tasmania mission I returned to Adelaide to discover that my project funds had evaporated. I was relieved. I’d successfully stuck up a few hundred posters and that seemed like enough. I decided to dedicate the rest of the year to making money and buying a house. My priorities have shifted, I told myself.
Despite my compulsive saving, I still didn’t have enough money for my half of the deposit so I asked my parents for help. They were happy to contribute. I didn’t take their generosity lightly. I knew it came with the tacit expectation of providing grandchildren, though they’d never say so explicitly. I tried to let them know that Julie and I were planning to start a family. Even before they gave me the money, I felt I owed them that assurance.
Julie and I found a mortgage broker. We told her that we wanted to buy something well within our means and, after a lengthy process, we were approved for a loan of $300K. I got the impression we could have asked for more but we didn’t want to, being terrified enough already. Despite our fear, we found a house and we bought it.
After a few months a sense of belonging set in that was different to living in a rental property. Combined with the prospect of starting a family, it seemed that everything was set for a life of domestic bliss. I started listening to the golden oldies of Cruise FM. My weekends were spent working on the garden. My friends noticed that I seemed ‘happier’.
One day, from somewhere within my mind, an ironic thought bubbled up to the surface: My posters are based on disregarding people’s property rights, but now I own property … It was followed by another thought: Australia was built on stolen land, but now I own a piece of that land. What should I do with those thoughts? I didn’t know.
In October 2017 Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which was the key recommendation issued five months earlier at the historic constitutional summit in Central Australia. As I watched Turnbull make his statement, that the proposed idea was neither ‘desirable nor capable of winning acceptance’, I was reminded of Keith’s words. Until then I thought I was ready to stop making posters about Australian identity, but now it occurred to me that I might never stop.
Until then, I hadn’t read the Uluru Statement from the Heart. So after watching Turnbull’s response I sat down and read the statement in full.
Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?
With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.
We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.
We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.
Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.
We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.
In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.
In the weeks and months that followed Turnbull’s rejection I read all the commentary I could get my hands on. Constitutional reform became my obsession. As an artist, I became fascinated with the mindset of people who believed that the way forward was to alter the fundamental mechanics of Australia’s political system. For me, coming from the world of art and culture, it seemed like such an impotent strategy – like watching a team of elephants attempt open-heart surgery on a mouse, using wet spaghetti. There was no lack of intelligence in the discussion, but the legal language conveyed no real feeling. Despite the Statement from the Heart’s explicit appeal to emotion, the response from Turnbull and the culture at large seemed comparatively mechanical. The various pundits employed a carousel of legal jargon that was never going t
o attract broad interest, let alone the support required for a referendum. Over time I lost interest. If that’s the way this game goes, I’d rather not play, I said to myself, and got back to building my veggie patch.
I picked out a long strip of dirt at the back of our property. There wasn’t much growing on it, just a few tufts of scraggly glass, but I could see its potential. In my mind’s eye I saw a bounty of vegetables that Julie and I could gift to our neighbours and relatives. I imagined teaching our children how to tend the plants. But as I dug into the dirt I made a nasty discovery – the land was filled with buried rubbish. The property’s previous owners had dug holes all over the yard and filled them with household junk and building materials. That’s why nothing would grow. I found bricks, rusted metal, plastic children’s toys, cutlery, chunks of cement and endless shards of glass. Some of the rubbish pits were shallow but other went down for metres. There was no way of telling from the surface. Once you hit junk you just had to keep digging.
Obviously I’m telling you about the rubbish buried in my backyard because it’s a useful metaphor about the inevitability of facing the past. After a couple of weeks of digging up rubbish I gave up on the idea of removing it all. Even after Dad and I had taken trailer-loads to the dump I knew the yard would never be as clean and pure as I had hoped. At least I knew I’d improved it somewhat. With that attitude in mind I read the Uluru Statement again and committed myself to producing a response of my own.
If there’s one thing I understand about communication, it’s the impossibility of conveying the totality of any desire through a single statement. Given that, it’s safe to say that Turnbull didn’t really know what he was rejecting. It’s also safe to say that the people who wrote the Uluru Statement didn’t know what they were asking for, whether it was too much, not enough or the wrong thing altogether. I didn’t know either. However, I thought I might be able to understand the fear that motivated its rejection.
What would someone like Keith fear in the Uluru Statement? Surely it was the notion of ‘structural reform’. Maybe the prospect of a First Nations Voice was seen as a kind of Trojan horse? After all, what are words like ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self-determination’ if not expressions of a latent desire to separate from Australia? If Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders went down the road to self-governance, Australia might gradually disintegrate along racial boundaries. Was that a rational fear? To borrow a phrase from the statement itself, ‘how could it be otherwise?’ Without a real effort to reform Australia’s fractured identity, why wouldn’t Australia slowly fall apart under the weight of a constitution divided by ethnicity? Regardless, a voting public would be vulnerable to these perceptions, and worse … Maybe that’s why Turnbull said it was not ‘desirable or capable of winning acceptance’.
It’s always been my process to get as close as possible to the people whose opinions I oppose. I think it helps to get inside their heads and surrender completely to their convictions until you can’t remember how you got there. Only then, when you’re trapped within their worldview, can you start to really feel what they feel. Only then can you attempt to negotiate a way out. I think people like Keith play the world as if it’s a game of power while secretly hoping it’s not. They toy with the idea that morality’s relationship to power is merely ornamental, but they never truly believe it.
As I stood on my little patch of land with my unstable family history behind me and the future prospect of starting a family of my own, I wondered what really holds people together. Surely it’s something stronger than the transactional mechanics of legal jargon. Surely it’s the power of stories and myths that live inside us and bind us together by the force of shared imagination.
I thought back to the invention of Monga Khan, the Aussie folk hero. Suddenly a new idea occurred to me. What if I tried to reinvent Dupain’s Sunbaker? If there is an animating spirit at the core of people like Keith and Turnbull, what would that spirit think and feel?
AWAKE!
The Sunbaker is dreaming the Australian dream
He’s dreaming of atonement
He’s dreaming of forgiveness
He’s tired from all he’s taken
What colour will his skin be
Whose head will appear on his coins
What shape will his flag be
When the Sunbaker awakes?
I designed this poster at the end of 2017. At the time it was as close as I could come to making a poster about love. I think people like Keith still believe in love but they hide it from themselves. They hide it in symbols like the Sunbaker, or the national anthem or the Australian flag, because those symbols are powerful enough to protect their love. Art has the ability to reshape those symbols and unlock the love therein so that individuals, families, tribes and nations can be reborn and awaken anew. I know that sounds a little grandiose, but that’s what I believe. I’m an artist; it’s my job to believe in the redemptive power of art.
At the time I made this poster I thought it was for Keith, but really it’s for my brother Julian. I don’t know how to explain that in a logical way. I just remember the feeling of trying to design something personal and that this is the way it came out. By the end of 2017 there was a feeling growing inside me that was quite different to anything that had motivated my previous projects. It was more of a personal longing. It didn’t feel like strength. It felt like vulnerability. I thought it might go away. I wanted it to go away. I wanted to block it out with another attention-grabbing project. So I cooked up some more attention-grabbing posters and tried one more time to outrun my own demons.
Please Be Offensive
At the beginning of 2018 I went through my annual phase of doubting whether I was really an artist. I had little confidence in my ‘AWAKE!’ design. Too many words, I told myself. Why would anyone share a poster that takes time to read and offers no clear solution? It had none of the punch of my previous designs, so I put it to one side and tried to forget about Australian identity.
Luckily there was plenty of other noise to focus on. After one year of Trump in the White House, the global culture was busy servicing the appetites of a new generation of outrage junkies. Why not? I thought. Why not jump into that vortex and see where it takes me?
There were so many battlegrounds to choose from. I could go into race, gender, immigration, free speech, economic inequality, climate change, gun control, the rise of the far right or the rise of the far left. Via YouTube and Twitter I could easily discover who the thought leaders were. If debate got bogged down in nuance I could float downstream to where the debate stayed simple, punchy and entertaining. I could rapidly internalise the swirling mass of rhetoric and regurgitate it as my own. Maybe I’d start small with a few funny memes. Gradually I’d build my following into a baying mob of supporters whom I could deploy against easy prey. I noticed that the landscape was quickly filling up with backyard pundits competing for the prize of ‘most provocative player’. How could I make my brand stand out? What if I was never truly an artist? What if I was just another political entrepreneur?
The only indication that I might still be an artist was the fact that the entire spectacle made me feel sick. Everyone expressed the same disgust, yet everyone remained committed to a system of social media that thrived on polarisation. All the old optimism of a ‘democratised’ media landscape had evaporated. Instead it seemed that democracy itself had become suspect.
Something about the term ‘political entrepreneur’ was still interesting to me, so I decided to make it my new theme. Until then I’d been unabashedly left wing. However, from an entrepreneurial perspective, declaring my allegiance to just one side seemed like a dumb move. Wasn’t I alienating half the political market? What if I made some right-wing posters? So I did.
We’re only truly equal in death, so there’s a bitter irony in the fact that whenever we try to enact total equality it always seems to end up in a big pile of skulls. To me this seemed a very dark statement, but many people saw it as complet
ely innocuous, simply because it bore the word ‘equality’. Such is the unimpeachable power of that particular platitude.
At first I was disheartened by the poster’s superficially warm reception until I received a message of support from a Cambodian refugee, who interpreted the skulls as victims of the Khmer Rouge. If she got it but the normies didn’t, all the better, I thought.
Now that I had a right-wing poster, I needed a new left-wing poster to balance things out. I decided to turn my focus to the United States. Julie and I were planning to travel to America later in the year. It was to be our last hurrah before we committed ourselves to a life of parental servitude. At some point I realised that the perfect issue for an Australian street artist in America would be gun control.
Following the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017 and the Parkland shooting in February 2018, the debate over gun control had reached fever pitch. Several comedians, including one Australian, had already made careers for themselves by boasting about the success of Australia’s gun laws. The fact that a conservative Australian government had introduced the restrictions made the point all the more irritating to American conservatives. I felt confident my poster would trigger their annoyance.
Finally, I needed a third design to pull it all together and draw out the sour taste of irony. I wanted to make a spectacle of my naked capitalistic impulses. I wanted to celebrate the sheer nihilism of America’s political entrepreneurship and pour my fuel upon the fire.