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Poster Boy: A Memoir of Art and Politics
by
Peter Drew
4.02 · Rating details · 65 ratings · 14 reviews
I’ve stuck up thousands of posters across Australia to interrogate our national identity. With each, the response has grown. You might expect I have unshakable convictions about social justice, but I don’t. I reject the label ‘activist’. So why do what I do? Maybe it’s time I made sense of my motivations.
Artist Peter Drew wanted a better Australia. In 2013, frustrated at the political discussion around asylum seekers, he put up a poster, commenting on Australia’s offshore detention. What followed was an outpouring of community support, and a national, then global, following for his art.
As Peter’s profile rose, he began to question his beliefs – a struggle that led to destructive behaviour and affected his relationships. When compelled to face a painful family legacy, Peter realised that his behaviour and his motivation to make art shared a common thread: his father. Their relationship had been shaped by an outdated Australian machismo – a mix of bravado, inadequacy and shame that not only affects sons and their fathers, but informs social relations more broadly, including the way we as a nation treat outsiders.
Told with humour, sincerity and an attentive eye, Peter’s story is both intimate and inclusive, drawing a parallel between our personal relationships and Australia’s national narratives. This is a book about family and identity, about the lies we tell ourselves and the past we bury. It is an expedition to be a better citizen of his country. (less)
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Paperback, 245 pages
Published August 2019 by Black Inc.
ISBN
1760641332 (ISBN13: 9781760641337)
Edition Language
English
URL
https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/poster-boy
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· 65 ratings · 14 reviews
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Sep 01, 2019Diana rated it it was amazing
Thoroughly enjoyed this memoir that cuts deep into family relationships and cultural identity.
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Aug 27, 2019Brendan Lawley rated it it was amazing
Honest as fukk and raw as ya mama's favourite blue steak. Some real good quotes about the way the world be for real for real. Well done Peter Drew, whoever the hell you are, two first names do not unmaketh the man after all, thanks for writing this – I got a lot out of it. (less)
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Aug 26, 2019Déwi rated it it was amazing
4 1/2 stars- this was not the read I was expecting. It was very personal, reflective and honest and for that reason I think people will find it relatable at different levels. I think there are some details about his personal life I didn’t think we needed to know. It made me feel uncomfortable - but then that’s what honesty does sometimes. As a parent of teenagers, I felt for his parents - I felt exposed, it’s hard work being a parent - while also as a daughter/sibling I could empathise with his ...more
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Apr 16, 2020Laura Jayne Tricker rated it it was ok
I’m not sure how I feel about this book. One one hand it’s personal tale of finding oneself in Australian identity and family. I couldn’t put it down. He’s from SA and reminds me of people I know. On the other hand it’s a cliche attempt at trying to stir up controversy without truly understanding racism and the depths it reaches. I think there are good intentions behind his work. But the second something doesn’t fit his narrative it’s “ruining art”. I think some self reflection on privilege is needed. The book is a bit disjointed and feels rushed at the end. You can almost feel his enthusiasm leave as the final pages turn. I dunno. I really wanted to like this one. (less)
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Oct 04, 2019Sonja Lawrance rated it it was amazing
This book was not what I expected, it was an honest memoir about love, art and family. Highly recommended
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Dec 02, 2020Balkaran rated it it was amazing
First came across the author when I saw his Aussie poster series. Came to read the book expecting it to be about art or at best, photography. Instead, I was delightfully surprised with a story about identity, family and the dreaded word, belonging.
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Sep 02, 2019Jillian rated it really liked it
I learned a great deal from this book. I was expecting to learn about community response to asylum seekers and the Monday Khan poster campaign but learned much more about the complexity of personal motivation, psychology and the limitations of ideology.
It is a book about the pursuit of truth through art. It seeds and pursues ideas and feelings rather than a linear, logical argument, although there is a clear timeline and progression. I was carried along in its current, feeling out of my depth at times and clinging to fallen branches to stay afloat.
It has left me less assured of certain certainties and trying to figure out the core of my own values. (less)
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Nov 24, 2019Laetitia Desmons rated it it was amazing
Shelves: art
Excellent idea to write an honest book after this political art campaign that lasted a few years.
The question of identity is essential to many australians and the artistic way Peter approaches it is very profound. Our identity exist through our personnal family and history. You get to understand it very well through the book
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Oct 19, 2019Adam rated it really liked it
Shelves: politics-ir, 2019-2020-holidays
This book is absolutely fascinating account of what Australia’s identity is and how we relate to it.
Driving past Marrickville one day I saw a poster on a burnt down pub, the one adjacent to Sydenham station. The poster had a picture of an Indian looking middle-aged man with a turban, with the tag line ‘AUSSIE’.
After seeing It I felt confronted, challenged and perplexed. I felt that the poster was asking for a reaction and intending to challenge us. I first thought ‘yes I know we are have a large population of Asian, especially Indian people, but is that really our identity, is that really what we would call Aussie’? I felt it was a radical leftist attempt at saying that Australia by no means has a largely European identity.
Fast forward to browsing a bookstore in Newtown and a book captures my eyes; It was a book called ‘Poster Boy’ and on the front cover was the ‘AUSSIE’ poster that I had seen in Sydenham. It was a biography of the man who put up the poster. In fact, he had put up tens of thousands of that poster, and many others, all around Australia. I immediately purchased the book for my girlfriend (because she was also drawn into the provocative poster we saw) and we both became enamoured with it.
To give a short back story, Peter Drew is the subject. He’s a fairly ordinary, middle-class, creatively inclined Australian who, not being a typical activist, was strongly fascinated with Australian history, identity and certain social causes: such as refugee immigration. Over the course of many years he stuck up thousands of posters aimed to ask probing questions about who we are as a nation and to advocate for refugees. He does all this with a remarkably objective lens. He doesn’t align with the radical left who seek to destroy any notion that Europeans have positively contributed to the history of Australia, nor does he align with the conservative far right who often seek to parade the idea that white man in Australia has never done anything wrong, and that we have an absolutely white identity. Instead he sits at the centre- he wants people to remember the brutal history of Indigenous people, the sacrifices of the ANZACS and the migrants who have fled war torn places, and have gone to contribute to our success.
Ultimately, this book has made me challenge my ideas on what is Australia’s identity?
I don’t think this is a question that is debated and talked about enough but it is absolutely central to our progress and to unite a seemingly polarised political and civic body. To move forward I believe that we need to adequately answer how we want to define ourselves and how we want to define ourselves in the future.
Some questions
- Does being Aussie mean being a white person with European background. Just because most of us can be defined by these characteristics, is that who we are?
- Or should we be defined by the Aboriginal people who occupied this land for thousands upon thousands of years. A people who’s customs and culture are incredibly different from both Western and Eastern people. Do we need to look back and reflect more on how they were treated and how we can do better for them? They currently number at around only 3% of Australia’s population but should we give them much more than 3% of our attention?
- We are also a nation of immigrants. People have constantly flocked to Australia for numerous reasons. British Convicts. Irish escaping the potato famine. Italians, Russian, Polish escaping the horror of the world war. Vietnamese escaping their war ravaged country. The Chinese, Indian, Nepalese, Bengali. Is this who we are? A nation of successive waves of immigrants, that will go on forever?
- Should we seek to have a fixed identity? It seems it is constantly changing as we let more and more people into our country and should we accept this flux? Should we promote it? Or should we conserve some sort of identity?
Go to any Australian University and you’ll see that our identity is diverse. We have an Aboriginal context, with British and European foundations, and then a largely immigrant history. As we head Into the future we should probably seek to delve into the past a bit more about our Aboriginal history, the wrongdoings of our founders, the successes of our founders, the sacrifices of the Anzacs, the successive waves of immigrants and where exactly we want to head into the future.
Australia is going to change a lot in the future off the back of migration and I believe that this idea of identity is going to press and weigh on us. It’s going to need to be a conversation we all engage in.
I almost gave this book 5 stars, just because its so different to the books I've been reading and it brought up some really unique and interesting ideas, but I think 4 starts does it justice. (less)
Peter Drew questions art, family and Australian identity in a complicated memoir
In his memoir, Poster Boy, artist Peter Drew navigates conflicting perspectives on Australia’s streets and within his own family as he explores what it means to be a political artist, an Australian, and a man.
Over the past decade Peter Drew has used public walls and screen-printed posters to provoke national conversations through now-iconic campaigns such as Real Australians Say Welcome and the AUSSIE portrait series, which repurposes National Archives photographs of people who applied for exemptions to the White Australia Policy. But after appearing in a panel on immigration and national identity at the 2018 Festival of Ideas, Drew knew he had more to say about identity, both politically and personally.
Poster Boy wrestles with these questions as Drew reflects on his life to date and prepares for its next chapter, with a desire to grow closer to his family and start one of his own. His efforts to deliberately provoke – by sharing secrets both political and personal – may divide audiences of his work.
The book, Drew explains, uses family as a metaphor. “Because we all have families and we all understand that families have secrets,” he tells The Adelaide Review. “And Australia’s a bit like that. Australia’s got a history which is unresolved and it’s not spoken about.”
Throughout Poster Boy we follow Drew as he posts his work around the country and gets talking to people of all political persuasions and backgrounds about what the posters mean to them, from the streets of Adelaide to Parliament House in Canberra to regional Queensland. “Online it’s hard to tell whether anyone is really sincere,” he writes in Poster Boy. “But on the street it becomes obvious pretty quickly.”
The divide between online and offline discourse hits close to home as Drew introduces us to his older brother. A reclusive figure who lives with their parents, the elder Drew spends his days as an online troll. As Drew’s younger brother wears a MAGA cap to the family’s Christmas Day celebrations, it begins to seem like provocation is a family trait.
“My work has deliberately set out to play on virality and become memes in order to spread, and for people to have a sense of ownership of it,” Drew says of his work and its relationship to conversations around online activism and so-called ‘slacktivism’. “That’s a terrific thing and one of the reasons I was attracted to street art is because it does allow people to connect in a very raw way. I love that aspect of it … I think of culture as being an extension of nature in that way. How it manages to live among us is interesting to me.”
But there is a difference, Drew says, between art and the political messaging that plasters billboards and fills our screens. “You know that one individual artist climbed that [wall] in order to put up that poster. It’s sort of a spectacle of their labour. But when Clive Palmer stuck up posters for months on end all over the country, it’s really just a spectacle of his wealth. […] Both those [forms] are displays of power though, I guess.”
The question of power forms a recurring, and unresolved subtext throughout the book. While his posters invite comment, Poster Boy sees Drew often avoid his detractors, preferring to work alone and early in the day so that he can put up posters without distraction. Drew is open about his frustration when onlookers ask him questions about anything ranging from wheat paste glue to what his posters can feasibly achieve. While the bold messaging of his posters is often deliberately simplified, in the book he is regularly insensitive to more nuanced critiques of his work.
During his 2017 Seek Welcome campaign, designed to highlight the hundreds of language groups and nations on whose traditional lands we all live, Drew struggles to understand a Kaurna leader’s resistance to his use of the term ‘Kaurna Land’ in a series of posters, and the idea that some forms of culture come with political and racial boundaries that aren’t his place to navigate. He resolves to continue with the campaign, albeit with the more generalised ‘Aboriginal Land’.
It is not until Drew crashes the office of a right-wing lobbyist that it all begins to click. Given his campaigns are designed to build empathy, it’s a surprising turn to see Drew ignore so many voices along the way, only to finally gain a fuller understanding after being called out by someone who, like Drew himself, speaks from a position of great privilege.
“I think that’s really what the book’s about,” Drew says. “It’s about all the characters I’ve met on the street, because obviously [there is] the old white shouty conservative guy, but there are all sorts of other political pathologies which I bumped into. It’s just taken me a long time to digest it.”
His campaigns have earned Drew a national profile, and gained the attention of a wide variety of politicians and activist groups. But at the end of the day, does Drew view himself as an artist, or activist? “Definitely an artist,” he says. “I think what I do is make art disguised as activism. Or art disguised as propaganda.” Despite the fact he has “always hated political art,” Drew says that ultimately, he makes work designed to ask questions.
“That’s what art really is. It’s just a big question mark at the end of an object. And because I say my posters are art there is an implied question mark: Do real Australians say welcome? What is an Australian?”
Like his best-known campaigns, Poster Boy leaves some questions unanswered.
Peter Drew will launch Poster Boy at Imprints on Wednesday, August 7 from 6.30pm
Poster Boy (Black Inc.) is out August 6
peterdrewarts.com
This article has been edited for clarity since its original publication in our August 2019 issue. The Adelaide Review apologises for any errors
Kylie Maslen
Kylie Maslen is a writer and critic from Kaurna/Adelaide, and the author of Show Me Where it Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness (Text Publishing).
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