Writing on the wall: Street artist Peter Drew tells his story
Peter Drew has made a career asking big questions. When he sat down to write a memoir, he realised that some of them were close to home.
“When you’re sneaking around the city at night you feel like a kid again. The seriousness of the world is unmasked as a series of facades, dead objects just waiting to be painted. I was immediately hooked. Out on the street I could say anything I wanted. So what did I want to say?”
Peter Drew may be Adelaide’s best-known artist, but you probably don’t know what he looks like. And while his work has hung in the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery, that’s probably not where you’ve seen it.
But you have seen his work though, that’s almost guaranteed. You’ve seen it on alley walls, on hoardings, under bridges. Substantial pieces that quietly ask questions of passers-by. Questions about national identity, questions about how we treat each other. Big questions.
You’ve seen the posters that say REAL AUSTRALIANS SAY WELCOME. You’ve seen the posters featuring moving, handwritten accounts of what it’s like to be an asylum seeker. And you’ve seen the proud face of Monga Khan, an Indian hawker who immigrated to Victoria in 1895 to make a new life in Australia. Khan, resplendent in turban, sits above a solitary word – AUSSIE.
Drew, who says he’s pasted up somewhere between 3000 and 4000 of his posters, has taken a break from his art of late. The glue bucket and broom have been replaced by a laptop as he worked on his memoir Poster Boy, an examination of not only his art but also his family and where he fits within it.
It’s a thoughtful, heartwarming and occasionally funny piece of writing. It’s also brutally honest when it comes to dealing with the complicated dynamics that underpin all families. But if there’s one thing Drew has learned through years of pasting up art that asks us to examine just who we really are it’s that there are no easy answers. Life, just like family, is bloody complicated.
‘My family are reading the book right now,” Drew says over a long black at a Waymouth St cafe. “That’s the thing that’s been on my mind right now, to be honest. Obviously, I want people to get something from the book, but the thing I’d be most happy about is my family receiving it well.”
It could go either way, to be honest. Drew, 35, doesn’t hold back when it comes to writing about his father’s historical infidelity or his older brother’s racist tendencies.
Then there’s an anecdote involving another brother – he is one of three boys – where simmering tension between the two boils over into actual violence and Drew is punched square in the face while the pair are supposed to be hosting a radio program. They eventually made up … after seven years.
The first half of the book poured out, Drew says. The second half wasn’t so forthcoming. “The second half was much harder,” he says.
“I thought, ‘Right, I need to try to resolve as much of this as I can in an honest way’. But I don’t think it ties it all up in a neat little bow. It would be false to try to finish everything completely, because that never really happens. Nothing’s ever finished.”
Drew knows that only too well. What started as a few posters in Adelaide grew into a national, and then international, project. The artist would screen print his art, fly to a new city, check into a YHA, cook up a pot of glue and then hit the streets.
He did it as much for the reaction than to make any sort of political statement. Perhaps unusually for a street artist, Drew isn’t particularly fond of political statements.
“It’s motivated by curiosity, and wanting to find out what happens,” he says.
“These posters seem like simple commands, in many instances, but really it’s about my curiosity about how the audience reacts. That’s what motivates me, rather than telling the audience REAL AUSTRALIANS SAY WELCOME. There’s a question mark on the end of that. Do they say welcome? I want to find out what the person the street thinks.”
Overwhelmingly, the reaction is curious indifference. People pause for a second, clock the poster, and keep walking.
Occasionally they’ll stop for a friendly chat. Very occasionally they’ll get angry.
Drew always works in a hi-vis vest and this, he says, means most people rarely give him a second glance.
“The irony of wearing hi-vis is that it makes you invisible,” he says.
“It helps me get into character as well, because I think what I do is legitimate – although it is in this weird little pocket where it’s tolerated, but also illegal.”
The hi-vis disguise doesn’t always work though, and sometimes there’s confrontation.
“The other week in Sydney I was putting up a poster on hoardings, and the site manager came out and told me to take it down,” Drew says. “It was done in a really calm way, but you could tell that he was actually really angry. He told me that if he ever saw me back there he’d shove my posters up my arse. When you’re really up close with someone like that, and there’s a threat of violence, it’s just unlike any other interaction. This is going to sound stupid, but there’s a weird intimacy to it.
“He’s getting angry at me, but he’s also ashamed of what he’s doing at the same time and I don’t want to make him feel that way.”
The anger sometimes flows the other way, and Drew writes about a moment where he lost his temper – in a major way – at a man who stopped to point out that the person in his poster didn’t look like a “real Aussie”.
“Yeah, I completely lost it,” he admits.
“I said things without even thinking, just to hurt this guy. It happened, and then afterwards I thought, ‘Oh, that was me’.
“I think we all have that inside of us. Everybody should acknowledge that this is inside of them. If you think of yourself as fundamentally one of the good guys, then you’re more dangerous in a way.”
It’s this pragmatism, this refusal to go all-in on any one philosophy, that’s seen Drew draw the ire of both the Right and the Left. The Right has bashed him for framing what they see as simplistic arguments around immigration and asylum, and the Left has bashed him for refusing to buy into the identity politics that surrounds so much of modern discourse. Drew doesn’t care either way.
“Ultimately, the reason someone like me is drawn to street art is that I don’t like being put in a box,” he says.
“Surely there must be some wisdom on the other side. Surely the truth lays somewhere in the middle.”
It’s a line of thinking perhaps best expressed in one of his more recent paste-ups, which reads, “It’s my own responsibility and I’m going to fix it.” Then, in smaller letters below, “Repeat daily for a meaningful life.”
“You need to be made fun of if you are 100 per cent certain of your political views,” he says.
“I see other people of my generation who are no longer children but who are still acting like children. If we’re going to progress, then people need to grow up a bit.”
Poster Boy: A Memoir of Art and Politics (Black Inc, $29.99). Released on August 6.