Collections Monga Khan AUSSIE poster by Peter Drew, 2020. ANMM Collection, reproduced courtesy the artist
The art of making New immigration acquisitions
There are more than 10,000 objects in the museum’s collection relating to Australia’s rich immigration history. But the museum is also committed to contemporary collecting about immigration. Curator Kim Tao discusses three new acquisitions that explore the art of making through activism and sustainable socially engaged design.
AFFIXED TO A PILLAR beneath the Western Distributor freeway in the Sydney suburb of Pyrmont, just down the road from the museum, is a striking poster featuring the Indian-born hawker Monga Khan. It’s a poster I stare at every afternoon on the way home, while waiting for the traffic lights to change. Monga Khan is dressed in a suit and turban and gazes, rather defiantly, into the distance in his profile portrait, which has been superimposed with the word ‘AUSSIE’ by Adelaide artist Peter Drew. Since 2013, Peter Drew (born 1983) has been making his mark by installing hand-screenprinted posters in public spaces to raise awareness of contemporary issues such as immigration and Australian identity. His ‘Stop the boats’ and ‘Real Australians say welcome’ poster campaigns were a direct comment on the treatment of asylum seekers, but it is his iconic AUSSIE series that has captured the public imagination and provoked conversations about what epitomises a ‘real Australian’. To create the series, Drew mined the vast archive of Certificates of Exemption from the Dictation Test (CEDT) at the National Archives of Australia, which attests to the administration of the White Australia policy during the first half of the 20th century. After Federation in 1901, the new Commonwealth government passed three pieces of legislation – the Immigration Restriction Act, Pacific Island Labourers Act and Post and Telegraph Act – together known as the White Australia policy. The central tenet was a dictation test that required non-European immigrants to write out a passage of 50 words in any European language (and later, any prescribed language), as dictated by the immigration officer. Since the choice of language was at the discretion of the officer, undesirable immigrants – namely those from Asia and the Pacific Islands – were destined to fail the test. They could then be declared prohibited immigrants and deported. 58 Signals 132 Spring 2020
Non-European residents of Australia wishing to travel overseas temporarily could apply for a CEDT to re-enter the country without needing to sit the dictation test. These certificates of exemption, comprising biographical details and photographs, constitute an extraordinary body of records documenting the movements of thousands of Sikh hawkers, Chinese traders and Afghan cameleers, who were granted special permission to leave and re-enter Australia as their labour was regarded as essential to the nation’s growing economy. They are the faces of the White Australia policy. Monga Khan, born in India in 1870, was one such exemption. He immigrated to Victoria in 1895 and worked as a hawker around Melbourne, Ballarat, Beaufort and Ararat, as evidenced on his application for a CEDT in 1916. Gladys Sym Choon was another. She was the owner of the China Gift Store in Adelaide’s Rundle Street, which sold exotic oriental goods such as embroidery, lace, lingerie and ornamental china sourced during her regular visits to China and Hong Kong. Although Gladys was born in Adelaide in 1905, and her father was born in the British colony of Hong Kong, she was still required to apply for a CEDT to re-enter Australia in the 1920s. Drew uses the visually arresting medium of poster art to humanise these marginalised histories and complicate the traditional vision of national identity that dominates both media discourse and Australian folklore. His ‘AUSSIE’ posters restore agency to figures such as Monga Khan and Gladys Sym Choon as survivors of the White Australia policy. As part of the National Maritime Collection, they are an evocative example of poster art as protest art, and the emerging relationship between artists and activists responding to Australia’s changing immigration policies.
