Poster Boy by Peter Drew

Author:Peter Drew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

I left feeling silly for how much time I’d wasted thinking about the riots. For the sake of contrast, I decided to spend the afternoon in Sydney’s western suburbs, beginning with Auburn. Every time I unrolled the poster I met a Muslim. It was hard to get any work done. I was going back over territory I’d visited with the RASW posters, but this time there was intense interest. That’s how I met Bassam.

Plenty of the people I met knew all about the history of Muslims in Australia, but some of the younger guys had no idea. Obviously I wasn’t there to hand out history lessons but it was fun to spark some curiosity and learn some things myself. One man in Lakemba told me about the Makassan fishermen who started visiting the Australian continent decades before European settlement. I’d never heard of them.

In the days that followed I took the Blue Mountains Line out to West Penrith and left a breadcrumb trail of posters across the western suburbs. I liked to think about my images reaching people I’d never meet. Despite the glut of media in today’s world, people are essentially information foragers. We’ve evolved to collect nuggets of information across the landscapes we inhabit. Advertising exploits that impulse, and so does street art, but I think there’s something distinct about a message that’s placed in a landscape by an individual’s own hand.

For the second half of the week I focused on Sydney’s North Shore. I visited the SBS building in Artarmon, where Abdullah Alikhil invited me for a radio interview that would later be translated and broadcast internationally in Monga Khan’s native language of Pashto.

More help came from a Muslim mother of three who offered to drive me around the Hills District. Mina picked me up in her family wagon with her one-year-old in the back. This isn’t going to work, I thought, but I was wrong. We covered more ground that day than I thought possible. Whenever I jumped out to hit a spot, Mina came too, pram in one hand, phone in the other. She had that ‘get it done’ attitude of a mum with a million things on her schedule. By the end of the day I was embarrassed to admit I was exhausted while Mina seemed fine. She introduced me to her family over a delicious Afghan meal. She was an interesting lady.

‘I’m a proud member of the Liberal Party because I believe in the empowerment of individuals for the collective good of society, and not the other way round,’ she told me, to my surprise.

Mina’s ancestors were Arabs who came to Afghanistan to teach Afghans about Islam. They adopted the Afghan (predominantly Zoroastrian) culture while maintaining their religion.

‘That’s the beauty of Islam,’ Mina explained. ‘It’s dynamic. You can adapt it to any society and any culture. I do whatever I can to highlight that.’

We spoke about Islam’s internal struggles to remain pluralist and how federal government grants had been used to recruit Muslim Australians into surf-lifesaving clubs across Sydney, following the Cronulla riots.

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