The Living Archive: Peter Drew

The Poster House Living Archive is a collection of contemporary posters from around the world. Sourced from design studios, advertising agencies, and artists, these posters represent exceptional contributions to the medium being made now. 

In January, Poster House refreshed the Living Archive space at the museum with two new posters highlighting the work of Peter Drew. Read below for more information about these remarkable pieces in our collection. 

During the mid and late 19th century, Australia experienced a surge in immigration; the gold rush engaged a large Chinese workforce, while the burgeoning sugar industry brought in thousands of Pacific Islanders as indentured laborers. Tensions with local European populations led to immigration restrictions that, by 1895, became the “White Australia Policy”—a set of laws that prohibited those from non-white backgrounds from emigrating to the country. In 1901, this evolved into the Dictation Test, an exam that required a person to write out a paragraph of approximately fifty words spoken to them by a Customs officer in a European language of that officer’s choosing. This allowed the officers to decline entry to Australia based on the perceived inability to speak an approved language rather than discriminate openly by race. While the Dictation Test was abolished in 1958, it was not until the early 1970s that it became illegal to deny immigration status to an individual based on race. 

Peter Drew is an Australian multi-disciplinary artist. In 2016, he began his Aussie poster series that features screenprinted portraits of people from the Australian National Archive who requested exemption from the Dictation Test because they had immigrated to Australia prior to the implementation of the White Australia Policy. The poster on the left incorporates a 1921 photograph of Dorothy Sym Choon, a Chinese shop assistant based in Adelaide, while the poster on the right highlights a 1916 portrait of Monga Khan, a Pashtun Muslim merchant who has since become the face of Drew’s campaign. Thousands of copies of these images and others in the series were displayed all over Australia in protest against current attitudes toward immigrants. Drew continues to design new posters for the series annually.