"Real Australians Say Welcome" Artist Debuts His Latest Slogan: "Aboriginal Land"

Australia Day—and those #ChangetheDate rallies—may be over for another year, but artist Peter Drew is not waiting 12 months to continue the conversation.

Peter Drew, the Adelaide artist behind the “Real Australians Say Welcome” campaign, has debuted his latest attention-grabbing poster.

The third and final instalment of the campaign displays “Aboriginal Land” in giant block letters, with “Real Australians Seek Welcome” printed below, inside a bold arrow pointing downwards.

It’s a twist on the iconic—but controversial—slogan that first gained him notoriety (both for contrasting Australia’s foreign policy and for also potentially disregarding Australia’s First Peoples).

“If you take the two statements together, in my mind, it evokes the conundrum or riddle which is at the core of Australia’s identity,” Peter told Student Edge.

“We are a welcoming people; or at least, that’s what we like to tell ourselves, but what is the cost of that, in terms of the original inhabitants of Australia? There’s a riddle there.”

The idea for the first campaign came to Peter in 2013, inspired by such nationalistic catch-cries as “If you don’t like it, leave,” and “Stop the boats”.

“It always had an element of irony to it, in my eyes, because there’s something inherently contradictory in [my] phrase,” he explained.

Peter denies the irony was lost on those who viewed it, but nonetheless turned his attention to Indigenous Australians with his third entry.

(The second of the series featured a man in a turban—specifically, Monga Khan—with the word “Aussie” emblazoned across him.)

“In the beginning, I had not intended to make it into a trilogy, but I think if you are going to make posters about Australian national identity, at some point, you have to address Aboriginality,” he said.

More than 250 versions of the “Aboriginal Land” poster will be produced, each in a unique Indigenous language. Peter is planning a road trip that will see him put up the posters around the country.

However, he insists his goal isn’t to frighten or confront people with his message.

“I think what makes my posters perhaps different from other forms of activism or propaganda or however you might like to phrase it, is I want people to have a sense of strength having seen them; a sense of unity,” he explained.

“I don’t want to disrupt people to find out that they’re just more afraid or more insecure, because we have enough of that already.

“I think there’s a lot to be proud of in what we have.”

In the meantime, he’ll also continue work on his poster run for Muslims for Progressive Values, who recruited him for their own promotional campaign.

“The slogan I came up with is, ‘There are 1.6 billion ways to be Muslim,’” he said.

“I’m making 10,000 of those for them, over a period of time because, obviously, a lot of posters takes a while, and they’re distributing them to people all over the planet, and I think that’s especially timely at the moment.”

Photo: Supplied by Peter Drew