AUSSIESAUSSIES 

What does an Aussie look like?

Since 2016, Australian artist Peter Drew has pasted thousands of his distinctive AUSSIE posters on streets across the country. 

The portraits come from a time when successive Commonwealth governments discriminated against ‘non-white’ migration to Australia. The White Australia policy was introduced in 1901, watered down after the Second World War and eventually abolished in 1973.

In the early 1900s the policy cut non-British migration to a trickle and after 1909, to zero, as it empowered immigration officials to force would-be migrants to do a dictation test in any prescribed language. Most of the AUSSIES in Drew’s work were seeking an exemption from the test.

While the policy is long gone, Drew’s work asks the viewer to consider what it is to be Australian – and how Federal policies can radically change the answer to that question.

Many Australians will have encountered Peter Drew’s distinctive AUSSIE posters on the streets of their cities and towns. Now, see a collection of these works together at the museum and discover the stories of the people behind the portraits.