Artist vows Banksy-style blitz after angry anti-migration mob rips down Adelaide art
Angry but determined Adelaide artist Peter Drew is installing a thousand new artworks across Australia. He watched one of his iconic AUSSIE Posters celebrating diversity being torn down at the recent anti-immigration rally. See the video.
Peter Drew was installing one of his AUSSIE Posters showing historic images of migrants on North Terrace during August’s anti-immigration rally in Adelaide when a handful of protestors attacked the artwork, ripping them down.
“I suspected that was going to happen,” said Drew but he wanted to “put it in their face”.
“I think the vast majority of people there weren’t aggressive and probably didn’t even have a problem with the posters, but there is always an element of racism in a crowd of people who are anti-immigration.”
South Australian police estimated around 15,000 people joined August’s controversial anti-immigration March for Australia rally in Adelaide, which Australia Day Council SA CEO Jan Chorley said would cause “sadness” among the state’s migrant and refugee communities.
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Drew said that as more protestors started to gather around him, he was moved on by police for his own safety.
“The police were actually great – they understood and sympathised with what I was doing, but they have a job to de-escalate, so they got me out of there and the protestors quickly pulled down the posters,” the well-recognised artist who had been installing the posters on buildings across the nation since 2016, said.
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Asked how he felt about the incident, Drew told InDaily that upon reflection, he was angry but determined.
“It’s really given me a lot of energy to put the posters up again,” Drew, who has 36,400 followers on Instagram alone, said.
Drew had been planning to bring back the AUSSIE Posters for a while and had already created three designs. His posters appear on buildings in public locations in a similar vein to famed anonymous English artist Banksy, who covertly creates artworks in public locations across the globe.
But after August’s events held across the nation to protest what they claimed was “mass migration”, Drew has created an additional three designs, including one about his poster being pulled down.
He now plans to put up 1000 posters around Australia.
“I think that is something I’d like to make a poster about, because I think these people need to see what they look like and how negative their perspective is,” he said.
“I think that it’s a negative movement and they think they are patriots, but I see myself as a patriot – I love Australia as it is, not as they wish it to be.
“Typically, we react with fear and anger towards the sort of people who tore down the posters, but I think they are lost and in need of help.”
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Drew first created the AUSSIE Posters in 2016 in response to “a similar wave of Islamophobic street marches”.
“I wanted to counter that presence on the street,” he said.
The photographs used for the posters were sourced from the National Archives of Australia (NAA) and are of migrants who applied for an exemption to the dictation tests used as part of the White Australia policy.
According to the NAA, under the Immigration Restriction Act between 1901 and 1958, which is commonly known as the White Australia policy, any prospective migrant who came to Australia could be required by an immigration officer to dictate 50 words in any European language in order to gain entry.
“I thought that was a good reference point to how diverse Australia was 100 years ago – to evoke that part of our history,” Drew said.
Drew said the posters continue to resonate in 2025, particularly with recent anti-immigration marches around Australia.
Since first creating the posters, Drew estimates that he has personally put up around three to four thousand posters around Australia, including around 800 mainly in the Adelaide metro area.
Drew, who graduated with a master’s degree from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013 and has been exhibiting as a contemporary artist since 2007, now has his posters in major public art collections around Australia.
“I don’t really see myself as being a reaction to the marches on the street; it’s really my way of saying what I love about Australia, and so, I’m very adamant about it being a positive message, not a counterpoint to someone else’s negative message,” he said.
“The best messages I’ve ever received online are from migrants who saw the posters, and they made them feel welcome in Australia, and I think that that is just as important as confronting racist people.
“I think there’s something satisfying in that – that a migrant could come to understand Australia and its history better than someone who was born here.”
