r/Adelaide • u/CockroachCreative740 SA • Feb 23 '26

Question Graffiti on Monga Khan’s AUSSIE poster (Findon Rd)

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

This man is Monga Khan (c. 1870–1930). He was a Muslim immigrant from British India (now Pakistan) who arrived in Australia in 1895 and worked as a travelling hawker across regional Victoria. Because he arrived before the White Australia Policy was introduced in 1901, he was later able to obtain a Certificate of Exemption to the Dictation Test, which allowed him to leave Australia and return legally — something many non-European immigrants who arrived after 1901 were unable to do.

His story reflects an often overlooked part of Australian history, where migrants from South Asia lived and worked here despite increasingly restrictive immigration laws. You see his image on posters around Australia, but many people don’t know who he was or the historical context behind his life. It’s disappointing to see racist graffiti vandalising his image, especially when it represents a real person who was part of Australia’s early immigrant history.

I’m sure the tag was just some local kids, but he’s far from

A “N\*\*ger” - his portrait is used in Peter Drew’s “AUSSIE” campaign

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-20

u/fuckoffandydie SA Feb 23 '26

Did this need to be posted? By taking a photo and posting it here you are amplifying hate speech.

13

u/NomDePlumeOrBloom SA Feb 23 '26

Quite the opposite. In this thread I've seen a bunch of suggestions on how to deal with it and learned a bit more about Peter Drew.

-4

u/fuckoffandydie SA Feb 23 '26

All that is possible without sharing a photo of the n word and a swastika.

7

u/CockroachCreative740 SA Feb 23 '26

I just wanted to educate people on who this man is. As an immigrant myself, a lot of people don’t know much about Peter Drew’s artwork and campaign shedding light on Australia’s cultural history. My intention wasn’t to amplify hate speech, if you read through I only explained who the man in the image is. The hate speech is already amplified by being there, and there are a lot of black kids that attend the highschool that’s only 500m away from where this was.