False Claim
Author's note: This text was started on one side of 2023's Voice to Parliament vote to recognise Indigenous people in the colonial constitution, and completed on the other side once the results had been cast. Regardless of these results, the Country this text was written on remains Indigenous land. Always was, always will be.
The late 1980s was a potent time to be a high school student in the Australian education system. 1988, in particular, became a catalyst for a re-telling of the country’s colonial legacy. A re-telling that sought to paper over the devastation wreaked—on the land and its early inhabitants—by invading European settlers.
The government of the day instigated a cacophonous 'Bicentennial celebration’ that painted a trompe l’oeil of a nation 200-years young—papering over the 80,000+ years of habitation by the Country’s indigenous folk.[^1]
This Bicentennial project was vast, and the build up to it was insidious in its planting of dubious narrative tenets into the day-to-day lives of Australian's citizens. Any cultural touchstone had the potential to be weaponised by the state in support of terra nullius (i.e. the legal nomination for a land over which sovereignty had not been claimed, a falsehood wielded by colonists that propelled Australia into Nationhood).[^2]
Image from Museums
Australian Studies
In education, the late 1980s saw the installation of ‘Australian Studies’ as a compulsory subject into high schools. Academic and author, Alan Barcan observed in 2003—on the introduction of this new subject—that, “This relativist, socially-critical (subject) opened the door for generalisations and speculations which were probably beyond the comprehension of many students and some teachers.”[^3]
I can vividly recall the anguish and dismay our own Australian Studies teacher built up over the course of a semester as they tried to guide us through the many ad-hoc twists, turns and tinkering various government ministers had baked into the programme. The resulting subject presented a picture of a country whose national identity was cobbled together into a scrapbook of often obscure geo-political alliances and omitted the uncomfortable colonial legacies that haunted the syllabus with their glaring absence.
The goal was for Australian Studies to be placed at the heart of a new Australian Curriculum that was installed in 1988—the ‘Bicentennial’ year. In truth, the subject would prove to be too much of a political football to survive the various kickings it received from many sides of the political spectrum. Soon after it was installed, it would be dropped as a compulsory requirement and eventually become the appropriately obscure field it is today.
Trinkets and Distractions
There would be a cavalcade of distractions from past (and continuing) atrocities released in support of the Bicentennial, with design playing a significant part in the pursuit of false narratives. The most tangible would be a commemorative “historical medallion” handed out, free-of-charge to school-age children around the country.
‘EDUCATION’ side designed by Michael Meszaros, c.1988.
Image from Museums Victoria Collections.
I remember the Medallion was very similar to the 20 and 50 cent pieces in circulation at the time, only one side featured a group of clone-like figures climbing a set of stairs in unison towards a depiction of the Southern Cross (a constellation also known as ‘Crux’) and the word ‘EDUCATION’ written in all caps underneath. The reverse featured the Bicentenary logo—an abstract rendering of the coastal outline of the continent vaguely resembling a folded ribbon—with the words ‘Australian Bicentenary 1788–1988’ encircling it, interrupted by a laurel of wattle as punctuation.[^4]
The medallion was distributed encased in a blister pack which was set into a colourfully designed, die-cut cardboard folder. Text on the back of the folder read: “During 1988 we commemorate 200 years of Australia’s history in the modern world and will be celebrating our Bicentenary in many different ways. But one thing that we should all be doing is thinking about what it is to be an Australian. We should be learning about our past, trying better to understand the present, and thinking of the part we can play in the Australia of the future. You are Australia’s future. Keep this medallion as a reminder of this important year in our history.”
1988 would see another unique type of currency produced in time for the Bicentenary in the form of the world’s first polymer banknote. The illustrations on this $10 bill sought to bridge inhabitants of both pre- and post-settlement (or rather, invasion) by dedicating one side to each (with a portrait of Captain James Cook concealed in a translucent window with linked the two designs). According to the collector’s folder issued by the Reserve Bank of Australia at its time of its release the theme of the design was settlement.
The design team was led by Harry Williamson, himself an immigrant from the U.K. having established a design career in London before making a 'sea change' to come to Australia. Design notes at time of release describes how one side depicted, “the ship Supply and a medley of people against a background of Sydney Cove.” It goes on to explain that, “The Supply and its ten sister ships of the First Fleet left Portsmouth, England, for Botany Bay on 13 May 1787. All the fleet arrived at Botany Bay by 20 January 1788 but it was regarded as unsuitable for a settlement. Six days later a settlement was established at Sydney Cove. The representation of Sydney Cove is based on an engraving of a sketch by John Hunter, an officer on the First Fleet's flagship Sirius and later Governor of New South Wales.”
Whereas the reverse of the note, “relates to Australia’s original inhabitants” and, “brings together some elements of Aboriginal culture—ancient rock painting and hand stencils, a portrayal of an Aboriginal youth wearing body painting, and a Morning Star Pole.” The design of the Pole is credited to Aboriginal artist, (Terry) Yumbulul (who would later file an action against the RBA stating that he was misrepresented by an agent when the artwork was commissioned—the case was settled out of court)[^5] and was, “an example of poles used by the Aboriginal people of north-east Arnhem Land on certain ceremonial occasions.” The notes describe the background pattern as being based on “original works commissioned by the Bank” by unnamed Aboriginal artists.
It wouldn’t be until 2018—some 3 decades after the note was released—that the central figure of “an Aboriginal youth” would be identified as a Lardil man from Mornington Island, after indigenous activists, Welcome to Country, took on the labour of locating the unnamed man who was the basis for the illustration. In an article of their site Welcome to Country noted that, “It’s disheartening that the settler history goes into great detail … but the information about the Indigenous side of the note is (mostly) absent. Efforts could have been made to note the name, tribe and location of the boy and (more about) the artworks featured, however it appears the efforts made were simply tokenistic.”
The Jingoistic Cacophony
Alongside the televisual extravaganzas, the over-hyped arts, fashion and sporting events, the ‘royal visits’, the merch and supermarket tie-ins that were flung into the public maul in 1988, there was also World Expo 88[^6]—an Olympics for international trade—which was charged with “bringing the world to Australia”. Key tenets of national identity that used to legitimise geopolitical land grabs (such as those favoured by Micro-nations; of which Australia has quite a few) were hauled out in the form of Expo ’88 branded passports and dollar notes.
Amidst this jingoistic onslaught there was activism, protests and attempts at diverting attention away from this supposed “celebration of a nation” and towards an acknowledgement of past atrocities and truth-telling. The year started with one of the largest rallies of indigenous peoples in the (slim) history of the colony, with “White Australia has a Black History” emerging as a particularly potent slogan that sustains today (see Figures 1 & 4).
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/the-story-behind-the-image-the-bicentenary-protest-poster/ok1ys3sot
In response to the Bicentennial event Indigenous activist, Burnum Burnum, went as far as travelling to England to plant a flag on a beach in Dover “claiming sovereignty over the land for Indigenous people”. Distinct voices of indigenous resistance emerged from these protests too whose words and activism would resonate for decades to come such as Gary Foley & Linda Burnley, amongst many others. But these protests had little chance of permeating the chaos around the instigation of the Australian Curriculum project or the sensorial onslaught of the Bicentennial celebrations and only added to the colony’s burgeoning legacy of wilful ignorance and missed opportunities.
As an example, Australian Studies could have been the place to start sharing the true stories of the place many of us were born into with its botanic gardens emulating far away foreign vistas and fake snow at Christmas time amid increasing heatwaves. I wish the 1986 film, BabaKiueria had been part of the curriculum, and that there had been some sort of counter narrative to the colonial capitalistic structures we faced. It makes me think that most of our high school education was built on a facade of lies and that we were consistently fed false narratives for the nefarious purpose of supporting a (still) illegitimate colonial land-grab.
The Australian Lettering Book
It was during this formative time, in the late 1980s, that Graphic Design was offered as an elective at my secondary school. I can’t remember a lot of what we were taught—or even who was teaching it—but I have a clear image of the green-grey metal cabinet at the back of the classroom and the stack of small, horizontal format books perched on top of it. The books were slim and elongated with sombre dark green covers and bright white text across the front reading, The Australian Lettering Book.
There were more glossy, colourful, photo-typeset lettering books around at the time—which went some way to explaining why these monotone editions had been relegated to a back cupboard—but I think I must have been drawn to the unpolished, hand-hewn nature of the letterforms within. These sets of letterforms didn’t belong to specific families but rather broad, curiously territorial canons such as Egyptian, Roman, Florid Roman, German, French, Old English etc. Towards the back more elaborate letterforms had less specific names—most falling under a generic banner of ‘Map Lettering’ before examples had titles completely stripped away.
In researching The Australian Lettering Book’s origins for this project, it turns out to have had a publishing legacy extending well back before the 1980s. It has also been adapted and its format changed to suit a variety of audiences over the years. In fact, it was still being published—in the face of the continuing evolution and democratisation of various typesetting services and technologies—up until 1989 (at last record).[^7] When it was initially released as The Australian Printing Copy Book, it’s format followed that of many other Copy Books at the time which were commonly issued by the state around the late 1800s/early 1900s.
Copy Books were usually embedded within formal coursework, but could also be completed independently of schools and institutions. They typically featured sets of example letterforms (usually starting with a cursive script) that ran across the tops of pages followed by empty space for pupils to ‘copy’ the forms into with their hand writing implement of choice [See also Thy Hà’s discussion on cursive script in their Counter Forms piece, ‘Same, same but different’]. The key difference with The Australian Printing Copy Book was that it was given a wider remit than that of young students. It sought to engage with a professional class of “Lawyers, Architects, Surveyors, Engineers, Engravers, and Draughtsmen” who needed to brush up on their formal lettering skills.
As the book evolved, a formal link to cartography and the marking and dividing of territories was solidified. Drafting maps was a potent skill within the colony for securing land illegitimately stolen from its initial inhabitants. If an area could be drawn or mapped out and boundaries asserted, then it could be assigned a value, a name or title and then claimed, bought or sold.
Indeed, in lieu of the modernising effect of the printing press, hand-writing was utilised in the legitimising of many official documents in the country around the turn of the 19th century, acting as a type of ‘security feature’ where distinct formalised types of hand-writing were employed in order that documents could be traced back to their source. Travel documents, deeds and receipts were often produced by hand, or incorporated formal types of ‘hand-writing’. John Batman’s now infamous 1835 treaty which helped establish Melbourne as a legally recognised settlement and was alleged to have been signed by Wurundjeri Elders, is a highly contentious example of this.
In this light, it makes sense that “The Australian Printing Copy Book” appears to make ‘Map Lettering’ a priority. Indeed, all editions/versions of the publication include examples of hand-lettering as applied to the inscribing territory onto land. Editions in the 1880s give an example of the land of Australia divided crudely into states, whereas later editions only feature the state of Victoria with an example of hand-lettering on an architectural plan of a building thrown in, fulfilling an early promise that “The Australian Lettering Book is specially designed for use in Australian Schools, and in the offices of Lawyers, Architects, Surveyors, Engineers, Engravers, and Draughtsmen generally.”
Showcard & Ticket Writing
Part of a series of 43 photographs published by the Commonwealth of
Post-war—as hand-lettering was replaced by more stable, mechanical and less easily accessible means for all types of reproduction—The Australian Lettering Book found a new purpose as a means to keep idle hands busy and provide an accessible livelihood via the labour of ‘Ticket and Showcard Writing’.
'Showcard and Ticket Writing' described the painting of letters onto windows and shelf display items (tickets) as an attractive way to communicate prices and sales information of products within retail environments. This appears to have been an easily transferable skill in high demand within the retail and services sector as evidenced—not by the number of positions wanted ads in Australian newspapers in the early to mid 1900s—but rather the vast array of courses advertised on the subject that were offered by a wide variety of sources.
Initially touted as a means for military folk returning from war to rejoin the workforce with minimal material costs. Interest soon passed from returning soldiers to unemployed youth, to women seeking income working in the home, to the development of practical skills for prisoners. A similar style and flair would be translated into painted lettering favoured by Butcher shops and the like. Some practitioners still exist today although you’d probably have to head out of the big cities to find them.
Featuring 'Showcard' style lettering painted onto a window outside the Desktop office by Ted Hanna, commissioned by Brendan McKnight.
Blot the Copy Book
Nowadays, although students are still taught how to write by hand from an early age, it’s not long before these skills are obliterated in the digital realm where Arial rules supreme. Writing quickly becomes typing (or ‘setting type’ to use its original meaning).[^8] The potency of hand-rendered text is rapidly lost as our written skills develop, making it increasingly hard to recognise a time when formal styles of hand lettering were central to the colonial act of robbing of indigenous folk of their claims to sovereignty.
That's not to say hand-writing has completely disappeared from state-organised curriculum in Australia (and beyond). In 2022, Google Fonts released the 'Google for Education Australia' suite of fonts stating "Australian teachers are required to use state-mandated handwriting styles to teach reading and writing to school children from ages four to nine... The regular weight of each font imitates the pencil thickness of handwriting, making the fonts easy for students to recognise as they learn how to write letter shapes".[^9]
This formalised the previously haphazard distribution of the 'Foundation Fonts for Australian Schools' that had been circulating amongst teachers (and few else) as a type of 'clip art' in years preceeding. With government involvement in colonial systems of education systems dictating that each state had their own version with slight changes to language support state-by-state.
Given the continuing proliferation of hand-writing in state sanctioned education, The Australian Lettering Book’s dubious legacy is worth of highlighting as a story of the potency of the hand-written letterform in early colonial practice, whose insidious uses we have the opportunity to further unravel today.
The hand written word is rarely completely indelible. The substrates that they inhabit can be redacted, damaged or partially erased [^10]—but the hand written word often connects untruths and devious actions thought to be concealed by the perpetrators in a way Arial and Times New Roman could never.
A note on False Claim, the typeface
Nat Pyper's 'A Queer Year of Love Letters'[^11] and Genderfail's Protest fonts[^12] are projects that have shown that good use can be made of font files as containers for distributing previously hidden or less heard stories, in their case, of Queer community and the associated struggles for rights and visibility.
'False Claim' has been produced in a similar spirit of utilising the font file format to not only contain letterforms but to also attach stories and urgent legacies to it. The stories that False Claim seeks to maintain and distribute, through this essay and in the font's name, is one of the damage colonial untruths wreak, how the tools of the colony are potent and nefarious and embedded within state-organised education systems before flowing out into the mass media. It is a story of how slight-of-hand through the repetitious drawing of specific letterforms can rob whole communities of the land they had occupied and cared for for tens of thousands of years prior.
Mostly though, it's an uncovering (through design research) and re-telling of stories that were already known. As Tony Birch points out in an essay published by Common Room Editions, "We tend to think that what we're trying to do is uncover history that no one knows about. But this is a fallacy."[^13]
Notes:
[On geopolitical terminologies used throughout]: James Taylor and Matt Chun’s UnMonumental Style Guide has been applied—in part—to this text in order to better describe relationships to names and descriptions imposed on (the) Country where this text was written. Where referring to them name ‘Australia’ is unavoidable—for clarity or to illuminate the colonial project—this name appears striked-out (as with similar colonial impositions). This is to de-legitimise colonial claims to the land which had to be named before its ownership could be falsely claimed and as a mark of respect to indigenous persons for whom the work may be associated with the legacy of trauma it also connotes. For more detail, see https://unmonumental.substack.com/p/the-unmonumental-style-guide
[^1]: Davidson, Helen & Wahlquist, Calla. ‘Australian dig finds evidence of Aboriginal habitation up to 80,000 years ago.’ The Guardian, 20 July 2017, http://theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/19/
[^2]: Gary Foley notes, “In 1788 the imposition of British sovereignty on Australia was justified by the notion of terra nullius, which was a convenient means to avoid the problem of just reparations for the indigenous inhabitants who, in the process of being dispossessed, were thereby deemed sub-human.” See Foley, Gary. ‘Assimilating the Natives in the U.S. and Australia’, Gary Foley’s Koori History Website, c.2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20010430103242/http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_11.html See also: The National Library of Australia’s ‘Challenging Terra Nullius’ digital classroom provides some good insight via http://nla.gov.au/digital-classroom/senior-secondary/cook-and-pacific/cook-legend-and-legacy/challenging-terra
[^3]: Barcan, Alan. 'The Struggle for Curriculum Reform in Australia 1987-1993'. Education and Research Perspectives, Vol.30, No.2, 2003.
[^4]: Museums Victoria Collections notes that Michael Meszaros was responsible for the ‘EDUCATION’ image while Michael Tracey provided the design for the reverse side. By 1988, Michael Meszaros had established a studio specialising in designs for medals, http://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/75825
[^5]: This case was documented as ‘Re Terry Yumbulul v Reserve Bank of Australia; Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited and Anthony Wallis’, (25 July 1991). Full details and partial transcript can be found via http://austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FCA/1991/332.html
[^6]: Peter Spearritt gives a comprehensive account of the decisions made in the build up to 1988’s Bicentennial event and the subsequent reaction to it in his text, 'Celebration of a nation, The triumph of spectacle', published in Australian Historical Studies in 2008.
[^7]: Although each iteration of The Australian Lettering Book has appeared sans author (as per the expected formats of copy books) the title has been connected to Herbert Newell who produced The Key Lettering Book for the same publisher.
[^8]: "It wasn’t handwriting that drove forward the technology of writing into the modern era, but type."—Simon Browne discusses how mechanical means of writing that meant letterforms cast in metal were manipulated into forming words and texts moved from presses to the type writer in his thesis, Tasks of the Contingent Librarian. Texts could still be hand-written but with an mechanical intervention of the type writer (and later the personal computer), turning everyone into 'type setters'. https://project.xpub.nl/the-bootleg-library/pdf/thesis.pdf
[^9]: 'The handwriting fonts that help Australian students learn how to read and write are now available in Google Workspace'. Google Fonts blog, August 4, 2022. https://fonts.googleblog.com/2022/08/the-handwriting-fonts-that-help.html
[^10]: It seems as though consecutive conservative Australian governments have found it more convenient to defund state archives rather than allow access to the many uncomfortable truths contained within. See: Visontay, Elias. '‘Inconceivable’: why has Australia’s history been left to rot?'. The Guardian [newspaper], 23 May 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/23/inconceivable-why-has-australias-history-been-left-to-rot
[^11]: Pyper, Nat. 'A Queer Year of Love Letters' [typeface collection]. 2018–ongoing. https://www.librarystack.org/a-queer-year-of-love-letters/
[^12]: Oakley, Be (aka Genderfail). 'Protest Fonts' [typeface collection]. 2018–ongoing. https://genderfailpress.info/PROTEST-FONTS
[^13]: Birch, Tony. 'A Brief History of Victoria'. [essay] from Melbourne School for Discontent (Tony Birch, Jacqui Katona and Gary Foley). 'Native Title is Not Land Rights!'. Common Room editions, c.2023.