She was born in regional Victoria in 1900, lived her life as an Australian, and yet — under one of the country's most discriminatory immigration regimes — Irene Law needed an official government certificate simply to return to her own country. Decades after her death, Irene's face has appeared on walls across Australia, becoming an unlikely focal point in an ongoing national conversation about who gets to be called Australian.

A family history hidden in plain sight

At Steven Law's home in Northcote, Melbourne, old family albums are spread across the dining room table. A large sepia photograph shows a woman in a wide-brimmed hat with a scarf draped across her shoulders — his grandmother, Irene Law. Steven remembers her exactly that way.

"Irene was an elegant woman; she was well spoken, well dressed. That was how we knew her," he said.

Born as Lucy Maud Lem Cue in South Wangaratta in north-east Victoria, Irene's early life and the official obstacles she faced were rarely spoken about within the family. For Steven and his sister Christina, that chapter of their grandmother's story remained largely shrouded in secrecy — until recently.

When Christina discovered that Irene's archival photograph would feature in artist Peter Drew's widely recognised Aussie poster series, the moment was overwhelming. "I was really overwhelmed and quite teary when I saw that nanna had been included in this series," she said.

What was the dictation test — and why did it matter?

Irene's story is inseparable from one of Australia's most notorious legislative instruments. Under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 — a cornerstone of what became known as the White Australia policy — immigration officers held sweeping powers to administer a dictation test to people seeking entry to the country.

The test required a person to write out a 50-word passage in a European language as dictated by an officer. After 1905, the law was amended so that officers could select "any prescribed language", effectively making it possible to test someone in a language they had no knowledge of whatsoever. Failure meant being declared a prohibited immigrant, facing refusal of entry or, in some cases, deportation.

To navigate this system, non-European residents who had been living in Australia could apply for an exemption certificate — a document permitting them to travel overseas temporarily and return within a set timeframe without being subjected to the test. For a woman born on Australian soil, the need for such a certificate represented a stark contradiction at the heart of the nation's self-image.

The archival photographs of people who applied for these certificates — sourced from the National Archives of Australia — form the basis of Drew's poster series, which has been running since its 2016 debut.

Art, identity and a polarising public reaction

Drew's Aussie posters have provoked strong reactions since they first appeared. Graffiti, counter-posters, attempts to remove the artworks, and more recently videos of the pieces being defaced and altered have all circulated publicly. Drew has been matter-of-fact about the pushback, replacing vandalised posters with new ones as he travels the country.

"Someone has vandalised my old posters, so I've got some new ones, and I'm going to fix them up," he said while working in Adelaide's central business district.

He acknowledges the deliberate tension built into the project. "In some ways, the posters have a double meaning because the first way to read it is that the person in the poster is Aussie, and that's a celebration of them being Australian," he said. "But in another way, the poster is also saying that the White Australia policy is Aussie, and that's something that we don't celebrate. So, there is a paradox because those two things are conflicting with each other."

For the Law family, that paradox is personal. Irene's image — once filed away in a government archive as evidence of her need for bureaucratic permission to come home — now looks out from walls across the country, prompting Australians to ask uncomfortable questions about belonging, citizenship, and the experiences of families who have long faced exclusion on the basis of identity.

More than a century after the Immigration Restriction Act passed into law, Irene Law's story is a reminder that official documents do not always reflect the truth of who someone is — or where they belong.