The Endless Angry Summer

The 2013/14 Australian summer was coined the ‘Angry Summer’ by the Climate Council due to heat, rainfall and flood records being broken across the country. The Endless Summer is an iconic American surfing movie about the pursuit of new waves.

The Endless Angry Summer poster deconstructs the original 1965 movie poster designed by John Van Hamersveld and is printed in highly unstable UV fluorescent offset inks. The poster on the street can be seen deteriorating daily as the weather eventually destroys the image.

It was also submitted to Meanjin, the Melbourne based national literary journal as a provocation, when we were invited, along with several other Australian designers, to suggest a new Australian flag.

We proposed not just that the current flag needs redesigning but that flags (and other tools of nationalist symbolism) will likely loose relevance as the effects of climate change escalate. After all, how far into the future can national borders legitimately defend against the potential massive influxes of climate refugees? The displaced suffer the inequitable distribution of global resources and increasingly extreme weather events triggered by the priorities of dominant economies. It’s likely climate refugees won’t be waving national flags. The fixed and guarded boundaries of the sovereign state are a fleeting historical anomaly.

And, yes vexillologists, text on national flags is impractical and taboo.