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Australians gear up for Dalai Lama's visit

By Ellie Harvey | The Sydney Morning Herald

One of the billboards advertising the Dalai Lama’s visit to Sydney, Australia, in December.Tibet Sun/Katrina Clarke/Australia

The face of the Dalai Lama will be watching over Sydneysiders for the next month as nine billboards are erected before his visit in December.

Four “supersites”, large billboards that stay lit up all night, will be put up at Darling Harbour, North Sydney, Parramatta Road and the Princes Highway today, weather permitting, and five others will be erected elsewhere in Sydney.

The signs will bear the words, “Our future — Who is responsible?”, with the Dalai Lama’s face, and will stay up for four to five weeks. The message will also appear later on about 30 buses.

“We’ve kind of never done anything like this before,” said Lynn Bain, general manager of the Dalai Lama in Australia organisation that is funding the campaign. “Some of [our] advice … is that mass outdoor advertising is quite effective, so we’re trying to let as many people as possible know that he’s coming.”

“It’s going to be quite amazing to see His Holiness’s face up on the big billboards,” she said.

The Tibetan leader, who lives in exile, will be in Sydney for teachings and a public talk from 1 to 3 December, before heading to Auckland, Hobart and Melbourne. His seventh visit to Australia is themed “Who is responsible?”.

“It’s a pretty heavy concept, responsibility … there’s quite a few people out there who just aren’t really willing to take that on board,” Ms Bain said.

The organisation debated whether the Dalai Lama should feature on a billboard, but eventually decided there was “absolutely no reason as to why he shouldn’t be up there”.

“If there’s backlash we’ll just have to deal with it,” Ms Bain said. “Our motivation is to try and encourage people to come along and attend the events … Buddhists don’t try to convert people or anything like that.

You don’t have to be Buddhist to connect to His Holiness is what we’re trying to say.”

Copyright © 2009 Fairfax Digital

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald