Uto/Breadfruit

I’m slow with this blogging habit. I’m not a writer. This is more about me collating what I’ve been looking at and noticing right now. I had a deadline which is usually how I keep working at something, to the point of feeling like I have gotten somewhere.

Lately I’ve been making digital collages, that I then turn into physical work and that way of working seems to fit for me, as so much of the figuring out is me constantly changing the images I want to use from my archive. I made this work Breadfruit in that way.

Starting with researching imagery, usually starting with a text book, in this case a book I picked up at a second hand bookshop in Blackheath ‘Captain Cook and the Pacific - Art, Exploration & Empire’. In this case breadfruit had been on my mind, mainly from a memory standpoint, my parents had a house in Fiji by the Rewa River, opposite Nausori town (where I was born) and every holiday we would visit the house. In the backyard there was a beautiful big breadfruit tree and my aunty Sisi would set up a mat under the tree and we would sit.

Breadfruit is one point of value the English saw in the Pacific, believing that breadfruit would be a cheap way to feed the slaves in the West Indies. The voyage for breadfruit was lead by William Bligh and turned into the mutiny on the Bounty. It was said that Bligh was a terrible captain and was ripping off his crew by manipulating their rations. Anyhow the Bounty is a whole other story, I was interested in the map of Fiji (Bligh’s Islands) that was created on the second Breadfruit voyage. They were avoiding Fiji due to its reputation for cannibalism and mapped out the southern Islands.

This really started me on the breadfruit rabbit hole. So I started researching breadfruit in Fiji and found so many powerful images of Fijians holding Uto (Breadfruit).

I thought of all the time I had spent sitting by the Rewa river, the breadfruit tree and wondered what images hung in the mind of my children who are connected to the Gundungurra and Dharug land we live on. We as a family have spend so much time looking at waterfalls here and playing by the rivers. Sitting near Katoomba Falls, which connects to the Kedumba River, which runs into the valley. The memory these places we sit by hold, the history and then of course the childhood memories that I have and the memories my children will keep with them of this beautiful place they get to grow up in. This helps me feel connected to my own history and my connection to the place I now call home.