Bruce Connew: Stopover

The Tauranga Art Gallery presents Stopover, a book and photographic essay by Bruce Connew, on Indian-Fijian migration.

For generations, the descendants of early indentured Indian migrants brought to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 to cut sugar cane on harsh five-year contracts, have made their homes in Fiji.

Many still eek a living from leased cane fields. However, today Indian-Fijians who third, fourth and fifth generation Fijians, are forbidden to own land in Fiji or, it seems, to have any say in the running of their country, now realise their future lies beyond the country of their birth.

Born in Auckland in 1949, Bruce Connew began photographing at an early age, documenting his extended family with a ferrania Duplex Z2 Italian box camera, which he used at age 13 to capture Queen Elizabeth’s 1963 visit to New Zealand.

Connew made his first documentary series in 1976, focused on an Aboriginal community in northwest Australia. Over the past three decades, Connew has travelled extensively, undertaking documentary photography projects all over the world, in locations including New Caledonia, South Africa, New Zealand, eastern Burma, immediate post-war Kosovo, Bhutan, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, Vanuatu and Fiji.

His previous books include On the Way to An Ambush (VUP 1999) and with Dean Tiemi Te Au, Muttonbird – Part of a Story (Vapour Momenta Books 2004).