Brisbane-based artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby creates powerful work based on the intersection of the Pacific labour trade and her own familial history as a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander. Created in the mid 2010s, her early work coincided with the 150th anniversary of the recognition by the state of Queensland of Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct cultural group. During this period, 29 unmarked graves were discovered on a Bundaberg sugar plantation.

Togo-Brisby responded to these events by creating a haunting sculptural installation, Bitter sweet 2015, comprising a large mound of life-sized skulls. Cast in unrefined CSR sugar, they reference the more than 62 000 Pacific Islanders who were kidnapped, enslaved and brought to Australia from the mid nineteenth century (some as early as 1847) to 1904 to the sugarcane plantations, as part of a labour program known colloquially as ‘blackbirding’. In the tradition of the ni-Vanuatu communities from which Togo-Brisby descends, the skulls represent the many ancestral figures who died in the holds of ships or as a result of the inhumane conditions in which they were forced to exist once they arrived in Australia. Tragically, for their descendants, most of these people were buried in unmarked graves.

Drawing on cultural memory, intergenerational trauma and vitally important healing practices, Togo-Brisby is one of the few Islander artists delving into shared histories of plantation colonisation across the Pacific. Her work is a powerful reminder of a significant period of Queensland’s grim and often overlooked history.

Sensitive content note
Bitter sweet 2015 contains sensitive content that may be considered traumatising for members of the Australian South Sea Islander community, or visitors who have personal connections to plantation enslavement.