Bondi Sea Wall Mural – The Rough End 2017

The Rough End

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work featuring the Big Pineapples – the one in Nambour, and the now sadly demolished version in Gympie. In the course of doing some background reading I discovered that when first introduced to Europe, this extremely difficult to obtain fruit was a symbol of wealth and status. It was also a symbol of hospitality.

This made me laugh – certainly pineapples are very sweet and juicy on the inside, but the amount of prickly skin and spiky leaves you have to hack through to get to that juicy flesh doesn’t exactly suggest welcome to me. Imagine what sort of person or nation goes along with this symbolism, and what sort of welcome you’d get from them when you arrived for a visit.