Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 · Uncategorized Fruit bowl Tulia Thompson Here, in the first world in the North, We buy a fruit bowl woven out of cane for CAD$8.00 at a fair trade store I imagine it full of mangoes, oranges and bananas poised on the table still life evoking plentitude. You carry it on the bus jostling against your hip when we stop for lunch in Chinatown you leave it behind at the sushi place where a pony-tailed girl brings a porcelain tray of raw tuna for CAD$1.90. You travel back to claim it two buses and a walk in the hot June streets. Finally on the table, the fruit bowl tips drowsily to one side under the uneven weight of five Californian oranges. Tulia Thompson Tulia Thompson is of Fijian, Tongan and Pākehā descent. She has a masters in creative writing from the University of Auckland. She is published in Niu Voices: Contemporary Pacific Fiction 1 and Blackmail Press. Her young adult novel Josefa and the Vu was published by Huia in 2007. She blogs about social justice at www.tuliathompson.wordpress.com. More by Tulia Thompson › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 1 6 November 2026 · Friday Fiction Headland Harry Goddard He must have still been sore. I could tell from the winces he made as he scooted down the trail. Some unspoken agreement of not hitting other people’s children — and the circumstances of me not being that type of kid — spared me from the same punishment. I was taken to my parents who agreed I would have to work off the damages, and I must have mowed the lawn once, or cleaned the family car. 4 November 2026 · Film MIFF, Minotaur and the politics of maternal reception Alicia Byrnes Maternal labour is, in the terms I’ve set out here, not labour at all. Noisy, unfocused, mobile, perhaps even sleepy — it is an affront to arthouse film viewing and therefore unserious.
