Born and trained in Ōtautahi / Christchurch, Cedric Savage took up a two-year teaching position in Fiji in 1930. Following his return, Savage delighted visitors to his exhibitions in Christchurch, Wellington and Dunedin with his “placid lagoons, stately palms, and distinctive scenery of the islands”. Another reviewer noted, in language that reveals the exoticising colonial attitudes of the time, that he did “no portraiture except occasionally when he finds a particularly interesting type. Two pictures of Indian woman immigrants of Fiji who fit this description are alone worth going to the exhibition to see.”

(Te Wheke, 2020)