A woman has travelled around Australia to recreate her parents’ holiday photos – 30 years after they visited the country.
Deni Jessica, 30, from Swansea, always loved the pictures on the walls of her family home. They showed her mum, Ceri Baker, 62, and late dad, Clive Smith, 59, on holiday in Australia in 1990.
‘My parents have always had this photo montage in the bathroom from when they were younger and that inspired me to go travelling,’ she said.
Jessica, a professional traveller and her boyfriend, Matt Carcer, 34, a seller hand, flew to Sydney, Australia, for their own travels, and decided to recreate her parents’ and grandparents’ pictures.
Their two-year adventure around Australia took them to Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne.
Jessica posed at Uluru, the Blue Mountains and Australia Zoo, to replicate the snaps her parents had taken.
‘In between my first and second year of Australia, I went through my parents photos and when I went back to Australia for my second year abroad I decided to recreate them,’ she explains.
In January 2019, Jessica and her boyfriend went back to Australia for a second time to travel the country.
They bought a Volkswagen Caddy and travelled around the country – stopping at Mount Gambier, Port Hedland and Cable Beach.
Deni said: ‘We stayed in the van for the whole year, it was someone’s work van – we put a shelf in the back and chucked our stuff in.
‘Some of the pictures were taken in locations that were similar to where my parents were as we couldn’t work out the exact location.’
Jessica said her parents were ‘very excited’ about the project and her dad would help her through the photo albums to tell her where to go.
She said: ‘What I love is that my dad was so excited and he was helping me put them together.’
This holds a special meaning for Jessica, as it ended up being the last thing she did with her father, who passed away in 2022 while she was travelling in New Zealand.
‘I think this project was close to me as it was one of the last things my dad and I did together,’ she adds.
Jessica said her favourite images she recreated were the photos at Uluru and the Blue Mountains, as she looked so much like her mum.
‘The Uluru picture is definitely the most iconic one. I really like the Blue Mountains photos as I could see the resemblance in my mum and nan.’
‘When me and my partner go travelling now we make sure we are in them as much as possible,’ she said, as she regrets she has so few holiday snaps with her dad in.
Jessica also recreated her parents’ photo from their holiday in Barcelona and is planning to recreate their holiday pictures from Europe, too.
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