Let's All Do The Tralala!

Tralala!

All Good Tourists Do, in Lautoka

PASSENGERS on Canadian Pa cific Airlines planes spend 12 hours in Fiji, on both north bound and southbound flights bet ween Sydney and Vancouver. If they don’t go on their way feeling that Fiji is a pretty good place, it is not the fault of Lautoka’s city fathers.

This is one instance when Lautoka holds all the cards—because Siren Suva is right away on the other side of the island, and as the air passengers do not glimpse it, they cannot have their affections alienated.

They are brought in from Nadi airport to Lautoka hotel in cars, given rooms and drinks, much fine food and loads of tropical fruit and, in the afternoon, are taken sight seeing to surrounding villages and the beach.

After dinner at night there are more cars that whirl them away to the establishment of Mr. Jerry Adams, one of Lautoka’s first citi zens and certainly its most en thusiastic fan.

Here they are met by native

dancers and singers, with grass skirts and guitars, and they are presented with leis and led into a suitably darkened lounge and asked to sit down. • In the very nature of things (financial) about 95 per cent, of in ternational travellers are well past middle-age, and by this time they are feeling pretty jaded. Then the guitar players start to strum and the girls begin to dance and the travellers sigh a deep sigh and be gin to relax.

It doesn’t matter two hoots to them that these lads and lasses are predominantly Fijian; that there is only one Polynesian amongst them; that traditionally Fijian males do not wear Hawaiian grass skirts and play ukeleles; or that Fijian females do not make and serve kava, or do the hula. The visitors like grass skirts and hulas and ukeleles—what’s tradition got to do with it, anyhow!

LATER, the music quickens in tempo. This is the tralala.

Somewhat reluctantly, at first, the travellers are prised out of their chairs; then, in a jiffy, they are prancing and capering, whirling and twirling—that oldster, never to see 60 again, slightly soured you’d say, probably got a heart or an ulcer, is clasping a grass-skirted Fijian lass round the middle and kicking up his heels like a two-years-old.

Don’t know what he is at home—

maybe a bank president—but right now he’s wearing his hula shirt— all purple palm trees and riotous pineapples—hanging out of his pants and is having fun.

Mrs. Bank President, grey-haired and plump, possibly the prop and stay of society back in Melbourne or Vancouver, is jigging madly about, clasped in the arms of a large and agile Fijian.

The Anglo-Saxon is notoriously reluctant to let down his back hair in public; but if you want to see it done by the soft-lights-and islahd-music treatment, come to Lautoka.

It is a sobering thought that 12 hours hence these people will be back in their little grooves-—dark suits and plain shirts, tight corsets and nylon hose. Back to Pitt Street, and the International Situa tion and the H Bomb; the Russians and the excess-profits tax.

Mr. Jerry Adams and his band of island entertainers are doing a better job for civilisation than they know—JT, Lautoka. 24/9/51.