Confidence Requires Pants

The O’Keefe film is reported to have brought about a quarter mil lion pounds to Fiji but it has also

brought some high-coloured pub

licity. A Sydney daily recently had this to say: The company flew 278 pairs of bloomers to the Fiji Islands to induce native girls to perform hula dances.

“Girls wearing grass skirts must have some sort of bloomers underneath to give them confidence,” explained a leading tribal chief. An urgent cable to Hollywood produced a supply of nylon pants—and the seductive hula scenes were filmed.

There may be some basis for the story—but no one would recognise what it is after the publicity men have dressed it up.

Fijian girls do not normally do hula dances, seductive or otherwise, and usually look out of place and far from happy when they attempt it. Their Mekes consist mainly of hand and arm movements and a little feet-shuffling. For their dances they are usually clothed completely from neck to ankles—look at our cover picture this month.

Anyway, O’Keefe’s Caroline Is landers, although they wore grass skirts, probably did not dance hulas either. That form of dancing seems

exclusively Polynesian.