All The Fun Of The Fair

From a Mt. Hagen correspondent Eighty thousand visitors—more than 2,000 of them from overseas—who attended the fourth Mt. Hagen Show in August helped to turn those common old Hollywood-type of spectacu lars to a whiter shade of pale.

IT’S hardly believable, but this show (the first was in 1961) really was bigger than ever. And the most in teresting feature was that although the overseas visitors came, as usual, to see stone age primitives performing age-old rituals, this was a show which more than any other blended old and new into a fascinating package.

It was summed up in the picture of the splendid Highlands warrior trying not to get his purchase of fairy floss tangled with his nose-bone!

The natives were housed in the traditional “long houses” (such as the mile-long building bearing the sign “Instant Hilton”!) Europeans who were wise enough to book accommoda tion 18 months ahead slept in the hotel, motel or hostel. But hundreds happily unrolled their swag in schools, offices and other large buildings.

The old-new theme was stressed throughout the exhibits, with agricul tural machinery being dominant.

While New Guineans were more in terested in two Australian agricul tural officers sweating on the shearing board at one stand, the tourists were fascinated by the Highlands men wearing a few leaves and some feathers who were industriously weav ing. The avidity with which the visitors bought up the hand-woven blankets indicates that the Highlands

weavers need have no worries about their market.

Just over the way from the wool weaving exhibit a mission group was showing temperance films. Nearby, ladies from the women’s clubs were demonstrating to their less enlightened sisters the advantages of a gas cooker.

An enterprising young businessman was doing a roaring trade with his boxing booth, while warriors in plumes and tanget-leaf bustles careered crazily around the show ring in a bicycle race, only to be beaten by a more sophisticated competitor in shorts and shirt.

Show fever

Bush babies bawled in their billums; gnarled village elders got ice cream in their beards, and hill-billy music competed with the skirl of pipes and traditional sing sings.

It would have been natural for ‘‘show fever” to spark off a few tribal incidents, particularly as only re cently the favourite sport of these people was archery against moving human targets. Yet, there was merely some unpleasant incidents on the Hagen-Kagamuga road, when mem bers of one tribal group speared and stoned cars travelling to the grounds.

Anyway, at what other show in the world can you get such realism?