Hibiscus Festival

A critical eye looks at Suva’s Hibiscus Festival

Downbeat’ is the very least one could say about Suva reader John McGrath’s assessment of the city’s annual Hibiscus Festival. Read it and see and if lots of Suva-ites don’t share his miser able appraisal of the event, RIM hopes thev’ll let us know.

Sunday, September 2, and the Hibiscus Festival is over.

We can tell that it’s over be cause the rain has stopped for the first time in a week.

Not that the Fijians care.

They stroll around, beaming

happily, admiring each other’s

festive finery, and having a thoroughly good time. Their determined good humour is contagious, and here and there one sees an Indian, or even a

European tourist, smiling. The

resident expatriate Europeans, however, remain dismally aloof from any suggestion of

frivolity.

Just what the Fijians find so jolly in the festival is rather hard to discern. In fact, apart from the improvement in the weather, it’s not easy to tell that the festival is now over.

Along the waterfront the stalls are still selling grossly over-priced food, the streets are still crowded with smiling Fijians, with many Indians and

a sprinkling of Europeans,

Chinese and Pacific Islanders.

The Hibiscus Festival con sists of an extremely protracted series of non-events, inter spersed with great intervals of

time during which nothing

happens. The pace is so slow, the organisation so appallingly inept, that one is never quite sure whether something is not happening, or whether, per

haps, nothing is happening.

The nine-day ‘festivities’ of the Hibiscus Festival are as crassly commercial a cornfest as any in the Pacific, and almost the only music to be heard is the tinkling of cash registers.

Every hotel room in Suva is occupied. Private householders rent spare rooms. Nightclubs raise their cover charges. Duty free stores bring out their most

extortionate price lists, and are allowed to trade on Sundays as the Sea Princess is in port.

Also in port, by the same sort of coincidence that so often takes them to Melbourne at Cup time, is the British Navy a guided missile destroyer and a supply ship. And the freighter Southland Star ; There are prizes to be won, but most of them are reserved for the businessmen who profit so heavily from the festival.

They award each other prizes for such cultural feats as ‘Best Shop’, ‘Best Stall’, ‘Best Win dow Display’, and select some

body’s daughters as “Miss

Hibiscus’, and ‘Miss Charity’.

The successful Miss Hibiscus entrant gets to represent Fiji in a grand meat market contest; ‘Miss South Pacific’. This year’s Miss Hibiscus, Miss

Margaret Singh, is Indian,

although the competition attracts few Indian or Fijian entrants. The commercial beneficiary of this part of the festival is CP Air.

In Cruickshank Park what appears to be a semi-derelict ferris wheel provides some entertainment for Suva’s kids, together with a merry-go round, unwinnable card games and hoop-la stalls where the hoops, apparently won’t fit over the prizes.

There is a Baby Show (Mor ris Hedstrom), an Arts and Crafts Exhibition (sundry manufacturers), a Charity Lot tery (Bums Philp), a Coconut

Tree Climbing Competition

(Rothmans), the Fiji Fun Run (Fiji Time\ and Morris Hed strom for ‘official’ T-shirts), ‘Clothes Encounter’ (Estee Lauder, Stinson Pearce and the Isa Lei Hotel), and a Hibiscus Ball (Isa Lei Hotel).

The only Fijian flavour apart

from the tree climb is the Bi Bili, a race between bambo rafts.

A Box Car Derby (She! must be a masterpiece o

misorganisation. Stage

around a right angle curve wit all entrants starting square, th car on the inside travels abou half the distance of the outsid competitor and so wins inevi tably. Each heat takes about 3( seconds, and the races are staged, in driving rain, at inter vals of about half an hour Splendid piece of entertain ment.

Some hard-working New Zealanders provided an acro batic act, and an Aborigina choir sang splendidly. There were scheduled lunch-time and evening concerts which were either cancelled because of the rain, or simply didn’t happen Three ‘cultural evenings’, sep arately Indian, Islander and Fijian were held in the Phoenix Theatre at the tourists-only price of $2.50 per seat.

As a tourists’ festival Hibis cus is pathetic but profitable.

As a Fiji festival it is an atrocious affront to the people of Suva, who are involved as victims rather than par

ticipants.

(Curiously, Fiji has a European festival - Christ mas; a Hindu festival Divali,j the Festival of Lights; a Muslim celebration - Id-ul- ( fitr; a Chinese festival —i Chinese New Year. But no

Fijian celebration.)

The whole sad, soggy, sorry mess is rounded off by a parade - a procession of floats which could more accurately be de-| scribed as mobile billboards.

Supreme in this class was a motor car enclosed in card board with the inspiring mess-] age: ‘Plan Ahead with ANZ’. As Sukuna Park’s clock

chimed midnight, signalling

the end of the festival, all three ; of Suva’s bikies roared past I

with derisively crackling j

exhausts; a bus blew a tyre to j loud cheers. The gods, I unpropitiated again for the I 23rd year, allowed the clouds I to clear and the Hibiscus Fes-1 tival was over.

As the Fiji Sun editorial I said: ‘Thank goodness the I Hibiscus Festival finishes I today’.