Tonight, I am sucking on a cocktail that’s the same colour as the water gently lapping on the coral-ed shore. And I’m looking out, in small moments of reverie, across a field of emerald coconut palms. The cocktail is bright turquoise and the firey yellow and burnt orange sun set is falling into the oceans’ horizon.
I, ladies and gentleman, am on the island of Raiatea, which is part of the Society Islands - Tahiti.
During my time here on Raiatea I’ve had the pleasure of attending Heiva, French Polynesia’s annual cultural festival. For opening night, there was a bandstand on the beach, kids eating hot chips smeared in tomato sauce and an MC who guided us through a parade of local clubs and societies such Taekwondo, boxing and a girls’ volleyball team. Then a procession of extravagantly homemade floats and costumes representing different countries made it’s way across the sand. It was all in French and Tahitian so I didn’t really understand what was going on or why but I enjoyed the hub-bub and general atmosphere of ‘a community event’.
I attended the national dance competition – which is a Polynesian version of the rock eisteddfod, just with more hula than jazz ballet; more palm fronds than sequins. And in the quiet tiny town of Opoa I went to a Heiva celebration that I discovered was merely a girls’ soccer competition. But the whole town had turned out. Excitable kids with cake smeared mouths darted about, big fleshy islander families belly laughed and barracked for their daughters, and “community” hang in the air, mingling between the smiles on peoples’ faces and the cool night sea breeze.
“A community nurtures, develops and promotes what it considers important”, writes David Ducrou in this years edition of the Emerging Writer’s Festival’s publication, The Reader. For the people of Opoa, girls’ soccer was a way to do this.
Forte, the street press you’re reading, is another community’s way of celebrating what it considers important. This fortnightly magazine distributes, congregates, and discusses the ins and outs of that luscious arts scene of the Bellarine Peninsular.
As I’ve been lazily waking up to the sunrise and roosters’ crow and paddling the teal blue sea with the electro-raver fish (all brightly coloured and chewing on lollypops) I’ve wondered - has there ever been a theme to my Forte columns? Apart from long rambling sentences, twisted segues, and missed deadlines - is there any commonality running through them? The columns have been as varied and far reaching in topic and subject as one could imagine; from major music festivals to market stalls, from mainstream musicals to local short film festivals, I’ve covered a luscious example of arts in and around the Ballarine Peninsular.
Tonight, is my final night on the island and last golden beams of sun have now sunk into the turquoise sea. In a couple of days, I will land back in drizzle-ville Melbourne and I will start a new job that may be the beginnings of a career. It’ll be all adult and serious and as venture forward into grown-up responsibility, the sun must also on set on my contribution to to Forte. And I come to realise, if there is any common thread running through my columns – it is not of my doing. It is yours; the artists, the makers, the goers to gigs, the curators and purveyors of art, the buyers of market stall trinkets, the amateur musical theatre doers, the short film makers and the readers. It is this community that surrounds, abounds and appears in these pages that make Forte a pleasure to read and to write for.
And now, what was I saying about turquoise cocktails… Cheers Forte, this one’s for you.
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