Fiji Times - Hail and Farewell!

Rene was recently back in Fiji and has lots of photos.  Looking through them, every photo was a direct hit into my heart and I felt such waves of nostalgia. But then I saw one which, for a couple of seconds, I didn't quite get, however when I did see what I was actually seeing, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach:

Click on people's faces in the photo to tag them.

 

 Adding INSULT to injury!

Photo by Rene B.

Outrageous!!! That is a Chinese restaurant in the old Fiji Times building! 

Intellectually, sure, I knew the Military had shut down Fiji Times back during The Post-Coup Additional Crackdown of 2009 but I didn't quite get it for real until this photo drove it home.

Sad! Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad!

Fiji Times was a great newspaper and also one of the longest running in the world.  Look at the sign up there: "Fiji Times and Herald 1868."

Yes, it started in 1868 but it was permanently shut down by Voreqe Bainimarama in the last coup. That's our 2006 Coup if you're having trouble keeping track. Voreqe said the newspaper would be better served by going on-line, which it did, however if you look for it on-line these days you'll only find this: 

The Fiji Times ONLINE

“The Fiji Times Online is currently undergoing technical restructure. 

Services will be suspended until further notice. 

We apologise for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.” 

Freedom of The Press, huh!!!! And "technical restructure" my eye!!!!  It's been three months so we can only conclude that, because Fiji Times was a fierce publisher of The Truth - and great political cartoons - and Voreqe didn't like that, it is now gone!

 Actually from The NZ Herald.  

Couldn't find any from the Fiji Times!

Shutting it down is just wrong.  And wrong on so many levels too. And not all those levels are intellectual ones. Some are very primal and personal indeed.

Look, all intellectual pretensions aside, here's what really gets to me: Sure, Fiji Times was a marvelous newspaper, and, sure, it was very proud of the fact that it was the very first newspaper published in the world every day - so proud it was blazoned in big letters on the masthead - but that was an International Dateline thing and so Geography should be credited for that one ...

... however it also had a world record all of its own doing ...

... something that no other newspaper on earth can yet claim for itself ...

... and this world record is the fact that, for over a century -  118 years to be precise - it turned out an issue every single day, except Sunday.  Yup, come-hell-or-high-water, during the Riots in the 1960s, the Category 5 cyclones in the 50s, during the War in the Pacific in the 40s, during the Great Depression of the 30s, during the Suva Burning of the 20s, no matter what was happening in the world and in our streets, every day all the Fiji Times staff went in to work so that Fiji could get its daily newspaper.  That was its world record and everyone involved, for over a century, was proud to keep it going as a point of pride.

But that record didn't matter a whit to our military, because during our first coup - that's the 1986 Rabuka Coup - Rabuka shut it down. He did it with soldiers and guns and all that gung-ho Rambo Razzamatazz he was famous for.  Molly was a journalist there at the time and ... well, Molly enjoys things like that so we can hardly count on her report of the event since it mainly consisted of "Oooh, it was so exciting!  I do LOVE a big bite of Gun-toting Reality!"

But, unlike Molly, I thought the Rambo shut-down was outrageous and not just on the grounds of Freedom of the Press either.  Mainly, I was outraged because I thought it was truly mean of Rambo Razzamatazz to think so lowly of someone else's world record and "point of pride" that he'd ride rough-shod over it the way he did. Folks shouldn't do stuff like that to other folks, should they!

And he shut it down for the next coup too, and then Voreqe did the same with his coup, but this time with lethal results. For him it wasn't enough just to shut it down, he had to outright kill it.  When I heard it was about to happen, I actually wrote to him asking him not to close it on the grounds it was part of Fiji's Intangible Cultural Heritage, but I guess I wasn't persuasive enough or, more likely, he just didn't care about such things.

So now it's gone and all we have are the memories!  Such good memories too! It wasn't just there in the background during my entire childhood, because I actually started reading it everyday when I was about 8 years old, and often getting my own copy too so I could do the puzzles without fighting off my dad.

See, Dad had a thing he did with us when we were very little.  Everyday, he'd give the Fiji Times crossword puzzle to each of us in turn, from the youngest to the eldest, for five minutes each, and each of us would fill in what we could.  I was the middle child and, after about the age of eight, I started to quite often get the whole thing out so dad would get cross with me because it wasn't fair to the older kiddies, and this is when and why, most days, I started getting my own copy from The European Nurses Quarters up the road.

And since I could now hog it for as long as I liked, I even tried to do the cryptic puzzle but they never made sense to me. For several years, I'd just stare at those weird clues, hoping for a miracle, and one day it happened: I saw the clue "Unidentified in a kitchen fight" and the answer was so obvious I had my Eureka moment on how these things worked and I've dearly loved cryptics ever since.

I also dearly loved the Fiji Times as a physical entity, so much so that when I moved to Australia to go to university, I found the newspapers there so unsatisfactory, I used to drop by the Air Pacific office to get my news from the Fiji Times they had there, just as I'd always done. 

For me, no newspaper anywhere could match it. I loved the way it felt. I loved the way it looked. I loved the way it smelled. And I loved the articles with all those subtle ESL differences in syntax.  And the comics! The "Phantom" serial and "Peanuts", Louie the Fish's "Yedo Man" and "Spot the Ball"! And the "Angry of Toorak" Letters-to-the-Editor! And, naturally, yes, the puzzles. I even loved the preposterous and silly ads, particularly those of obese Indian children eating Rewa Dairy Products. What were they thinking?

But my greatest love was always the daily and weekly columns! Yup, I particularly loved the columnists: "Flotsam and Jetsam", Rob Wright's "Hook, Line and Sinker", our friend Dr Verrier's "Verrier's Verdict". 

Oh boy, how I dearly loved "Verrier's Verdict" and it wasn't just because we knew him either.  This Saturday column was a sour but hilarious litany of criticism of whatever was happening around the country that he didn't like. Dr Lindsay Verrier was an Oxford man and so clever and he had such a wonderful way with words, so each week, when he'd unleash his latest hate-fest, we'd all devour it all the while laughing uproariously because it was very often a real hoot. However, it wasn't just funny; it would always be so true and so right - what we were thinking written large - only put so much better than we ever could - so we'd all instantly agree with him and thus, in consequence, whoever was doing what he was currently hating would become an instant laughing stock and normally they'd back off. 

Oh yeah! Remember how much he abhorred The League of Gujarati Businessmen?  But then someone had to because, oh boy, they were vile! Remember that constant "Our wives and children ..."?

We used to mutter among ourselves that the wives and children of Gujarati businessmen had to be the stupidest people on the planet, because they were always the reason given by these Gujarati men for doing what they were doing, shutting down what they were shutting down, pulling down what they were pulling down, stopping everything good that was happening around Suva. "Our wives and children will trip over that new public seating. They have to go."  "Our wives and children don't like Prouds new window display. It has to go."  "Our wives and children will trip over those colourful new street signs. They must go." 

Lordy, lordy, lordy. Every week it was something new and different that those stupid wives and children couldn't deal with. "Our wives and children will trip over that seating in that new outdoor cafe." "Our wives and children don't like the leaves that drop from trees in the park." "Our wives and children don't like colonial style architecture." "Our wives and children don't like Fijian artifacts in the museum."  

It was endless and it was stupid. And even their wives and children could work out it was really only a stupid ploy for power because they thought our great mayor Sir Leonard Usher was too liberal in his views and so wanted one of their own to take over as Mayor of Suva.  Someone had to stand up to them, and we indeed had a champion because every week Dr Verrier would unleash his bile and "make hilarious" about their latest and turn them and it into a joke, and they'd slink away, well chastened ... until the next week when once again their wives and children couldn't cope with ...  gosh, who knows and who even cares!

Ah, Dr Verrier! Our Hero!  RIP!

And there were other great Fiji Times heroes too; people like Kim Gravell, the paper's historian and archivist. He was the most amazing resource for any newspaper - no, make that any country - to have because here was a guy who knew everything about the Pacific and had it all at his fingertips, or within an arms reach in his library, so was the first port of call if anyone had some big curious knotty question to ask. 

Like the time someone found the 17th century Portuguese anchor in Papeete Harbour in Tahiti, and some old Tahitian historian suggested it may have come from a visiting 17th century Portuguese ship ... and instantly turned himself into a laughing stock. But - ta da! - along comes Kim Gravell to the rescue: "There has always been talk of a Portuguese ship being in Papeete Harbour before Bougainville discovered the Tahitian Islands." he says and promptly and easily throws in chapter and verse from the Bougainville ships logs, and then from Cook's logs, and then lots of other evidence gathered since. The laughter immediately stopped.

And that glorious time back in about 1977 when an Eskimo Rugby team turned up in Fiji looking for their roots. Oh man, how everyone laughed. "Fijians come from Fiji. Eskimos come from Eskimo-land. Eskimos do NOT come from Fiji." was the big joke on the streets of Suva.  But I felt sorry for them because they'd come such a long way and saved for so long to make the journey, so took them for pizza to hear their story, and, on getting the details, was so convinced there was something to it I took them straight away to the only person, possibly on the planet, who'd have the answer:

Kim Gravell. 

Kim was amazing; immediately welcoming and it was fabulous to watch him in action. Totally, he didn't laugh as they told their story. "Was your ancestors' name Whateveritwas?" he said when they'd finished. "Yes" came the reply. "Ah, I wondered what became of that fellow." he said, and reached up for his translation of Luis Vaz de Torres' log to read out the relevant parts.

And, yup, right there was exactly the information they'd come halfway around the world to find: Torres met up with some young Fijian fellow who was part of a gang of Fijian boat-builders in Vanuatu to build a giant takia (apparently Vanuatu had better and larger hardwood trees than Fiji.) for the then-current Fijian King, and took him off on his ship as translator ... but there was nothing in there about what eventually became of him, which was a mystery that had long occupied Kim Gravell's leisure time.

And right here was an Eskimo Rugby Team with the answer.  And Kim with their answer. Nice mesh, right? Sometimes I do good, don't I!

Anyway, Kim promptly begins to interview them and I slink away, leaving them to it, all the while having these wild thoughts about how Kim Gravell needed to be cloned into infinity so everyone everywhere had one of their own.

He's still around, by the way, living on a houseboat someplace, so I've been told.  Mmmm, I wonder what became of all those amazing books?

Other Fiji Times Heroes?  Oh, I must tell you about Winnie Walker, the paper's layout artist.

Winnie Walker!  Molly was apprenticed to her for a while and used to go on endlessly about what a genius she was. I agreed that Fiji Times was always a paper that was good to look at and felt good to read ... but to call this GENIUS?

"It's not just about how the paper looks." Molly told me.  "Placement is power! And Winnie knows exactly how to exploit that power.  She's a genius, I'm telling you."

Huh? Placement is power? Bah humbug!

But then came the day when, with Molly and Winnie, having a quick PONG at Suva's new outdoor cafe (how The League of Gujarati Businessmen hated those silly fruit-juice names, which is precisely why we drank them), I challenged this notion to Winnie herself. "How can placement in a newspaper be considered anything like Genius? There is no genius involved in where you stick something in a paper."

"Denise, who is your greatest hero?" Winnie sighed.

Back then I was reading the Shirely MacLaine's "Don't Fall Off The Mountain" and loving it, so ...

"Shirley MacLaine!" was the answer I gave her.

"Give me one month and I will make you hate Shirley MacLaine with a passion!" she told me.

And I don't know how she managed it, but with only five articles on this actress and all of them complimentary, only one month later I indeed hated Shirley MacLaine with a passion and I've never got over it. Even the sight of her photo in a magazine and I'll feel a wave of nausea. 

And I only ever saw through one of Winnie's ploys. On the right side, near the edge of the page, was a photo of a Biafran baby, starving, all wide-eyed and with that horrible deathly grimace and immediately opposite it, on the left page, matching the starving baby in size and pose, almost an exact mirror image, was Shirley looking all wide-eyed and with a big wide Hollywood grin. It burned so deeply into my head that I can never look at one without thinking of the other ... and for some ridiculous and irrational reason (no doubt planted in there by Winnie herself with an earlier article) there lurks the stray thought that Shirley actually was responsible for that child's death, or even the drought itself.

Amazing huh!  Never again will I ever doubt the manipulative power of placement in the hands of a true layout genius.   Winnie Walker! RIP!

There are so many other stories I could tell you. So many other heroes too. But I think you get the idea.

And I hope too that, unlike Voreqe, you agree with me that with the loss of Fiji Times, Fiji has lost a great Intangible Cultural Asset and that's just both sad and wrong.

It's not too late, however!  That building is still there. So - fingers crossed! - maybe Fiji will soon come to its senses and Fiji Times will again be allowed to exist ... and hopefully be able to break its own record of a newspaper every day for 118 years!

But if not ... Fiji Times, you were a great warrior for truth, and also great fun and a great pleasure to read, so hail and farewell, old friend!  RIP!