Alexandra festival needs to play on local strengths

Jolyon Manning backgrounds the origins and history of the Alexandra Blossom Festival and suggests what a future event might look like.

The community culture in Central Otago as elsewhere has seen big changes in the past 50 years.

In the late 1950s, Alexandra was the fastest-growing borough in New Zealand.

Its growth was dominated by the transfer from the big Roxburgh Hydro construction village of many members of a close-knit team of families who were linked together with school and church connections.

They came to Alexandra to celebrate the unique sunny climate they had enjoyed in Roxburgh.

They were prepared for the cold winter which, in Alexandra, was a little colder than they had become accustomed to in Roxburgh.

But the early spring sunshine enjoyment was tempered by the unrelenting clouds of smutty black oily smog coming from the nearby stone fruit orchards, whose tender new fruit needed protection from late frosts.

The growing township had an unusually strong fellowship.

This was equally true for the longtime pioneering families, as well as the more recent arrivals from the hydro village.

In addition to the family fellowship, there arose a powerful, visionary movement of young men called Jaycees, a sort of younger chapter of the international Chamber of Commerce business community.

Among the newly settled families there were government-sponsored small rural outposts of earth science departments.

Some very bright young men engaged in nationally significant research enterprises.

One of their number in Alexandra who had teamed up with the local Jaycee chapter was a soil scientist, Michael Leamy.

Looking for a new community project, this group conjured up the idea of a springtime Blossom Festival for Alexandra, with profits to go towards a fine outdoor swimming pool centre.

The rest is history.

With the youthful vigour and enthusiasm of the powerful new Jaycee group, there were, behind the scenes, many young women and mothers who at that time were not in paid employment but keen to do their bit in the new enterprise.

And many spent hours and hours of the cooler cloudy months putting together the colourful pieces that would decorate the festival floats.

A recently augmented contingent of theatrical artists, whose gifts were much influenced by the spectacular local landscape inheritance prepared together a freshly created and unique series of entertainment shows founded on historically authentic early settlement stories.

But that is just part of the one side of the early beginnings of the nationally prominent Alexandra Blossom Festival event.

There was in those days a special appeal of an excuse to come into Central Otago for an early whiff of its sunny attractions, before the annual camping contingent at Christmas-New Year from nearby Dunedin and Invercargill.

In those days, the family car was becoming a more widely enjoyed amenity and a trip to Central Otago was a really special outing for many, that soon mounted to thousands.

The early spring days were so much sunnier and warmer than was the case in Dunedin and Invercargill.

Then a decade or so later, following successful annual festivals, the bikies arrived to add national publicity lustre well ahead of the event.

Speculation on police control measures filled the media columns for weeks in advance. But this all added grist to the mill.

And so the story goes on.

Meanwhile, there were big changes in the culture of both the out-of-town visitors and the local population.

More women entered the paid formal workforce.

Families were smaller.

Extra annual paid leave meant that for people throughout Otago and Southland there were fresh opportunities to take a week's holiday break out of town, sometimes in Australia.

Disposable incomes had increased and jet air travel was more commonplace.

The much desired sunshine experience could be obtained in Surfers Paradise and elsewhere.

And the winter trip abroad became steadily more commonplace for residents in Alexandra itself.

Families who had formerly devoted for decades so much time committed to do their part in Blossom Festival preparation had other things on the household agenda.