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  A Little of Fiji

2025
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Michael Kluckner


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Artwork & text © Michael Kluckner, 2025

Heading to Australia for our usual almost-annual family visit, we decided to fly Air Fiji and stop over for a few days in Fiji en route to Brisbane, thence to Sydney. When we lived in Australia in the 2000s, Fiji was sometimes in the news because of the unrest caused by a 2006 coup led by the colourfully named Commodore Frank Bainimarama. It has settled down since. Ads often appear online for resort holidays in beautiful tropical settings there. The little I knew about Fiji involved its status as a British colony in the late 19th century and colonial-era sugar plantations, including the ownership of one, with its indentured Indian labourers, by the Vancouver-based, Rogers-family-owned, BC Sugar Company in the early 1900s. Reading about the plantations on Wikipedia before we left home, I was interested to read that "many of the indentured Indians never returned to India" although they could return at the government's expense after completing two 5-year terms. "The great majority chose to stay," belying a recent narrative of exploitation and racism. The Indian culture seems to co-exist with the Fijian one. The resort culture in Fiji, which holds little interest for us, also co-exists with the native Fijian culture of  agriculture and bustling towns and small cities. Tourism is without doubt a mainstay of the economy. But the two solitudes of the Fijian world next to the resorts, some with golf courses, many occupying picturesque peninsulas and effectively forming gated communities, is a bit startling. We chose to move around initially on the local buses in the Nadi region of Viti Levu (the international airport being nearby) and were the only White people on them. Occasionally we would see a group of White tourists at, for example, a fruit and vegetable market in Nadi, with the comfortable day-trip van from the resort parked nearby. To see more of the countryside, we rented a small Toyota from the local company Coastal Rentals for a couple of days and headed northeast along the Kings Road as far as the town of Ba, then another day headed south and east along the Queens Road as far as Sigatoka. Suva – the biggest city in Fiji – is on the other side of Viti Levu, a 3-4 hour run by express bus or car and too far we felt for a daytrip. So for us it was just a glimpse of beautiful people, smiling BIG people (Fijians do very well in international rugby tournaments), the women wearing brightly colourful clothes, and everyone friendly. "Bula," hello, you hear constantly on the street or in any interaction. "Vinaka," thank you, accompanies any small gesture, such as moving out of the way on a tight sidewalk. My recent habit of taking the small Moleskine sketchbook, pencil, eraser, and a set of coloured pencils worked fairly well, although I didn't have enough bright reds, purples and oranges to get the intensity of the colours, especially of clothing (and so finished them at home). And there wasn't really a lot of time – we were moving around pretty constantly. Later in Sydney, staying comfortably at our daughter's backyard cabin, I added some black ink to them, not very successfully.

Tight little crowded ramshackle buses move most people around. This was a bus we took between Nadi and our airbnb about halfway to the airport. The intercity buses are in much better condition. Below: women and men serving in many restaurants wear a frangipani flower behind their ear. And there are dozens of stray dogs along the roadsides, mostly beige/brown ones like I drew below. Near the coast, fishermen sell their early morning catch on the roadsides. Unfortunately we weren't set up to cook anything, and went twice to the Indian restaurant Masala Twist near our apartment.

Below: Lautoka, just north of Nadi, is the big commercial port and sugar-processing town.








And, again in Sydney, we returned one morning to the favourite surf beach, Mona Vale, that we habituated 40 years ago.


And a few photos from Fiji...



Billboard near the airport: selling to the international resort investor crowd.



 
By comparison, a quite ordinary Fijian house after a very heavy tropical downpour one afternoon. Temp. about 30.
Not fun driving (on the left) in a small car in the deluge ...

A shop in the little town of Ba on the north coast, suggesting the proximity of Australia (Brisbane is 2+ hours away) and also the way many storefronts are wire-screened presumably against break-ins. We especially noticed this in shops in Nadi that you wouldn't think would be a target for burglars by comparison with this betting shop.

Old buildings, probably 1950s, in Ba



Sport-loving people...



A big ashram or gurdwara ...? Sigatoka on the south coast.



A sugarcane harvest painting by T. Sing in the Momma's Pizza near our airbnb.


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