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Last year’s Pasifika festival
The annual Warkworth Pasifika Festival cultural celebration has become yet another casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The event, which showcases the music of island nations such as Kiribati, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu, as well as Maori, is normally held in November. However, Mahu Vision Community Trust chair Neville Johnson says it did not seem possible to organise the event with any confidence.
“It is very disappointing, but from a planning point of view, it was just too hard to guess what might happen next,” Mr Johnson says. After 10 years of festivals, he says it is possibly time to rethink the format of the event, anyway.
“There may be ways to transform it into more of an event that is less reliant on church volunteers.
The Pacific Fusion in Whangarei, for example, takes a more commercial approach with stalls and information booths, as well as a stage.”
