Brian Rudman: Dust off the old exploders - we'll make art out of them

With another successful Pasifika Festival following hard on the heels of the two-week celebration that was AK05, isn't it about time Aucklanders cast off the inferiority complex that has us apologising for our lack of culture?

You only have to turn to the arts and entertainment listings of this paper any day of the week to prove what a nonsense this is. But despite all the evidence to the contrary, we delight in bestowing on ourselves this country bumpkin image.

It's a form of self-flagellation that intrigues and mystifies a recent immigrant from Adelaide, Auckland Festival chief executive, David Malacari.

We'd been discussing the healthy turnout to the festival's concert performance of John Adam's modern opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, and my comment that its popularity was an answer to those who talked of Aucklanders' lack of cultural taste.

"This thing about Aucklanders not being cultured is interesting," Mr Malacari said. "I've heard it more from Aucklanders than I have from anyone else. It seems to me there's a bit of a chip on the shoulder that Auckland doesn't have culture, that Wellington's got it.

"As an outsider I'd have to say that just seems so counter-intuitive. Auckland has so many cultural riches. I think maybe the community hasn't started to realise them yet."

As festival chief executive, he sees as part of his mission, the desire to knock this chip off as many shoulders as possible.

The success of AK05 was a good start. Now it's over to the rest of us to play our part and, instead of buying into the bragging from a certain city to the south, be proud of our own unique and diverse cultural identity.

Despite pre-festival jitters about our last-minute ticket-buying habits, attendances - at the shows I went to at any rate - were good, though not as high as organisers had hoped. But Mr Malacari is quick to point out that any box office shortfalls can be met by current funding levels, meaning the squeeze won't go on Auckland City for emergency grants. This will be welcome news for city councillors.

With the festival now bedded into city life, the challenge is to get Aucklanders to embrace it rather more enthusiastically than they have up until now. Mr Malacari accepts this is a marketing challenge for his organisation. One task is to establish a "friends" organisation and encourage ticket sales in the pre-Christmas period. This gets money out of pockets before the Christmas and holiday bills start pouring in. It also gets a group of early ticket buyers, who will then talk up the festival to friends and acquaintances.

Another basic marketing tool needing developing is the mailing lists of enthusiasts for the various art forms.

What can we expect in AK07? Well no acts have yet been booked, but there maybe a clue in Mr Malacari's toying with the idea of theming it around his reaction, as an outsider, to living on a volcano in the middle of the Pacific Island.

"Aucklanders say, 'we don't have earthquakes here,' yet I look out my window and there's Rangitoto Island. I say 'excuse me, that island only appeared 600 years ago. The whole place could turn into a volcano tomorrow'."

For someone who comes from a land 3.5 billion years old, "it's an amazing feeling to think that you're at the centre of all this geological energy". He likes the idea of sharing the energy analogy with the arts, Auckland as a storehouse of artistic energy "just wanting to explode" and all that.

As long as the explosions can be controlled, it's not a bad theme to begin with. And with a bit of organisation, it might even be possible to incorporate my hobby-horse campaign for world heritage status for those old exploders, Rangitoto and its older brother and sister cones.

But first things first, and that involves translating the exploding image into a programme of events and exhibitions that can help secure the festival into a permanent spot in Auckland's cultural life.

Having lived through the anguish, with fingers and toes crossed, of the emergence of first AK03 and now AK05, it's wonderful to finally sit back and relax a little, glorying that the baby, while still not out of the woods, is at least finally out of intensive care.