Hokitika Wildfoods Festival
The Hokitika Wildfoods Festival is an annual event held in early March in Hokitika, New Zealand. Its main attraction is an array of unusual foods, including huhu grubs, lamb's testicles, and horse semen.
The Wildfoods festival was started in 1990 by Hokitika local Claire Bryant, a producer of gorse-flower and rose-petal wine, who wanted to celebrate the flavours and produce of the West Coast.[1][2] The first festival in March 1990 coincided with Hokitika's 125th anniversary and was run by Heritage Hokitika.[3] It took place in a newly-developed heritage area on Gibson Quay in downtown Hokitika.[3] The first Wildfoods had 30 stalls, and attracted 1800 people.[1][4] Alison Holst was the celebrity judge.[3]
Wildfoods has traditionally been run on the second Saturday in March, the driest time on the West Coast.[1][5] The weather has generally been fine, but in the third festival in 1992 a squall blew down the festival tent.[3] By that year visitor numbers had increased to 3,800, so in 1993 Wildfoods moved to its current venue of Cass Square, which has a capacity of 10,000.[3][6][7] In 1994 for the first time the festival was opened by the West Coast Member of Parliament, Damien O'Connor, rather than the Mayor of Westland. One councillor decried the involvement of a "foreigner" as "propaganda by the Labour Party".[8]
The 1991 and 1992 festivals had been run by the South Westland Community Activities Trust, but Westland District Council took over the operation of the fourth festival in 1993.[3] Mike Keenan was appointed as festival coordinator, assisted by Lance Rae and a voluntary festival committee (numbering 17 by 2005).[3][9] The use of festival currency stopped after 1994, and by 1995 the event, sponsored by Monteith's, had expanded to cover Cass Square.[3] By the next year the festival had reached its peak number of 90 different stalls.[3] Westpower, the other major sponsor since 1990, was taken over by Trustpower in 1999.[3]
By 2003, after ten years of steady growth, Wildfoods Festival attendance peaked at 22,500 (Hokitika at the time had a population of just 3,500).[10] That year over 100 of whitebait and 19,000 litres of beer were sold.[25] Over half the visitors came from Canterbury (and 81 per cent from the South Island), only 2 per cent from Auckland, and 9 per cent from overseas.[10] At its height the festival attracted 25,000 under-age revellers, who smashed windows, lit bonfires on the beach, and left litter over central Hokitika; 20 were arrested, and there were calls for Wildfoods to be cancelled.[26] Subsequently ticket sales were capped at 15,000,[4] and a liquor ban was introduced downtown, with all alcohol being sold in plastic cups.[13] Sixty-eight arrests were made in 2012 for breaching the liquor ban (although none were at the festival site),[27] but in recent years arrests for disorderly behaviour were lower: fifteen in 2016,[16] eight in 2017.[7]
