Steve Price: Moomba is outdated, so why is council bringing it back?
Bringing back archaic Moomba is as crazy as trying to flap across Melbourne’s dirty Yarra River like a birdman, and as pointless as its parade.
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Radios breakfast host Fifi Box and Nine newsreader Peter Hitchener are two of the nicest people you could ever meet, so it’s hard to criticise them
But you need to ask yourself why anyone in their right mind would allow themselves to be crowned Moomba monarchs?
There they were, midweek – the radio star and the veteran newsreader - complete with staged photos wearing cardboard crowns, sitting on a fake throne claiming: “Moomba is back baby bigger than ever.”
To be fair, that was the delusional Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp’s claim.
After two years of Covid misery, the argument is that the Moomba Festival, arranged around the March long weekend in Melbourne, is just what we need to lift our flagging spirits.
What? A waterskiing competition on a brown river barely wide enough to stage it? A birdman rally in the same dirty river? A rides carnival in a park and a parade through a city decimated by the Covid?
Really? All this from a council and State Government incapable of rescuing the CBD with proper policy.
Moomba was dead and well and truly buried before Covid came along. A pointless celebration of what exactly, nobody really remembers.
If you Google Moomba, it tosses up dubious statistics about crowd sizes including the unlikely claim that as recently as 2018 it attracted 2.3 million tourists.
It doesn’t say where from.
And I defy the organisers to substantiate that number and tell me exactly where those millions of tourists supposedly came from.
I don’t know anyone from Sydney who waits for the dates of the Moomba Festival (which falls on a Victoria-only long weekend by the way) and then says ‘let’s rush down to Melbourne’.
What about the outdated tradition of crowning a man or a woman as King and Queen of Moomba? I am amazed frankly that the green-left dominated Melbourne City Council would even allow the Monarch tradition to survive.
To crown two Anglo Saxon media personalities, one an ageing white male – as great a bloke as Peter is – is a further puzzlement to me in 2022.
You also must ask where are the howls of protest about such an insensitive decision with the exclusion of a person of colour or someone from our multicultural migrant population?
Moomba probably gets a leave pass because it’s claimed the name Moomba is an Indigenous word meaning ‘let’s all get together and have fun’, although I have never been able to clarify if that’s entirely accurate.
This Moomba thing has been going since the mid 1950s, which is pretty much where it has remained trapped.
The first one was in my birth year of 1955, on March 12, and went for 15 days.
I guess there wasn’t a lot going on in Melbourne in 1955.
It’s had a monarch or monarchs since 1967, and for some strange reason the first King of Moomba was British actor Robert Morley. He was that bloke with the big bushy eyebrows who played pompous Englishmen in movies. Why he was Moomba King completely escapes me. We had a love affair apparently with international entertainers.
The second King of Moomba was a British actor by the name of Alfred Marks and then Italian opera singer Tito Gobbi.
By 1970 Australians got a look-in with boxing champion Johnny Famechon, and then, one of the strangest choices — a Russian clown by the name of Oleg Popov. His online awards history mentions the Order of Lenin in 1980 but fails to recognise his illustrious King of Moomba title.
Since the British actors, the opera singers and clowns, we have had Dame Edna and Daryl Somers in 1983, Molly Meldrum in 1985, the disgraced and jailed Rolf Harris in 1975, Bert and Patti Newton, Lou Richards and the bizarre combination of Mick Malthouse and Ruby Rose in 2011.
Maybe Melbourne needs Moomba as we head past the two-year anniversary of the pandemic but just because it has been around for so long — only dropped last year — isn’t a reason to keep it going.
It’s too late now to put our creative people to work on an alternative use of the March long weekend but it’s also disappointing that with all the spare time on their hands, those in charge didn’t come up with something more modern, spectacular and useful.
Moomba will never again attract the claimed crowds of millions and certainly no tourist with money to spend will make a special visit to our city to watch a second-rate parade make its way through the city and a water skiing competition.
Melbourne, like Sydney, has established a spectacular White Night festival – in Sydney it’s called Vivid – and we should move that to March.
Combine the lights festival with the Comedy Festival and the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and get rid of Moomba.
Melbourne is great at food, wine - and laughter - and not so great at waterskiing and parades. The city council has been an abject failure for the last two years.
After ruining the CBD with useless bike lanes, allowing car park operators to gouge motorists so badly they don’t bother visiting, while at the same time losing control of the homeless situation in the city and agreeing to a drug injecting facility, this council should have been sacked and the city turned over to administrators.
The Andrews Government is too weak to do that.
Moomba like the city council has had its day.
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