ABSTRACT
The small town of Bluff is located at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. Like many rural towns, Bluff decided to theme their annual festival around a distinctive local product. In 1996, they started staging the Bluff Oyster Festival, a hallmark event that involved the local community, attracted tourists and reinforced a strong sense of place. In 2007, the festival organisers Venture Southland – a joint initiative of three local councils – planned to increase its patronage by moving it nearly 30 kilometres north to the regional city of Invercargill. The local people of Bluff were outraged by this attempt to take over what they saw as their festival. A public meeting voted to take the festival away from Venture Southland and its council backers and to organise the 2008 festival at Bluff (NZPA 2007). John Edminstin, the new chairman of the organising committee, proclaimed that they would ‘set about taking the festival ‘back to basics’ and putting the focus on people’. As a result, they found that when ‘the committee scrapped the ‘corporate feel’ introduced by Venture [they] immediately saw an increase of more than 1,000 people through the gates’ (quoted in Foden 2015).
