A smorgasbord of tastes and races at Regional Park

It's picnic time at Long Bay, where SUZANNE McFADDEN discovers a mini United Nations in session.

Sixteen-year-old Neemia Neemia devours a whole raw fish - everything but the bones and fins.

He munches on the scales and sucks out the snapper's eyes.

Every few mouthfuls he stops for a chunk of coconut. Tokelauans eat coconut with everything - they call it their version of tomato sauce.

Neemia's family, nearly 100 of them, laugh as he sits cross-legged on the grass, hunched over a plastic ice-cream container he uses as a plate, gripping the slippery fish in his hands.

In Tokelauan, this is a pikiniki. In Vietnamese it is a camtrai, in Samoan taafaoga.

In English the word is picnic, and on any given Saturday a feast of different cultures meet at Long Bay on Auckland's east coast to eat out - come sunshine, drizzle or gale.

Russians, Koreans, Croatians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis and South Africans all crowd around barbecues on the grass above the beach.

This is not an organised meeting of the United Nations, just a picture of New Zealand's overflowing ethnic cocktail.

In the Vietnamese corner, they bring plates of deep-fried chicken wings, spring rolls and barbecued pork.

The boys kick a soccer ball, while the girls sit in a circle giggling over a Vietnamese card game called cat te.

They are students from a Vietnamese Catholic youth group. Sister Bonoit organises the picnics to introduce newcomers to the New Zealand way of life.

"We love it here," says student Huyen Tran, of Papatoetoe. "We try to have a half-and-half picnic - half New Zealand food like sausages and bread, and half traditional Vietnamese food."

Plump gulls and nosy ducks waddle over to picnic mats and try to stick their heads in people's baskets. Weekends mean they get a multicultural feast too - they can even afford to be picky.

If they meander over to the Samoan barbecue, they can choose from taro and green bananas, potato salad and marinated chicken legs.

The Samoans erect tents and lie on woven mats and sleeping bags. The men play kilikiti, Pacific Islands cricket, using sticks from the trees as wickets. The young women play volleyball and the older women watch and clap from under their tarpaulins.

Men from the Pt Chevalier Christian Church arrive at the park at 7 am to make sure they get one of the brick barbecues before the crowds come. They gather wood and stoke up the fire before the rest of the group arrives on chartered buses.

Every year the Samoan families bring their children to this beach the weekend before school starts.

One of the mothers, Koleti Faletuai, watches over the men cooking the barbecue.

She says they come here because it is clean, and there is plenty of room for their kids - at least 100 of them - to play and swim.

The hot food is eaten straight from the pots - there are no knives and forks today.

At the Tokelauan feast, cheeky sparrows perch on the edge of plastic plates and nibble on half-eaten bread rolls.

There is a luncheon spread big enough to feed the entire park, but tonight, before the gates close at 9 o'clock, the Tokelau picnickers will cook up more meat and chicken for their dinner.

Bunches of bananas hang from manuka trees, there are sacks of coconuts and tables of crabmeat salad, doughnuts, orange fizzy drink and plenty of whole raw fish.

The people here live all over Auckland, but their families are from Fakaofo, one of the three Tokelau atolls.

They, too, bring their children here before they return to school. Just before the lolly scramble, an elder speaks to them about how they must try to make their families proud in the year ahead.

Then the people of Fakaofo sing and dance the afternoon away, determined to stay until dark when the park gates close.