KEY POINTS:
The 137th annual Waipu Highland Games saw in the New Year with a flurry of tartan, a chorus of bagpipes and one or two whiskies.
The gathering of the clans brought people with Scottish links from all over the world to the tiny Bream Bay town, where they were greeted with ceud mile failte - a hundred thousand welcomes.
Organiser Wayne Laurence said about 7000 came through the gates to enjoy the day - well up on 4000 last year.
Former Northlander Patrick Hellier, now an Auckland policeman, won his 12th New Zealand Highland Heavyweight Championship event, to take the title with 79 points.
Australian Craig Reid was runner-up with 65 and Mick Cotterill, of Auckland, was third with 62.
Whangarei electrician Craig Read, with 35 points, came seventh out of eight heavyweight competitors in his first attempt at the title.
The midday March of the Clans and massed Highland fling and songs was a highlight of the day, the rousing bagpipes warming the cockles of the heart like a good single malt.
New to the Games this year was the Tartan in the Park fashion show of tartan garments. Points were given for knowledge of the tartan and its ancestral links.
But it seemed the only requirements for the child models in the junior section were to look cute and smile at the crowd.
Eighteen-month-old Harris McLean, of Waipu, won the boys' section with his navy tartan ensemble complete with hat, and 3-year-old Mairin Collyer, of Kamo, won the girls' section in her red outfit of a Royal Stewart tartan.
A film crew recording a documentary called Pride and Passion was at the Games, and one of the cameramen got up with a scrap of tartan wrapped around his waist for a turn in the limelight.
Mr Laurence said the event was a great success, and while the event's master of ceremonies lamented the absence of any tartan bikinis, it was decided Tartan in the Park would return next year and be an annual event.
Highland dancing and piping competitions brought competitors from all over New Zealand and from abroad.
You needed "Mc" in front of your surname to feel at home walking past the clan stalls. The McLeods, McLeans, McKays and McDonalds were there in force - and so for the first time were the McPhees. Four members of the McPhee clan came up from Wellington, and one of them, Eric Worsdworth, said the Waipu Games was brilliant and the McPhees would surely be back for more.
- Northern Advocate
