Pictures: Commonwealth Games opening ceremony

A tram takes flight as part of the entertainment at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. Picture / Brett Phibbs

New Zealand's Commonwealth Games hopes were launched last night amid an opening spectacular that lit up the Yarra River and flew by winged tram into the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Just after midnight and flanked by other teams from the Pacific, Olympic triathlon champion Hamish Carter, proudly waving the New Zealand flag with a school boy grin etched on his face, led the large contingent of Kiwi athletes, all clad in black and arms upraised, into the stadium.

The Kiwis joined another New Zealander - Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, who sang Happy Birthday to the Queen, a month ahead of her 80th birthday on April 21.
But they may have already been hit with psychological warfare by the Australians.

New Zealand's symbolic figure in a parade of marine creatures that illuminated the Yarra to represent the countries of the Commonwealth was the john dory.

Australian briefing notes describe the fish as a weak swimmer with an incredible extending tube of a mouth to suck in an unwary victim.

In a break with tradition that saw the opening ceremony start outside the main stadium, 18 surfboats carried the flags of the host cities of previous Games, blending into a ceremony heavy on narrative and spectacle, and focused on a boy with a duck.

Above him, suspended from a 30-tonne cable system, one of Melbourne's iconic W-class trams with wings soared into the centre of the stadium to begin a ceremony that included almost 2400 performers and a bevy of Australian sporting legends.

Australian Rules icon Ron Barassi and Olympic gold miler Herb Elliott handed the Queen's baton to Sydney 2000 star Cathy Freeman, distance runner Ron Clarke, two-time Olympic Gold medallist Marjorie Jackson-Nelson and 1950s miler John Landy, completing a 180,000km odyssey.

In an extravaganza highlighted by fireworks that raced around the stadium, up the Yarra and into the city, the boy's duck became a flying woman and the boy chased her into the sky on a magic skateboard.

A rescue bid by manic koalas on land and in a box kite and a bizarre flying machine - during which a decapitated koala's head became a football - moved to Aboriginal mythology and the Dreaming creator Bunjil, represented as a shadow that darkened the stadium.

In a segment that had earlier angered Aboriginal activists protesting against the Games, indigenous elders representing Victorian tribes formed a circle in the middle of the stadium, wearing possum-skin cloaks.

Protesters were furious that the ceremony included reference to traditional lands lost.

But the ceremony was a triumph for singer Delta Goodrem, whose fight against cancer moved Australia - she sang a special anthem co-written with fellow artists Brian McFadden and Guy Chambers.