# A METAPHOR FOR A NATION IN FLAMES? (UPDATED)

No-one with a sense of history and love of our capital can fail to be devastated by the fire that gutted one of our oldest landmarks this morning – the Defence Club in Gordon Street, Suva, that has existed for 109 years.

Like many people, Grubsheet went into a state of shock when the first pictures emerged. Where were the firefighters, for God’s sake? Nowhere to be seen.

In the old days, the Suva Fire Station was next to the Regal Theatre ( McDonalds) and it would have been a short sprint up the road to Gordon Street with sirens blazing. Now that they have to come from far-off Walu Bay, how much was this a factor in the building’s destruction?

Yes, the Defence Club has been a bastion of privilege since 1915 – an almost exclusively white hangout until just before most of the whites left after Independence but even before then, a favoured watering hole for some of the country’s greatest indigenous figures – Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, Ratu Sir George Cakobau, Ratu Sir Edward Cakobau and more recently, Ratu Epeli Nailatikau. But it was also part of the heritage of old Suva. While everything else around it changed, it stayed stubbornly part of a bygone era.

Grubsheet has only ever set foot in the place once but it had all of the atmosphere of clubs of its type the world over – timber-panelled walls, full-sized billiard tables, honour rolls of those who’ve served and historic photos that are all now tragically lost.

Much is being made of the fact that the Defence Club was a male bastion where only recently could women become even associate members. But over the generations, that suited many women just fine.

They knew exactly where their menfolk were – propping up the bar at the Defence Club with other men. And they could be comfortable in the knowledge that when their men were at the Club, they were beyond the reach of female predators like you know who.

Yes, every generation has had its jezabels but they weren’t welcome at the Defence Club. And one suspects – because there was just as much extramarital mischief in Viti Makawa – that it has taken so long to admit women members for more than just reasons of male chauvinism.

Many of the nation’s most important and influential men will today be bereft – mourning the loss of a wonderful bolthole for them and a wonderful national institution that is now lost, along with a great deal of Fijian history including the personal sacrifice made by so many servicemen in war that has given us whatever freedom we enjoy today.

Call me old fashioned, but I will miss the Defence Club even though I’d only ever set foot in the place once. Because we are again in mourning for a Fijian institution that seemed rock-solid but has been snuffed out within the space of a few minutes.

The flames have taken not just that institution and a handsome landmark in our capital. For someone like me who has a great deal of nostalgia for Viti Makawa and the beauty of old Suva – the city of my birth – today’s inferno can’t help but be something of a metaphor for Fiji as a whole.

And what precisely is that? The loss not just of a building or an institution but an ideal which many of the Defence Club’s members supported and fought for over the years – the vision of a multiracial, multi-religious nation in the South Seas that defied the odds of other third world hell-holes and was tolerant, progressive, compassionate and thriving. A beacon for its neighbours and an example in a troubled world.

That too has gone up in smoke over the years and especially the past 14 months. And it is an even bigger tragedy than the inferno on Gordon Street.