Those Great Big Enormous Fijians

Fijian sailors were getting themselves talked about in Port Moresby in late May, according to the South Pacific Post.

It appears that when the new Fiji Government vessel Ra Marama called there en route home on its delivery voyage from Singapore, half a dozen of the Fijian sailors were asked to sing for the Native Peoples’ session over the local broadcasting station, 9PA.

The singers rolled up to record their items, and so did three of their mates who, reports the Post, “drank grog from bottles and staggered all over the place . . . they sang and sang. They were enormous”.

The upshot of it was that the real singers couldn’t get a note in sideways: an ABC official sent the whole lot —singers and plain sailors —packing and no one except those in the immediate vicinity heard any singing at all.

That’s the story, anyway.