FISH FRY ISLAND STYLE

Take your fishing boat out for a morning, gather together a few friends and rellies, heat up the oil in the cookers, bring on some bread and butter and salad, and you have a Norfolk Island Fish Fry.
A marvellous way of entertaining and feeding a crowd, and maybe raising funds for a good cause.

Last weekend, there was a big Fish Fry out at the Parish Centre, and we fed about 110 people in great style with fish, chips and lots of delicious salads and island style dishes, including pilhi, muddha, and sweet island pies.......lemon, coconut, passionfruit and guava.

Frying the fish and chips, including preparing the batter, is definitely a man's role, and Duncan ("Coon"), Brian ("Golla"), Roy and Ray certainly did us proud. Edie, meanwhile, had decorated the hall beautifully, as well as making pies and trifle. Everyone brought dishes to share, and there were a couple of enormous succulent watermelons to share round.

The entertainment was definitely "island style" also, with the 4 Nobbs brothers and Michelle on keyboards, ukeleles (produced at Rocky Point Joinery), accordion, and mouth organ, Tony on ukele, and Wiggy strumming on his wonderful Tea Chest Bass. The music created a great spontaneous atmosphere, and not only was everyone singing along, but there was plenty of dancing...rock and roll, waltzing, disco, and Tahitian dancing, often all at the same time!

The Fish Fry was planned by the recently formed Association of Bounty Descendants in Norfolk(usually called the Tahiti group) to raise funds to help entertain their Tahiti cousins when they come to help celebrate our sesqui-centenary Bounty Day on JUNE 8.

The association has been formed by the 26 Norfolkers who, last October, accepted the invitation to help their Tahitian cousins celebrate the 217th anniversary of the Bounty sailing in to Matavi Bay on October 23, 1788 (some months before the Mutiny.) Up until recently, the Norfolk Bounty descendants have only had close contact with the Bounty descendants on Pitcairn. So the Tahiti visit proved to be a very moving and emotional time, and they experienced intense feelings of kinship and of their common culture and ethnic roots, in spite of the language barrier. There were other Bounty descendants there too, from the Cook Islands, Pitcairn, Hawaii, Tubai and even Chile.

While the Norfolkers were in Tahiti, they were entertained, accommodated and fed right royally by the Tahitians, who, after years of having their cultural roots ignored by successive governments, were delighted to meet long-lost relatives who shared and valued the same heritage. The fact that David Buffett, one of our own Government ministers, was part of the group, gave the Tahitian group a measure of official government recognition in Tahiti, for which they were extremely grateful.

If the success of Saturday's get-together is anything to go by, we are all going to have a wonderful time in June.