My ex-wife and I, and our first baby, had a memorable stay in Fiji on our way over to visit Australia in 1978, from Berkeley. It was an exploratory trip to see if we wanted to move to Melbourne, which we did the next year.
We stayed as guests of the son of the chief of Naivuruvuru village, near Suva.
I went out harvesting Piper methysticum plants, with a machete, with the men, to make their sacred drink, yaqona (kava). Once we were deep in the jungle, my host ragged me a bit about my long hair and white skin, saying, ‘You know it wasn’t that long ago that we would have been eating people that looked like you.’ Surrounded as I was by ten half-naked men with machetes in the middle of nowhere, it did give me pause.
The yaqona roots were pounded in large tubs. In olden times, only virgin women were selected to chew the roots to release the liquid—so that the drink would be ‘pure’.
Later, in one of the outlying sheds, there was a men-only night of drinking the yaqona, with everyone performing the traditional three handclaps after downing a half-coconut shell of the brown liquid. During the ceremony, I enquired if I could take a few photos. The chief’s son addressed my request in Fijian to the other men. One of the elders said something sharp and everyone howled with laughter. I asked the chief’s son what he had said.
‘He remarked that your photos probably would be overexposed—from too much light.’
I said, ‘Too much light?’
He replied, ‘Yes, by the reflections from all the spiritual mirrors.’
An incredibly subtle bit of humour, and the entire shed understood it in less than a second.
I joined one of the elders of the tribe on the mandolin to play some local singalongs for everyone. This man was a holy musician with the most amazing head of frizzy brilliant-white hair, and it was an honour to accompany him.
I asked him if I could touch his hair. He told me it was forbidden to touch hair in public, and traditionally punishable by death.
Human hair and the head area are the most sacred (tabu) parts of the body. Special permission is required in advance to touch an elder’s head. Hairstyles in ancient Fiji were an art form. It would often take two days to prepare the chief’s hair.
The ulu cavu was a warrior’s wig. Warriors used to strip their enemies of their hair, turn it into a wig, and wear it into the next battle.
In 1867, Methodist missionary Thomas Baker was killed because he touched a chief’s head. The rock used to kill him is still on display in the village of Nabutautau. Baker was cooked and eaten by the tribe, leaving behind only the soles of his leather sandals, which are on exhibit at the Fiji Museum in Suva.
On Sunday, before we had to leave, the villagers had a Christian service in the chapel where the entire congregation sang old hymns at the top of their lungs, unaccompanied. I still have a cassette recording of that somewhere. So powerful. The most authentic Christian service I have ever experienced. Our baby had been sick and the pastor offered up a public prayer for his recovery.
The chief’s son told me afterwards that there was conflict, at the time, as one branch of their new Christian faith had broken off from the rest and established their own little chapel because they felt the yaqona ceremony was pagan and a sin. The men were no longer permitted to join the others in the shed for their nightly sacred drink.
I told him that I thought the two belief systems, in tandem, made for a profound experience and not to change it if possible.
I had a large yaqona bowl made with a small engraved plaque bearing the name of the village, and presented it to the chief as a parting gift.
Joe Dolce is an Australian-American composer and poet. He wrote and performed ‘Shaddap You Face’, the most successful 45 rpm vinyl recording in Australian music history, which topped the charts in 15 countries and was added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia collection in 2026. With Lin Van Hek he co-wrote ‘Intimacy’ for The Terminator (1984), a film later selected for the US National Film Registry. He was the City of Melbourne Poet Laureate in 2021, and has won the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Health Poetry Prize and the 25th Launceston Poetry Cup. His poems have been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize and selected for Best Australian Poems 2014 and 2015. He received the Advance Australia Award in 1981.
Joe is currently working on the musical setting of a poem by early 20th-century activist Ch’iu Chin, translated by Kenneth Rexroth and commissioned for performance by the Chung Wah Chinese Orchestra of Perth for 2027, for mixed Chinese traditional instruments and both Chinese and English choirs. Ch’iu Chin was beheaded by the Manchu Dynasty for her poetry opposing foot-binding.