Giggling like a loon, the Shipping Reporter lurched into the Little Darwin mouldy den and boasted he had discovered another fabulous yarn in the Ghost Fleet that passes in and out of Townsville without the landlubber media crew noticing .
"Foo was here !!! he shouted over and over , as if he had just come from a long session at Molly Malone's Irish Pub ... " And nobody but me spotted him !!!" To back up his almost hysterical outburst , he produced the cropped photograph , below, of a vessel in port bearing the incredible name , FOO.
Little Darwin has long been a fan of Foo. He was the graffiti signature of Australian soldiers during WWl , depicted on the side of railway carriages as a baldy man peering over a wall with the message FOO WAS HERE.
The Yanks copied this in WWll with KILROY WAS HERE .
How could a cargo vessel with such an emotive name-FOO-sail into the garrison port of Townsville and not be noticed by the media ? We at Little Darwin brought out the office coracle, loaded a picnic hamper aboard , and set out for the docks to get a glimpse of FOO. Unfortunately , it was heavy going ,the tide against us and there was much rubbish in the water .
It became dark , so we were forced to divert to Molly Malone's for liquid refreshments. When we carried our vessel into the bar , several nosey customers wanted to know what we were doing rowing about Cleveland Bay in a coracle.
Border Security arrived soon after in large numbers, set fire to the coracle , and accused us of being refugee smugglers. They got really nasty when we told them we just wanted to take some selfies next to the good ship FOO . Incredibly , they said there was no such vessel of that name in port , just one called FOOCHOW , see obscured snap below .
We are being flown to Christmas Island in chains tomorrow and the Shipping Reporter has gone into hiding.
Allowances should be made for the Shipping Reporter deceiving us . He went a bit troppo covering the waterfront in Darwin , chundered along the Arnhem Land coast in a mission boat , chundered to and from Portuguese Timor ( arriving back with malaria ) , sank a few on the notorious Barbary Coast in Cairns and somehow evaded being bitten by Sandshoe Annie and never once dived into Kay's Kimono , downed a few ales in Sydney's Ship Inn , guzzled large amounts of flat Waikato Mud in New Zealand and chundered considerably while sailing with Kiwi commercial shark fishermen .We'll send him a Christmas card from Christmas Island just to show him there are no hard feelings .
