Table Of ContentWoven Histories
Dancing Lives
Woven Histories
Dancing Lives
Torres Strait Islander Identity, Culture and History
Edited by Richard Davis
First published in 2004 by Aboriginal Studies Press
for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres About the artist
Strait Islander Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra, Ellen José was born and grew up in Cairns, and
ACT, 2601. later attended art school in Brisbane. She moved to
Melbourne in the late 1970s, where she still lives
© 2004 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres and works today. Descended from the people of
Strait Islander Studies Mer, Erub and Ngurupai Islands in the Torres
Strait, one of her maternal great-grandmothers was
Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of indigenous to Mer and one of her paternal great-
private study, research and criticism or review, as grandmothers was from Ngurupai. Both sets of
permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of great-grandparents lived and raised José’s maternal
this publication may be reproduced by any process grandfather and paternal grandmother in the
whatsoever, without the written permission of the Torres Strait.
publisher.
José’s work explores the impact of colonisation on
ISBN 0 85575 432 X her land and people, the evolution of their distinct
cultural traditions through European contact and
National Library of Australia the forging of new cultural symbols. Her work
Cataloguing-in-Publication data: draws on traditional and contemporary images of
the islands – ceremonial drums and costume, local
Woven histories, dancing lives: Torres Strait islander
identity, culture and history. flora and sea creatures, fishing techniques and
traditional implements – as well as symbols of
Bibliography.
Includes index. European and Christian incursion into the region.
ISBN 0 85575 432 X.
José is currently Chairperson of the Victorian Torres
1. Torres Strait Islanders. 2. Torres Strait Islanders -
History. I. Davis, Richard, 1965- . II. Australian Institute of Strait Islander Wongai Corporation, which provides
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. a meeting point for Torres Strait Islanders living in
305.89912 Victoria, and helps recognise and continue the
cultural and political contributions made to this
Produced by Aboriginal Studies Press country by Torres Strait Islanders.
April 2004
Front cover: ‘Warm’ by Ellen Jose
Text (shell illustration): Simon Ippoliti
Design and layout: Rachel Ippoliti, Aboriginal
Studies Press
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements vii
Contributors x
Abbreviations xiv
Map of the Torres Strait region and communities xvi
Part 1: Introductions
Writing about Islanders: recent research and future directions 2
Jeremy Beckett
Torres Strait: the region and its people 15
David Lawrence and Helen Reeves Lawrence
Culture connections 30
Ephraim Bani
Evidence of cultural custodianship 31
Ephraim Bani
Part 2: Identity, performance and kastom
The spirit of the image (journeys) 34
Richard Davis
‘The great traffic in tunes’: agents of religious and musical change in 46
eastern Torres Strait
Helen Reeves Lawrence
‘Living in the Light’ and Island dance: morality and temporality in 73
Warraber Christianities
Julie Lahn
‘Embryonic science’: the 1888 Torres Strait photographic collection of A.C. Haddon 90
Jude Philp
Language diversity, pan-Islander identity and ‘national’ identity in Torres Strait 107
Anna Shnukal
Cairns and Cambridge: an Australian anthropologist’s view of the 124
Cambridge Expedition’s centenary
Maureen Fuary
Cooking, walking, and talking cosmology: an Islander woman’s perspective of religion 140
McRose Elu
What is a totem? 151
Ephraim Bani
v
Part 3: Space, region and politics
Commonsense, colonialism and government 154
Martin Nakata
Turning secession into self-governance in the Torres Strait 174
Sandra J. Kehoe-Forutan
Shared space: Papuan perspectives of the Torres Strait 190
David Lawrence
Bridge or barrier: the Torres Strait borderland 207
W.S. Arthur
Schooling and the negotiation of culture on Saibai 217
Jenny Martin Davis
Initiation 230
Ephraim Bani
Part 4: Time and resources
Archaeology of the Murray Islands, eastern Torres Strait: implications for a 234
regional prehistory
Melissa Carter, Peter Veth, Anthony Barham, Doug Bird, Sue O’Connor
and Rebecca Bliege-Bird
‘Our feet are on the land, but our hands are in the sea’: knowing and caring for marine 259
Territory at Erub, Torres Strait
Colin H. Scott
Hunter skills: the dugong, the hunter and the talking sea grass 271
Ephraim Bani
References 273
Index 296
vi
Preface and acknowledgements
This community of essays was originally conceived as an extension of discussions that
started with contributions to a 1998 AIATSIS seminar series entitled ‘The Torres Strait
100 Years On’. The occasion afforded the opportunity to reflect on the scholarly legacy
of the 1898 Cambridge University anthropological expedition to Torres Strait. The most
significant issue emerging from the series concerned how little the wider public knew
about Torres Strait Islanders. As a result a sustained dialogue arose between the authors
about how to best communicate to a broad audience the unique histories, identities and
cultures of Torres Strait Islanders. As we developed our papers in the intervening five
years we recognised how unique this volume was and recalled other significant
contributions made by Islanders to Australian life: the unprecedented 1899 institution
of community-elected councils granting limited self-government powers to Island
communities; the 1936 Torres Strait maritime strike in which Islander boat crew secured
better wages and labour conditions and new institutions of community self-
management; successful Islanderisation of the major Christian denominations by the
1940s; the regional independence movements of the 1980s; and the historic 1992 Mabo
and others v. Queensland (No.2) judgement of the Australian High Court which
recognised for the first time through the successful actions of the Meriam people that
Indigenous, or native, title to land is recognised at common law.
As scholars and teachers with eclectic intellectual affiliations and sensibilities, our
curiosity over how to account for the historical and cultural diversity and richness of
Islander lives led us to a fertile conversation. What does it mean to live on the cultural
edges of two landmasses and across two states? How have the many migrations of
different ethnicities into Torres Strait affected the social and cultural life of people living
there? Are there social practices and experiences that are unique to Islanders, Papuans
and Aborigines of the region? If there are, how might these speak to other parts of
Indigenous Australia?
The conversations these questions sparked would probably not have occurred without
the particular institutional setting of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), which provided a distinctive and open intellectual
space. Since its inception in 1964 as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies,
AIATSIS has fostered an exploration of Indigenous Australian issues that has brought
together Indigenous activists and thinkers, university-based scholars, and the wider
Australian community in exciting, intense and often contentious dialogue. One of the
contributions to this ongoing discussion occurred in ‘The Torres Strait 100 Years On’
seminar series. Many of the presentations in that program found their way into the
Institute-sponsored journal Australian Aboriginal Studies (1998/2), which in turn
prompted the greater discussion that has resulted in this volume of excellent papers.
vii
We see ourselves as extending the precedents established there—of bringing together
scholars and Islanders, the one not excluding the other—and contributing to an original
and innovative redrawing of discussions about Islanders’ experience of colonialism
and globalisation and the importance of the region to Australia and Melanesia. In one
sense, this is a continuation of topics opened by previous writers. But in another it
creates a new environment for writing about Islanders’ in the first years of the new
millennium. Contributors to this volume assert their confidence in creatively thinking
new models and questions that are sensitive to the racial histories, gender politics,
moral predicaments and political nuances of writing about Islanders.
We also acknowledge that the geographic place of Torres Strait has been and continues
to be constructed and reconstructed. Torres Strait is the waterway between Cape York
and southwestern New Guinea. Torres Strait is the imprecise area encompassing the
Papuan peoples living around the mouth of the Fly River across to the lower reaches of
the Papua New Guinean–Irian Jayan border, the Islander peoples of the Strait and the
Aboriginal peoples of the northernmost parts of Cape York. Torres Strait is recent
Australian territory. Torres Strait is a submerged shelf holding clues to the migrations
of the ancestors of contemporary Indigenous inhabitants of Australia and Papua New
Guinea. Torres Strait is the social and cultural homeland of the 27,000 mainland
Australian Islanders, many of whom have yet to visit the region. Likewise we are aware
that there are many Torres Strait Islander identities, as many Islanders acknowledge
their Pacific Islander, Japanese, Indian, Scottish, English, African-American, Papuan,
Aboriginal, and other ethnic heritages. Others understand themselves to be resolutely
Indigenous to the region while others distinguish themselves by their birth and
residency on the Australian mainland. As the two Indigenous languages of the region,
Kala Lagaw Ya and Meriam Mir, roughly coincide with speakers born in the western
and eastern regions of the Strait, and these languages contain their own dialectical
differences, identifications between place and language are often highlighted. All
Islanders though are linguistically united through their use of Kriol, the lingua franca
of the region. Reflecting this linguistic diversity, authors have, in a few instances used
different spellings for similar terms throughout this book. In a different vein affiliation
to Anglican, Pentecostal, Catholic or Bahai denominations are also important markers
of religious identity.
We stress that these writings are partial, in the sense that they reflect our interests and
concerns, and in doing so we do not claim to define or comprehensively cover the range
of what it is possible to say about Torres Strait Islanders. Even so, we think this book
will make it impossible to ignore how a section of Indigenous Australia has dealt with
the complex and subtle interrelationships between unequal distributions of power,
identity, culture, migration, government and historical contingency. Undoubtedly, each
paper is site and subject specific; however, there is salutary purpose in the way each
contribution bears some relationship to passionately serious debates currently taking
viii
place in Australia about the relationship between settlers, or invaders as they are called
by some, and the Indigenous inhabitants. With this book we mean to raise issues
concerning Islanders that will form part of that turbulent sea of arguments about the
place of Indigenous people in an Australia that is still profoundly uncertain of its
relationship to, and recognition of, its Indigenous peoples.
As editor I would like to thank all of the contributors for their persistence, hard work
and cooperation in writing and revising their essays. Most recently, careful readings by
Ann Jackson-Nakano were helpful in assisting papers to their conclusion. At the
Aboriginal Studies Press, Sandra Phillips and Rhonda Black provided perceptive
editorial guidance. Rachel Ippoliti has a remarkable eye for design and layout. Within
AIATSIS Geoff Gray was instrumental in devising the seminar series that led to the
book’s genesis while Stephen Wild and George Boeck began the process of asking
authors to address issues that I later developed into section themes. I am indebted to
Luke Taylor for constant reassurances and Russell Taylor for advocating a rich visual
presence in the book. My thanks to AIATSIS for providing a stipend and desk from
which to dedicate myself to editing this book.
Richard Davis
Canberra
ix
Contributors
Bill Arthur is presently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy
Research at the Australian National University in Canberra. He has carried out
extensive research, principally socioeconomic, with Torres Strait Islanders in Torres
Strait and on the mainland of Australia.
Ephraim Bani often described himself as a Torres Strait Islander Cultural Ambassador.
For 30 years he interpreted Islander culture to many within the Torres Strait region and
beyond through his columns in the Torres News and broadcasting of the weekly
Warapau UU segment on Radio 4MW. He specialised in linguistics, on which he
published widely, and was the main focus of Frances Calvert’s acclaimed movie Cracks
in the Mask. Ephraim’s cross-cultural work extended to founding the Torres Strait
Cultural Festival and facilitating much archaeological, anthropological and linguistic
research into the region. Between 1974 and 1979 he was a member of the AIATSIS
Council.
Anthony J. Barham is a geoarchaeologist and Quaternary sedimentologist, who first
worked in Torres Strait in 1980. His long standing research interests is in stratigraphic
analysis and interpretation, and especially the contextualisation of archaeological sites
in terms of Quaternary landscape histories and past environments. Formerly lecturer in
Geoarchaeology at University College, London, he has published widely both on the
prehistory and archaeology of Torres Strait, and on the geoarchaeology of sites in
Europe and Central Asia. He is now based in Canberra, where he works as a consultant
geoarchaeologist and is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology
and Natural History, RSPAS, at the Australian National University.
Jeremy Beckett has been working in Torres Strait since 1958, and has written on various
aspects of its history and culture, including his book, Torres Strait Islanders: Custom
and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 1988). He was expert witness in
the Queensland Supreme Court hearings of the Mabo case. He taught anthropology at
the University of Sydney, and at the City University of New York and the University of
Texas at Austin. He retired in 1994, but continues to be active in writing, editing and
occasional consultancy.
Douglas Bird is a Research Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the Climate
Change Institute at the University of Maine, USA. His research specialty is in human
behavioral ecology with a focus on factors that influence variability in subsistence
strategies. He has spent many years in eastern Torres Strait, working in collaborat- ion
with the Meriam community to investigate marine resource use and its archaeological
expression.
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