The Torres Strait Islanders

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Between the northern tip of Cape York and the swampy coast of New Guinea the sea is shallow and crowded with islands — volcanic cones in the east, low sand cays and granite hills in the west, perhaps a hundred and thirty of them scattered across some hundred and fifty kilometers of strait, with reefs and sandbars showing at the low tide between. The water here is a road, not a barrier. For the people who have lived on these islands the strait is a country in its own right: a sea-country of named reefs and tidal passages and sailing routes, gardened on the islands and fished and hunted on the water, crossed in outrigger canoes that once ran the whole length of it in trade. They are the Torres Strait Islanders, and the first thing they will tell an outsider is what they are not.

They are not Aboriginal Australians. The point is made carefully, and it is true. The Islanders are a Melanesian people, sharing genetic and cultural inheritance with the people of New Guinea rather than with the nations of the Australian mainland — closer in their gardens and their masks and their seafaring to the world across the strait than to the deserts to the south. Australian usage has come to honor the distinction in its very grammar, never folding the two together but always naming them in the same breath and apart: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The conjunction is a courtesy and a fact at once. (The same insistence on a line that outsiders are tempted to erase runs through other neighbored peoples — the way the Ainu refuse to dissolve into the Yamato people of Japan.)

A sea-country between two worlds

The strait took its English name from Luís Vaz de Torres, the Spanish navigator who sailed through it in 1606; the people took no name from him and kept their own. They divide, by language and island, into communities the colonial record came to group as five clusters — eastern, central, western, top-western, and the islands near the mainland — and they speak, between them, two indigenous languages of entirely different stock. In the west and center the tongue is Kalaw Lagaw Ya, with its dialects, a language related to those of Aboriginal Australia. In the eastern islands — Mer, Erub, Ugar — the language is Meriam Mir, a Papuan tongue with no Australian kin at all. That a single small archipelago should hold two unrelated language families is itself a record of its position: the strait is the seam where the Aboriginal world and the Melanesian world meet and overlap, and the Islanders live along the seam.

What binds the communities across the language line is not a single tongue but a shared way of being in the sea-country: a body of inherited law and practice they call, in the creole that now carries it, Ailan Kastom — island custom. Ailan Kastom is the whole of it — the kinship that orders marriage and obligation, the rights to particular reefs and garden plots and fishing grounds, the dances and the songs, the funerary rites, the proper way to do everything that matters. It is descended through families and held by the communities, and it is the standing answer to the question of who one is and what one owes.

The custom rests on a sophisticated economy of the sea and the volcanic soil. On the high eastern islands the people gardened — yams, bananas, sugar cane, sweet potato — in plots cleared on the rich ground, and the gardens mattered enough that their planting was tied to the turning of the heavens. On the water they were among the great maritime hunters of the world, taking dugong and green turtle with harpoon from outrigger canoes, knowing the animals’ seasons and grounds, reading the wind and the tide. Turtle and dugong hunting are not, in the Islander telling, mere subsistence; they are the continuation of the Islander’s closeness to the sea, a practice that carries the identity along with the meat. The canoes that did the hunting also did the trading, carrying shell and feather and stone the length of the strait and across to New Guinea, so that the Islanders sat as middlemen in a network that ran far beyond their own waters.

A family group on the beach at Darnley Island (Erub), eastern Torres Strait, photographed in 1898. Queensland State Archives, item 5170, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain (Australia, photograph made before 1955).

The law written in the stars

Across the night sky of the strait stands a man in a canoe. His name is Tagai, and he is the great ancestral fisherman, and the whole turning calendar of the islands is read from where he stands.

The figure is real and exact. Tagai’s body and his canoe are the stars of Scorpius; in his left hand he holds a spear, which is the Southern Cross; in his right he holds a fruit — sorbi, the eugenia — which is the constellation the astronomers call Corvus. He stands in the canoe across the band of the Milky Way. The story of how he came to be there is a story of order broken and order restored: Tagai had a crew of twelve, the Zugubal, and on a long fishless, waterless voyage the crew gave way to their hunger and consumed the stores meant for all. For the breach of the law Tagai cast them out of the canoe, into the sea and up into the sky, where they remain in two groups of six — the cluster outsiders call the Pleiades, and the belt and sword of Orion. The discipline that founded the order of things is fixed overhead, and the crew that broke it hangs forever apart from the man they wronged.

That is the meaning of Tagai, but it is not the use of him. Tagai’s slow procession through the year is the islands’ calendar, and the calendar is the Law of when to do everything. When the Pleiades and Orion — the cast-out crew — climb back into the evening sky in mid-November, the season turns: the time has come to plant the gardens, and the dugong and turtle move to their mating grounds, and the hunting begins. When the Southern Cross, Tagai’s spear, dips low toward the horizon, the wet season is coming, the monsoon the Islanders call kuki, and the year is on its other foot. The same stars steer the canoes by night across open water. So the seasons of the garden and the seasons of the hunt and the bearings of the voyage are all one knowledge, and it is written in a single figure standing in the dark — the law of the year legible to anyone who can read a fisherman in the stars. The reading of the heavens for the order of life on earth is an art the Islanders share, in their own idiom, with diviners and sky-watchers across the world; here it is not divination of the hidden but the plain calendar of the visible, the year’s instructions posted in the only place high enough to be seen from every island at once.

Malo-Bomai, the cult of Mer

In the eastern islands, and above all on Mer — Murray Island, the high volcanic island that would later give its name to the most important judgment in Australian legal history — the order of the sea-country had its most powerful expression in a cult. Before the missionaries came, the central religious institution of Mer was the worship of Malo, also called Bomai: a religious fraternity, the early ethnographers wrote, essentially concerned with law and discipline. Malo was the law made sacred. To be inducted into the cult was to be made a man and to be bound to the order it kept.

Of the cult’s inner life little can or should be said, for it was secret-sacred — its full ceremonies known only to the initiated men, its songs and the meanings of its masks closed to the uninitiated and the outsider. What is publicly known is the shape of it: an elaborate male initiation, conducted over weeks at successive sacred places on the island, in which youths were brought by stages into the cult’s knowledge through ritual and dance. Its great objects were the masks — the Bomai mask above all, and a shark-form headdress — turtle-shell faces that carried the presence of the being. When the London Missionary Society arrived and the old worship gave way, the original masks were lost: destroyed or hidden or carried off. The mask of Bomai vanished. But the cult’s dances, alone among the ceremonial dances of Mer, survived the missionary era, and the Malo-Bomai dance is still performed — the body of the law outliving the secret of it. The details that remain closed remain closed here; a tradition that draws a line around its own knowledge has the right to have the line respected.

Map of Mer (Murray Island), the high volcanic island of the eastern Torres Strait, drawn by the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon. Via Wikimedia Commons; public domain (author died more than 70 years ago).

The coming of the light, and the man who counted

The written record of the Islanders, as of so many oral peoples, was made by outsiders, and the outsiders came in two waves that the Islanders themselves remember as a single turning. On 1 July 1871 a schooner named the Surprise carried two missionaries of the London Missionary Society — the Reverends Samuel Macfarlane and Archibald Wright Murray — to the island of Erub. The Islanders call that day the Coming of the Light, and they keep it still as a festival. Christianity took deep and lasting hold across the strait; but it did not erase Ailan Kastom so much as braid itself into it, so that the church and the island custom now stand together in most Islander lives. The coming of the light was also, for the old cults, a coming of the dark: it was the missionary zeal of these years that saw the masks of Malo-Bomai destroyed.

The second wave came with a scholar. In 1898 the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, led by Alfred Cort Haddon, settled for months in the islands, and on Mer Haddon — who had first come as a marine biologist and returned as one of the founders of British anthropology — persuaded the old initiated men to recreate the Malo-Bomai ceremony so that he could record it. He shot moving film of the dance: among the first field footage of any indigenous people anywhere on earth, made within a few years of the camera’s invention. He took wax-cylinder recordings of the songs, and he gathered some two thousand objects, convinced that what the missionaries had not already destroyed would soon be gone. The Haddon Collection at Cambridge became the most comprehensive holding of Torres Strait material in the world — a salvage made necessary by the very mission that had occasioned the loss, and a record the communities now draw on as their own.

For all the weight of these outside accounts, the name by which the strait is now known to the law of the whole of Australia belongs to an Islander. Eddie Koiki Mabo was born on Mer. He left the island as a young man, worked on the mainland, and came in time to a discovery that stopped him: he learned, in a conversation with historians, that the land his family had held on Mer for generations — land whose boundaries he could recite, whose ownership Ailan Kastom had never doubted — was held in Australian law to belong to the Crown, because the law deemed the continent to have been terra nullius, land of no one, when the British claimed it. The Meriam people had owned Mer time out of mind, and the law said they owned nothing.

On 20 May 1982 Mabo and four other Meriam — David Passi, Sam Passi, James Rice, and Celuia Mapo Sale — brought an action in the High Court of Australia claiming native title to the Murray Islands. The case ran for ten years. Eddie Mabo did not see its end: he died of cancer on 21 January 1992, five months before the judgment. On 3 June 1992, in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), six of the seven justices held that the doctrine of terra nullius had never been good in fact and would no longer be held good in law — that the Meriam people were entitled, as against the whole world, to the possession and enjoyment of the lands of Mer, and that a native title surviving from before the British claim existed in the common law of Australia. The judgment carries the name of a Torres Strait Islander from a small volcanic island in the east, and it remade the legal foundation of the entire continent. The following year the Native Title Act gave the principle a statute. The deep certainty of Ailan Kastom — that the land was held, and known, and owed — had become the law of the land that long denied it.

A living people

The Islanders are not a remnant. The 2021 census recorded more than eighty thousand people identifying as Torres Strait Islander across Australia, the large majority of them now living on the mainland, in the cities and the cane towns of Queensland and beyond, with a few thousand still on the islands themselves — thirty-eight of the archipelago’s islands inhabited. The diaspora carries the custom with it: the dance, the language, the Coming of the Light, the kinship that still places a person.

The strait keeps its own emblem. In 1992 — the year of the Mabo judgment — a young man named Bernard Namok won a competition to design a flag for the Islanders, and the flag he made is now flown across Australia beside the national one. Green bands for the land at top and bottom, a blue field for the sea between, black lines for the people; at the center, in white, a dhari — the feathered dancer’s headdress of the strait — and beneath it a five-pointed star, one point for each of the island groups, white for peace. The star is no idle ornament. For a people whose law was written by a fisherman standing in the constellations, who timed the planting and the hunt and the long canoe voyages by the wheeling of the sky, a star at the center of the flag is the oldest sign they have: the same heaven that told Tagai’s people when to plant now marks them out as one people to the world, five points of light gathered around a single star.

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