Growling at the sea
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 21: Hidden Queensland
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Brett Caldwell
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Brett Caldwell's biography and other articles by this writer
Ailanman never growl the sea or anything. Not say anything bad about the sea
when you are on it. Because the sea we treat like a polite thing ...
– Flo Kennedy
In the early 1990s, I spent three years living and working in the Torres Strait. The Army had commissioned me to recruit and lead men and women living in the region to serve in the Australian Army as reconnaissance soldiers. The Islanders' nickname for the unit is ‘Sarpeye'. In English, the word means ‘sharp-eye'.
I lived on Thursday Island with my wife and infant daughter. I travelled extensively through the region: by dinghy, Sharkcat and sometimes aboard an Army Blackhawk helicopter or Navy patrol boat. I tried to merge with the place. I kayaked across the Strait, patrolled on horseback throughout Cape York, visited hundreds of islands and points of strategic interest, and worked with every Islander community. I was young and driven by ego and ambition. I was also possessed of a sense of duty akin to missionary zeal. The experience left an indelible mark on me. I have written this piece in recognition of the Indigenous people of that place.
I am sitting at my office desk staring through tinted windows at Sydney's labyrinth of office towers, thrusting and shoving upwards towards the mottled, greying skies. The smog blanketing the city makes everything look mean and selfish. I am eating a mango. I roll it vigorously between my hands until the pulp is soft and then bite a small hole in one end. I suck out the cold, sweet juice and mouthfuls of stringy flesh. I learnt to eat mangos this way when I lived in the Torres Strait. The smell of the fruit is strong and mingles with my recollections. The cityscape evaporates as my mind floods with sacred memories.
I am wearing garb of mottled green
And boots of salt-stained leather,
I see the palms, the reef, the bush
And feel the untamed weather.
I recall the dark skinned soldiers strong
A parade of timeless faces.
The West, the East, the North and Central isles
The pride of Island races.
I can smell salt-laden ocean air, the parched dry season and the smoke from a dozen bushfires that burn unchecked on Muralag. The fires burn for weeks but are too lazy to cause much damage as they stroll about the island like bored tourists ... until the rains come. I smell the wet season, exploding in lightning, thunder and a torrential downpour. New life erupts, growing into a tangled green mass, hiding the ravages of the dry. I smell wet, sweating jungle, fragrant frangipani and pungent pawpaw. I smell the stench of my stale, salt-water sodden camouflage uniform. I draw in a deep breath and savour the rancid stink of rich, rotting mangrove mud.
Islanders first arrived in the Torres Strait more than two thousand years ago, around the time Socrates was walking barefoot through the streets of Athens. I arrived in late 1989, from Melbourne; from trams, tennis courts and cold winters to Thursday Island, the epicentre of the Torres Strait and probably one of Australia's few remaining frontier towns. Thursday Island's historical zenith as the epicentre of the pearling industry has long gone, but the island's untamed past is patent. An anonymous poet writes:
Up in regions equatorial
Blessed with scenery piscatorial
Is an island known to fame.
Pearlers live and pearling thrives there,
Island races live in hives there,
White men only risk their lives there.
Thursday Island is its name.
THURSDAY ISLAND HAS has witnessed the evolution of Islander culture as it emerged from the ravages of invasion and 200 years of exploitation. Most Australians know the Torres Strait as the home of Eddie Mabo. Some may have read Ion Idriess's Drums of Mer (1933) or Head Hunters of the Coral Sea (1940). Those who have sought a deeper understanding of the Islander culture may have read Nonie Sharp's work Stars of Tagai (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993). Many Australians have heard the ‘Deadly Sounds' of Christine Anu singing My Island Home or the Mills Sisters' harmonic version of T.I. Blues. Recently, the television series Remote Island Nurse gained popular appeal. Nearly all of us recognise the Torres Strait Islander flag, but most Australians have, at best, an incoherent understanding of the culture and people bound by history to that place – these things remain camouflaged and hidden.
The numerous wrecks that litter the Torres Strait's shallow waters are testament to its treachery: indifferent and irrepressible. During the wet season, heavy rain and sea mist often limit visibility, making navigation difficult. At this meeting place of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the tidal streams are fierce. Matthew Flinders, arguably one of the greatest navigators and seaman of his age, noted: ‘Perhaps no space of 31⁄2 degrees in length represents more dangers than the Torres Strait.' Yet it is here, in this harsh place, that the ‘saltwater people' make their home. It is a place worth knowing.
The Strait is named after a Spanish sailor, Lui Vaez De Torres, who commanded the San Pedro and Los Tres Reyes, high-prow ships that lurched their way across the Pacific from Peru, reaching for their Spanish home before wind and curiosity pushed them into the Strait's maze of reefs and confusing currents. But the first European to see the Strait was probably William Janzoon, a Dutch explorer who tentatively probed the region from the west a few weeks before Torres, who took a month to cross the Strait from the north-east. Torres took away more than memories and drawings. In the Central Islands, his crew abducted several women and killed two men. Not long after her abduction, one of the Islander women gave birth to a child. The captives' eventual fate is not known.
Torres and his crew were probably the first Europeans to traverse the narrow, shallow waters of the Strait. What did the Islander people make of the salt-blackened vessels and the white men, ‘Lamars' or ‘Markai', spirits of the dead, who stood on timber decks, their sails and pantaloons billowing? Did Torres and his men smell the smoke from a thousand cooking fires? The details of Torres' journey through the Strait were lost for nearly 150 years. Then the British serendipitously learned of the Strait in 1762, when they captured Manilla from Spain and found Torres' charts in an archive.
On August 22, 1770, James Cook sailed through Endeavour Passage and into the Strait. On Albany Island, Cook saw Islanders for the first time; men armed with bows and wearing breastplates made from pearl shell. On Tuin Island, Cook took possession of the east coast of Australia on behalf of England, a potently symbolic act with tragic consequences for Australia's Indigenous people. Two hundred years later, the Mabo victory enabled lawmakers to recognise the connection of the Islanders to their land and sea.
There are almost two hundred Islander myths and legends, and nearly all of them involve the sea and fishing. Such was the Strait's bounty that the Islanders had time to grow crops, build large canoes capable of carrying dozens of passengers, design and make a variety of weapons, carve the images of their totems in stone and traverse the oceans and seas on wauri trading voyages. These voyages were an important, if not vital, component of Islander life. They sought to exchange goods and established reciprocal bonds with people throughout the Strait, Cape York and Papua. The saltwater people developed a repertoire of stories, songs and dances about these trading journeys. They honoured those who could hunt turtle, dugong and men. Armed with shark-tooth swords, bows and wicked looking gaba-gaba, the warriors frequently sailed from their home island with serious and violent intent. Around their necks hung an upi, the bamboo headhunting knife. Decorated with chest ornaments, armbands and spectacular headdress, these men would have looked proud and terrifying; however, they couldn't stop the inevitable European invasion or the impact of musket bullets, grapeshot and disease.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, thousands of fortune-hunters flocked to the region from Europe, Malaya, Japan, the South Sea Islands and the mainland, drawn by the mesmeric lure of pearl shell, beche-de-mer and trochus. Single-minded greed motivated the expeditions. They harvested wealth and delivered cultural despair. But it was the men wearing the sacred garb who inflicted the cultural coup de grace.The saltwater people were, and generally remain, deeply spiritual. The ritualised worship of the deity Malo-Bomai, in existence for centuries, provided a lattice upon which Islander culture rested. On July 1, 1871, the vanguard of the London Missionary Society (LMS), led by the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane, arrived at Erub aboard the Sapphire. A small group of South Sea Islander followers from New Caledonia accompanied him. The missionaries arrived waving their bibles and preaching the notion of a Christian god and eternal salvation: ‘Bayu nagi ... let there be light.' It may have been a conscious act to go with the flow and to embrace rather than resist the cultural interlopers, but the saltwater people, bound to their islands and seas by the nature and the spirit of Zogo-god, received the missionaries enthusiastically. The LMS missionaries took hold of the Islands, often by harsh and cruel means. They banned warfare and broke the nexus between trade and reciprocity that had bound the island communities together for centuries. The frequency of wauri voyages declined and the powerful Islander bows were unstrung and hung as ornaments. Today, the ‘Coming of the Light' festival celebrates the arrival of the LMS.