Torres Strait and Dawdhay: Dimensions of Self and Otherness on Yam Island1

When Papua New Guinea attained independence two decades ago an absolute distinction was created between Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait: Papuans were firmly placed in Papua New Guinea territory and Torres Strait Islanders in Australian territory. In constituting themselves as Torres Strait Islanders and more specifically as Australians, Yam Island people's contemporary expressions of their connection to, yet distance from, lowland Papua New Guinea can be best described as ambivalent, pulsing between identification and incorporation, distance and disavowal. I argue that this ambivalence is not an artefact of the establishment of the border per se, but rather it was through the establishment of the border that a new layer was added to Self and Other constructions by Yam Island people in terms of how they see themselves and their Papuan neighbours. The sometimes fraught nature of this relationship can be understood in light of the continuing socio‐political impacts of these international border lines on people who have recently combined a somewhat legalistic and political definition of themselves, and of Papuans, with perennial extra‐legal definitions. I suggest it is in isolating and exploring domains of interaction that we can see the fluidity and dynamism of Self and Other definitions in operation, and in so doing better appreciate their essential imbrication.     

Making Tuba in the Torres Strait Islands:

There is relatively scant evidence of the Indigenous production and consumption of intoxicating drinks on the Australian mainland prior to the arrival of outsiders. Although Australian Aboriginal peoples had mastered fermentation in some regions, the Indigenous manufacture of much stronger drinks by distillation was unknown on the Australian mainland. However, following contact with Pacific Island and Southeast Asian peoples in the 19th century, Islanders in the Torres Strait adopted techniques for fermenting and distilling what became a quasi-indigenous alcoholic drink known as tuba. This paper discusses the historical process of the diffusion of this substance as a result of labour migration and internationalisation in the Strait, and provides present-day accounts of tuba production from Torres Strait Islanders.     

The trade of our ancestors: Papuan participation in the early Torres Strait Marine industry ∗

Abstract

Papuans on the New Guinea mainland along the northern coast of the Torres Strait became extensively involved in the commercial harvest of pearl‐shell and other marine products soon after the fishing industry began in the Strait during the 1860s. Papuan communities successfully integrated this new economic activity into their traditional lifestyle, and a stint working aboard one of the luggers attached to the Thursday Island fleet became almost a rite of passage for young men. Yet working conditions on these vessels were harsh and the wages offered indentured labourers were low. Despite remedial measures taken by the colonial government many Papuan crewmen fell victim to disease. Villagers quickly recognised the advantages of working as independent commercial harvesters and took pride in their ability to adopt European fishing techniques. Today, these Papuan communities regard the involvement of their ancestors in the early marine industry as a vital part of their cultural heritage.     

Manuscript XXXIIThe Final Fate of the La Pérouse Expedition?The 1818 Account of Shaik Jumaul,A Lascar Castaway in Torres Strait

The final fate of the La Pérouse expedition is a mystery. In 1788 the frigates L’Astrolabe and La Boussole were wrecked on Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. According to Vanikoro oral history, the survivors then left, approximately six months later, in a boat which they had built. They were never seen again. This paper reports the rediscovery of an 1818 Indian newspaper article, detailing the rescue in Torres Strait of a lascar named Shaik Jumaul, a castaway for four years on Murray Island (Mer). While on Mer he saw weapons and instruments that seemed not of English manufacture. The Murray Islanders informed him that these came from the crew of a vessel wrecked nearby some three decades earlier. No European ship is known to have been lost in Torres Strait in that period. Shaik Jumaul’s account points to the possibility that the La Pérouse expedition ended finally in northern Australia.     

Ritual Mutilation of Europeans on the Torres Strait Maritime Frontier

Passage through the Torres Strait during the late 18th and early 19th centuries was a dangerous exercise for European mariners. Apart from a maze of largely unmapped reefs, mariners had to negotiate passage through waters inhabited by resident Indigenous communities who had acquired a reputation for brutal attacks and cruel treatment of castaways. This paper explores circumstances behind the murder and mutilation of crew and passengers by Torres Strait Islanders from five ships attempting to transit the Strait – Shaw Hormuzear/Chesterfield (1793), Charles Eaton (1834), Thomas Lord (1846), and Sperwer (1869). Using anthropological recordings from the late 19th century, these mutilations are recast as acts of ritual processing explicable with reference to Torres Strait Islander ontology. The circumstances that coalesced to precipitate these mutilations were complex and rare and ultimately unrepresentative of the majority of frontier interactions between European mariners and Torres Strait Islanders, which were generally friendly and mutually beneficial.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

REVIEWS

The Torres Strait Islanders. Department of Economics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. 1974. $A15.00 a complete set; $3.00 a single volume.     

Making tuba in the Torres Strait Islands: the cultural diffusion and geographic mobility of an alcoholic drink

There is relatively scant evidence of the Indigenous production and consumption of intoxicating drinks on the Australian mainland prior to the arrival of outsiders. Although Australian Aboriginal peoples had mastered fermentation in some regions, the Indigenous manufacture of much stronger drinks by distillation was unknown on the Australian mainland. However, following contact with Pacific Island and Southeast Asian peoples in the 19th century, Islanders in the Torres Strait adopted techniques for fermenting and distilling what became a quasi-indigenous alcoholic drink known as tuba. This paper discusses the historical process of the diffusion of this substance as a result of labour migration and internationalisation in the Strait, and provides present-day accounts of tuba production from Torres Strait Islanders.     

Wangga: The Linguistic and Typological Evidence for the Sources of the Outrigger Canoes of Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula

How an isolate distribution of the Austronesian outrigger canoe complex came into the possession of Pama‐Nyungan speakers of Cape York Peninsula and Torres Strait has long been obscured by the diverse typology and lexicons of these canoes. Here I pinpoint links between the typological variation and the distribution and ages of associated Austronesian loan words. These links implicate several Austronesian contact sequences, one in Torres Strait and another in southeast Cape York Peninsula, and point to speakers of Papuan Tip Oceanic languages as the main source. Some of these loan words reflect archaic forms of Papuan Tip words and are thus indicative of early contact dates. I suggest that the introduction of these canoes most likely involved past episodes of sustained trade engagement and/or small‐scale colonization by speakers of Austronesian languages.     

Mare Nullius: Indigenous Rights in Saltwater Environments

This article uses two case studies to illustrate the subjection of indigenous peoples’ marine territories to a ‘double jeopardy’ of exclusion — jurisdictional and proprietary — through the legal and administrative practices of European ‘settler’ states in Australia and Canada. While the fiction of terra nullius as a legal rationale for refuting indigenous rights of property and governance has steadily eroded in recent decades, its counterpart mare nullius has proven, so far, more resistant. The authors examine how state conceptions of jurisdiction, property and boundary‐making in coastal areas accomplish the distortion and fragmentation of the coastal and marine spaces of Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland, Australia, and of the Cree and Inuit peoples of James and Hudson Bays in northern Que´bec, Canada. Assumptions of land–sea continuity underlie these peoples’ cultural constructions of coastal and marine environments. In examining the progress that each has made in reasserting ownership and control of coast and sea, it seems that recognition and reinforcement of their institutions for managing marine spaces and resources offer the best prospect for reconnecting fractured jurisdictional domains, and for bringing about social equity, environmental protection, and self‐determined regional development.     

Past and present marine mammal hunting rates and abundances: dugong (Dugong dugon) evidence from Dabangai Bone Mound,Torres Strait

Dugongs (Dugong dugon) are a key food item and a totemic animal with major spiritual significance for Torres Strait Islanders of northeastern Australia. These marine mammals are officially classed vulnerable to extinction which has placed hunters under considerable internal (cultural) and external (bureaucratic) pressure to lower hunting rates dramatically to sustainable levels. But did Torres Strait Islanders hunt dugongs at much lower rates in the pre-colonial past? Excavation of a ritual dugong bone mound on Mabuyag island revealed the remains of 10,000–11,000 dugongs hunted between c. 1600 and c. 1900AD. The translated hunting rate of 33–37 dugongs per year is surprisingly high and challenging as this single site represents one-third of what conservation biologists argue is the current mean sustainable hunting rate for the entire Torres Strait archipelago. These data suggest that dugong abundance was much higher in the pre-colonial past and that current hunting rates are uncharacteristically unsustainable primarily due to an unprecedented dugong population crash and not increased post-contact hunting rates.     

Whatever Happened in Torres Strait?: Interpreting the Anglican split of 1998

Recent movements within world Anglicanism towards a more democratic representation of the church are in contrast to Torres Strait Islanders' assertion of their own male-led conservative and hierarchical body. These characteristics have marked Torres Strait Island Anglicanism for many years. On the surface, the various strands leading to a conflict over a choice of leader in 1997 focused upon discordant relationships and faulty decision-making procedures, especially the surrender of the diocese of Carpentaria to the adjacent diocese of North Queensland and a subsequent choice of a bishop where Torres Strait clergy claimed that the terms of the surrender had been dishonoured. Yet below the surface, the cleavage between Island and European leadership was also a sign of the ideological shift which was occurring in the Anglican Church of Australia. Supported by European elements within that church opposed to the ordination of women, Islander clergy charged that the mainland body was deserting the faith and order of the 'church of the fathers'. With the Islanders newly empowered, as they perceived it, by the Mabo judgement of the High Court of Australia in 1992, their perception appears to have been that, in spirit, the mainland church denied what the High Court's decision recognised: the ultimate control by Islanders over their own affairs.     

Ritualized Middening Practices

Practice theory focuses attention on agency and the generative dimensions of sites and material culture in terms of social formation and reproduction. This approach is applied to the ritualization of midden deposits by Torres Strait Islanders of northeast Australia. Ritualization of middens was achieved by three depositional strategies of privileged differentiation: referencing of mortuary remains, discrimination of animal bones and mounding of deposits. In addition, ritualized middens were spatially separated into small residential mounds and large communal feasting mounds. Ritualized middening was part of a broader social process of maintaining the biographical status of midden materials as a dimension of community socialization, identify and cohesion.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

THE INDONESIANIZATION OF WEST PAPUA

Even before the Republic of Indonesia gained control over the territory of West New Guinea (with the controversial U.N.-supervised Act of Free Choice of 1969), the government had systematically tried to forge new identities for the indigenous peoples, as Indonesians rather than Melanesians. This acculturation process has aimed at incorporating the West Papuan population into the Indonesian nation-state through the education system, the media, economic development and transmigration. The process, ‘Indonesianization’, is predicated on the assumption that inculcation of the Indonesian world-view through contact with what are considered ‘more advanced’ and ‘civilized’ Javanese, will ultimately strengthen national unity and allow greater exploitation of the rich resources in the region. The influx of Asian newcomers, many of whom have taken over the administrative, commercial and industrial spheres in West Papua, has marginalized urban and rural Papuans from economic development. In consequence West Papuans are developing a sense of their own racial and cultural distinctiveness and asserting their rights to greater participation in decision-making and self-determination.     

‘Naturally Fearful’: Emotion,Race and French–Papuan Encounters, 1818–30

This paper traces perceptions of Papuan ‘fearfulness’ in the records of the Freycinet, Duperrey and Dumont d’Urville expeditions. These French scientific expeditions explored Oceania during the period of the Bourbon Restoration in France and stopped at Waigeo Island and Teluk Doreri in West Papua. The paper aims to elucidate not only the nature and significance of perceptions of fearfulness in the Papuan encounters, but also the Indigenous agency, French cultural assumptions and evolving ethnographic practices that complicated and were papered over by emergent ‘racial’ classifications. Despite their acknowledgement of diversity and their increasing familiarity with their hosts, the voyagers presented fearfulness as the Papuans’ most characteristic trait. A hardening of this claim in the published accounts may be attributed partly to the development of a racial classification and distancing from the emotional intensity and complexity of contact, but that in itself leaves unclear what role fearfulness actually played in the encounters.     

Local Intermediaries? The Missionising and Governing of Colonial Subjects in South Dutch New Guinea, 1920–42

This paper will show that the colonial project in south Dutch New Guinea was a joint project in which evangelisation, education, ‘civilisation’ and ‘pacification’ were taken up by the Dutch Catholic mission in close collusion with the colonial government. This was also a project in which a few Dutch missionaries deployed many goeroes (teachers) from elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies. These goeroes had an important position assigned to them by the Catholic mission and colonial government in the development of the Papuans and the area. This colonial structure utilised by both Dutch colonial administrators and missionaries has been labelled in the literature as a system of ‘dual colonialism’. Drawing on records held in missionary and colonial archives, the paper explores this dual colonial structure by analysing the roles of Catholic goeroes from the Kei and Tanimbar islands. This is done by taking Felix Driver’s concept of local intermediaries as the point of departure. While this concept makes visible the key role of goeroes, it is not without its issues, which will also be explored.     

Date,Rituals and Socio‐Cultural Identity in the North‐Western Roman Provinces

This article explores issues of socio‐cultural identity in the north‐western Roman provinces, using all the available archaeobotanical evidence of date (Phoenix dactylifera L.). This fruit does not conform to the general social distribution pattern of other Roman exotic food plant imports in this area, but instead indicates a strong ceremonial connection. Through an in‐depth contextual approach the role of date in both domestic and ceremonial sites is investigated to reach beyond the simple ‘date‐Roman‐ritual’ association. The results suggest strong temporal, spatial and contextual patterning and an overall rare occurrence and selective use of the fruit in certain rituals and mystic cults. Date may have been employed not necessarily as a food, and was probably an affordable luxury for some in their ritual pursuits. As such, date can now be regarded as part of specific ceremonial expressions rather than a standard ingredient of a normative ceremonial or ‘Roman’ identity.     

Reshaping governance in Torres Strait: The Torres Strait regional authority and beyond

Getano Lui (Jnr) suggested in his 1993 Boyer Lecture that it was time to ‘build a new framework’ for the Torres Strait and that this might be negotiated in time for the centenary of the Australian Constitution in 2001. This paper examines possibilities for reshaping governance in Torres Strait, particularly the idea of Torres Strait regional government. It does so in the light of the history of settlement and contemporary population characteristics in the Strait and also the history and development of local and regional structures of political representation. It pays particular attention to events leading up to the establishment in July 1994 of the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TRSA) within the Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ASTIC). Under the labels of other authorities, the marine environment, constituency and confederal representation, it also examines some key issues which are likely to arise in attempts to move beyond the present structures towards fuller regional government. Some consequences of one possible and likely approach to the constituency issue are explored and a brief concluding comment is made about the relationship between these developments in Torres Strait and interpretations of Australian federalism.     

‘WORLDS AT WAR WITH THEMSELVES‘: NOTIONS OF THE ANTISOCIETY IN ANGANEN CEREMONIAL EXCHANGE

Exchange is the central arena for the articulation of the social structure of the Anganen, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. Despite a vast array of potential occasions, there are two main categories of exchange, ‘mundane’ and ‘extraordinary’ (or ‘ceremonial’). These contrast strongly in incidence, the items used, structural logic and many other ways, each giving rise to a particular ‘vision’ of society. Mundane exchange is dominated by exchanges in lieu of individuals (at marriage, death etc.) and warfare related prestations. These are the most frequent exchanges in Anganen and lie at the heart of the process of social reproduction. By contrast, ceremonial exchange, yasolu, is rarely undertaken and is largely peripheral to this process. Ceremonial exchange can be seen as a response to some of the inherent deficiencies of mundane exchange. However, as is noted in approaches which posit a ‘dual nature’ to society, the extraordinary mode of ‘anti-society’ lacks sufficient functionality to permit social reproduction. This article explores the differences between the structures of these two exchange domains and the consequences this has for meaning (concepts of time, kinship and politics, the role of women, symbolism and so on).