Torres Strait islander savagery ceased with British civilization

Torres Strait islanders are people who graduated from inter island warfare and savagery to British civilization in little more than half a century.

Travelling through the Torres Strait throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries was a dangerous passage for European seafarers. Apart from a maze of largely not surveyed reefs, mariners had to negotiate passage through waters inhabited by local islander tribes who had gotten a reputation for cruel and brutal attacks on castaways….  the seafaring local islanders would perform ceremonial dances carrying the heads of adults from castaway rafts suspended from a pole in a ‘ritual mutilation’ of outsiders.

The Torres Strait islands were archaeologically unexplored until the twentieth century when initial field investigations started in the 1970’s. The Torres Strait Islanders had no racial kinship of any kind with the Australian mainland local natives and were never ‘settled’ by outside Empires. The Torres Strait Island flag was adopted by the nation of Torres Strait Islander peoples in May 1992.

The islanders were people who graduated from inter island warfare and savagery to British civilisation in little more than half a century. These people were not considered as nomadic hunter-gatherers like the mainland local natives. Rather, seafarers who lived on small islands in huts grouped in villages. 

Between 1890 to 1980 many outsiders markedly from Samoa, Niue, Rotuma, Lifou, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Jamaica and Spain made the Torres Strait their home.

In 1963 the completely self-supporting Torres Strait Islanders were engaged in large-scale pearl shelling, trochus gathering, and boat building. Their marine products were managed by the Island Industries Board, a giant co-operative which operated stores on seventeen islands and one mainland community. No work which could be performed by an islander was done by foreign labour. 

The history of the Torres Strait Islanders before the coming of the whitefella has come along to us through oral telling of tradition and folk lore, song, and dance. Prior to whitefella arrival all history is unwritten and tells of a seafaring, barbaric, ritual driven way of life. From the arrival of the whitefella the islanders came on the road to enlightenment with a happier and richer lifestyle. 

Head-hunting is the practice of hunting a human and collecting the severed head after killing the person. Head-hunting raids and accumulating skulls were a highly visible and a ritualised display of status throughout the Torres Strait islands. Shipwrecked castaways knocked on heaven’s door as they rarely survived brutal attacks. 

The Torres Strait Islanders had held that the whitefella, who sailed through the Strait waters in imposing ships, were lamars, that is ghost people who for evermore sailed the shoreless seas of Eternity. Raiding war canoes carrying formidable warriors thirsting for the blood and heads of the lamars would paddle out from the shore. The lamars had to be killed again because the islanders were scared that death and disaster to all the people of the islands would follow the lamars arrival. The islanders believed in the transmigration of souls, and that upon death the islander would be transformed into a whitefella and therefore passed the second and final period of his existence. The human heads of their massacred enemies were shrunk and kept as trophies of their raids and conquests.  

In the 1960’s it was claimed that the islanders could be roughly divided into a number of ethnic groups, divergent in some respects, alike in others. There was considerable variation among these ethnicity in language, customs, and physique.  

The men of Murray Island and the Darnley Islanders were described as tall, athletic types of fine physique, many of them with handsome features. The Murray Islanders, in particular, were considered proud, independent, physically, and mentally superior to the average among the islanders in the other groups. They regarded other islanders, as well as the mainland natives, with contempt, arrogantly conscious of their perceived racial superiority and of a warrior ancestry that stretched back into the shadowy past.  

The genealogy of the Murray Islander is said to be dominant throughout the islands. Even though their origin has never been clearly verified, it has been accepted that their ancestors migrated to the islands around 2,800 years ago. The first settlers, whenever that was, are said to be Papuo-Austronesians (people from Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar) who brought pot making with them.  

The Torres Strait is the region of Australia’s northern-most frontier, a broad stretch of shallow water around 150 kilometres wide at its narrowest point from Cape York Peninsula to Papua New Guinea. The strait extends some 200 to 300 kilometres between the Arafura Sea on the west and the Coral Sea on the east. The watery realm includes about 3% land, 6% tidally inundated reef flats, and 91% treacherous and turbulent open seas. The outer islands have limited water supplies, and highly dependent on annual rainfall and underground stores. 

The 48,000 square kilometres of treacherous and turbulent water that laps New Guinea shores to the north and Cape York Peninsula shores to the south is home to more than 300 small islands many coral reefs, cays, sandbanks, and large seagrass meadows. A total land area of 566 square kilometres.  

The Torres Strait islands have a tropical climate with a systematic wet and dry season. 

Prince of Wales Island is the largest Torres Strait island being 205 square kilometres in area. Rugged, steep rising to 232 metres, thickly wooded, with fertile soil unsuitable for growing crops. The island has no permanent sources of fresh water. Most of the land on the island has been returned to a group of native people. In 2001 the island had a population of 20 people. In 2016, 109 people were living on the island.  

Covered in dense vegetation with fertile soil Murry Island is just north of the Great Barrier Reef. A basaltic island of volcano origin it is the most easterly inhabited island of the Torres Strait islands archipelago. Murray Island rises steeply from the shoreline to a crater rim on the western end of the island. A ribbon village of huts follows a narrow sand strip on the northern side foreshore of the island.  

The vegetative landscape of Murray Island is dominated by grassland areas on the western side and vine forests on the eastern side.  

In 2015 there were more than 20 registered Native Body Corporates in the Torres Strait islands. In 2016, 17 islands were reported to be inhabited by around 4,500 people. 42,000 Torres Straight islanders reside outside the island region, mostly in mainland Queensland.  

The economy of the Torres Strait islands today is heavily reliant on Australian government-funded programs, employment in government agencies, transport and shipping, niche commercial fisheries and local businesses.  

More than 25 Australian government agencies and departments are represented in the Torres Strait because of its unique political features, and strategic location for defence, surveillance, and monitoring. These agencies are primarily based on Thursday Island, the Australian administrative centre for the region. 

In 1912 the Torres Strait Islands, including Murray Island became permanent Aboriginal Reserves for the use of the islander natives and an Island Fund was set up to administer them.  

The Torres Strait Islanders at first did not consider the Australian land rights movement had any significance to them as they never pondered or held concern that individuals had no legal title to the island land and that the crown or the public owned the islands not individuals.  

Unlike the Australian local natives and the other Torres Strait Islanders the modern Murray Islanders via oral storytelling claim themselves to be traditional horticulturalists who held hemmed in plots of land individually or as extended families. There is no fixed evidence that categorically proves this occurred prior to arrival of the British missionaries and at the time of the Mabo claim there had been a decline in gardening and the absence of a part of the population had allowed much of the land to become overgrown making the finding of boundaries difficult encouraging guesswork.  

Boundary markers comprised of natural features- trees, rocks, stones, or shells. Boundaries could be imaginary lines linking these markers. Apart from local islanders’ knowledge, there is pretty much no recorded data on Murray Island formulation of its past garden plot history.  

Before Mabo, the long-term local stayers believed the emigrants had forfeited their claim to any island gardens and they were fearful that the emigrants if given personal ownership would sell their community land to non-islanders.   

The historic Mabo decision on 3 June 1992 led to the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth) entering the Australian legal system. A legislation brought about by the desire of a few individuals to inherit land that belonged to many for individual personal gain and wealth. Prime Minister at the time, Paul Keating, knew how to run the parliamentary system. He was noticeably clear, in his opinion, the Native Title act was payback for the massive shocking injustice of disposition, the original colonial sin against First Nations peoples via invasion by the British in 1788. “To give aboriginals land we never had the right to give.”  

It is noted that Paul Keating has never publicly offered to or has handed back his personal land titles to First Nations people because his land title was on disposed land. Which according to his argument is land he never had the right to own. His actions say he is one who has entered and remains on the real property of another wrongfully or without the First Nations people’s authority or consent. 

Via payback a few have gained a step onto the ladder of land inheritance that rightly belonged to many others. An opportunity filled with the potential of material growth.  

The High Court’s social conscience Mabo ‘white guilt industry’ decision of six judges is questionable on many levels and the consequences like the unwatched pot continue to boil over. 

In the decision of the Supreme Court of Queensland in the Ngurampaa v Balonne Shire & Anor [2014] QSC 146 known as the Euahlayi Rates Dispute case, Justice Philippedes in her judgment said that Mabo established that:  

“At the time of acquisition of Australia sovereignty, international law recognised acquisition of sovereignty not only by contest, cession, and occupation terra nullius, but also by the settlement of inhabited lands whether that process of ‘settlement’ involved negotiations with and or hostilities against the native inhabitants. The High Court recognised this last-mentioned method of the acquisition of sovereignty as applicable in the case of sovereignty.”  

Eddie Mabo is credited by his family members as being the single person who changed the whole history of the young Australian nation. Eddie Mabo did not have the power to change the law of the land. But seven High Court Judges did. On 3 June 1992, six of the seven High Court judges upheld the Mabo claim and ruled that the lands of this continent were not terra nullius.

High Court judges can make grave errors that not only need courage to reverse but also require a strong political will to correct the injustice of their flawed decision.

Historical scholars have handled claims of possession that were regularly focussed on a series of assorted legal rationales – like those of discovery, improvement, and settlement – as though they were all slices of a solitary legal doctrine that they referred to as terra nullius.

In the late 18th century there was neither a doctrine bearing the name terra nullis, nor is there any historical record of it being used in any systematic fashion until the mid 19th century. ‘terra nullius‘ is derived by a likeness to res nullius a Roman Law doctrine. There is no reliable historical evidence to suggest that the British government was influenced by, or invoked, either res nullius or occupation as it began to colonise New South Wales.

Australia a nation with a human population at the time of 17,379,000 people. Included in the count were 265,459 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders ‘people’ represented 1.53% of the total population of Australia.  

The entire population of Australia is how many people have been affected by the Mabo decision in the High Court of Australia based on the admissible evidence it had before it at the time in relation to some indistinct plots of land on a 4.29 square kilometre island in the Torres Strait.  

The High Court had to decide whether the community of Murray Island, a seafaring race wise in the ways of winds, tides, and currents had a system of land ownership that predated white conquest and if it did was that system still valid. The High Court’s ‘white guilt’ loudspeaker thundered ‘yes’ to both questions. 

The land claim in question was on Murray or Mer Island situated in the Torres Strait about 800 km north of Cairns which has a total land area of 4.29 square kilometres. Anthropologists and ethnologists hold divergent views on the racial origins of the islanders. The population of the island today is around 450 people and about 800 when the British missionaries arrived there in 1871. 

Murray island inhabitants are known as the Meriam people. Over many centuries the inhabitants gained a reputation as fierce warriors and skilled mariners. Inter-tribal warfare included head hunting and was part the Islanders’ culture during the 19^th century as encountered by European ships in transit through the Coral Sea and Torres Strait.  

British missionaries and some other Polynesians began to settle Murray Island in 1872. In 1879 the Queensland Government annexed the islands. In 1939 more authority to govern local island affairs was provided by the establishment of local government councils on each Torres Straight Island. In the 1980’s the locals called for independence from Australia which arose as the Queensland government failed to provide finance for basic infrastructure on the island. 

Eddie Mabo was born on 29 June 1936 and lived on Murray Island until he was 19 years old. His first language was Meriam. He learnt English at state school with special assistance from one of his teachers. Meriam culture is known for its head-hunting practice. He was raised immersed in local culture, myths, and traditions. His mother died when he was a new-born, and he was given to his mother’s brother and his wife to raise him as their son. 

At age 19 Eddie was exiled from the island for a year after he was found guilty of drinking alcohol and fooling around with and female islander teenager. Most of his adult life was lived on the Australian Mainland. In 1959 he married a 15 or 16 year old Queensland-born south sea islander descendant and had seven children with her and they adopted three others.  

In 1970 he became president of the all-black Council for the Rights of Indigenous People. In 1972 the elders refused him permission for entry to Murray Island to visit his dying adoptive father. The refusal was based on bureaucratic articulation that Eddie was a non-islander because he had not lived there for so long.  

At the time of the Mabo decision a newspaper described the island as a paradise that may seem a fine place, but it could be a difficult place to live. Reporter Cameron Forbes wrote in an article published 4 June 1993 and titled Mabo decision a victory over white arrogance. “There was not room enough or jobs enough for all the Murray islanders. Some fish or gather trochus shell, but many exist on unemployment benefits. Young teenagers play an interminable game of touch football on the one sandy street. They are lost between school and meaningful work. They can also be lost between school and meaningful life. They can also be lost between their traditional culture and the wider Australian world.” 

There is nothing correct or moral about the recently claimed Aborigine and Torres Strait Islander Australia being real and the myth of these separate nations having unceded sovereignty would be laughable if it was not so dangerous for the real Australian citizens.