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The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait

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The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait Navigating Boundaries THE ASIAN DIASPORA IN TORRES STRAIT Navigating Boundaries THE ASIAN DIASPORA IN TORRES STRAIT EDITED BY ANNA SHNUKAL, GUY RAMSAY AND YURIKO NAGATA Published by ANU eView The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Navigating boundaries : the Asian diaspora in Torres Strait / Anna Shnukal, editor ; Guy Ramsay, editor ; Yuriko Nagata, editor. Edition: Second Edition. ISBN: 9781921934377 (paperback) 9781921934384 (ebook) Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Asian diaspora. Asians--Migrations--Queensland--Torres Strait Islands. Asians--Queensland--Torres Strait Islands. Asia--Emigration and immigration. Torres Strait Islands (Qld.)--Emigration and immigration. Other Creators/Contributors: Shnukal, Anna, editor. Ramsay, Guy Malcolm, editor. Nagata, Yuriko, editor. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU Press Cover: Donald Friend (1915–89) [Thursday Island] Manuscript Collection MS5959/33/113 For an account of Friend’s visit to the Torres Strait in 1946–47 see The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 2, Paul Hetherington, ed., Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2003. Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia. First published 2004 by Pandanus Books This edition © 2017 ANU eView We dedicate this book to the people of Torres Strait. The Acknowledgements We wish to acknowledge the support we have been given over many years by the people of Torres Strait and we dedicate this book to them. We are also grateful for financial support from the Australian Research Council, the University of Queensland and the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. We thank all the contributors to this volume and gratefully acknowledge the assistance given to us by the staff of the Queensland State Archives, John Oxley Library, National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia, Australian War Memorial Library, Noel Butlin Archives Centre (The Australian National University), Royal Historical Society of Queensland Library; and by Judith Ramsay, Colin Sheehan, Michael Stubbins, Rodney Sullivan and Evelyn Suzuki. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 13 Mapping Australasia: reflections on the permeability of Australia’s northern maritime borders Paul Battersby Chapter 2 33 Tidal Flows: an overview of Torres Strait Islander–Asian contact Anna Shnukal and Guy Ramsay Chapter 3 53 The Chinese Diaspora in Torres Strait: cross-cultural connections and contentions on Thursday Island Guy Ramsay Chapter 4 81 ‘They don’t know what went on underneath’: three little-known Filipino/Malay communities of Torres Strait Anna Shnukal Chapter 5 123 Heriberto Zarcal: the first Filipino–Australian Reynaldo C. Ileto Chapter 6 139 The Japanese in Torres Strait Yuriko Nagata Chapter 7 161 The Sri Lankan Settlers of Thursday Island Stanley J. Sparkes and Anna Shnukal Chapter 8 203 John Douglas and the Asian Presence on Thursday Island: 1885–1904 Jeremy Hodes Chapter 9 219 Coloured People: a challenge to racial stereotypes Regina Ganter Chapter 10 247 Confluence: Asian cultural contributions to ailan pasin Anna Shnukal Chapter 11 265 Some Historical and Contemporary Asian Elements in the Music and Performance Culture of Torres Strait Karl Neuenfeldt Chapter 12 277 Voices from Torres Strait Index 318 Biographies 329 List of Tables and Figures Table 2.1: Nationalities of men engaged in the marine 38 industry based on Thursday Island, 1885, 1896–1938 Table 2.2: Asian and European population of Thursday Island, 42 1877–1914 Table 3.1: Chinese population, Thursday Island, 1877–1913 57 Table 3.2: Occupations of Chinese resident on Thursday Island 63 (and nearby islands) pre-World War II Table 4.1: Naturalised Malays/Filipinos, 1886–1900 89 Table 4.2: Horn Island births, 1889–1932 93 Table 4.3: Children born on Badu to Malay fathers, c. 1891–1921 105 Table 6.1: Former Karayuki-san resident on Thursday Island in 1941 147 Table 6.2: Japanese families on Thursday Island in 1941 148 Table 6.3: Japanese residents who returned to Thursday Island 154 Figure A: Map of South-East Asia and Torres Strait 315 Figure B: Map of the islands of Torres Strait 316 Figure C: Map of Thursday Island, 1890s 317 Figure D: Map of Filipino and Malay communities in 317 Torres Strait, 1890s–1942 Introduction THE COMING TOGETHER of diverse peoples in a defined geographical space implies the prior navigation of geopolitical or physical boundaries and the subsequent navigation of social and cultural boundaries. To move from place to place is necessarily to navigate the boundaries between places, an experience that is invariably stimulating and ultimately enriching for its participants, producing cooperation and conflict in the forging of a new identity. New spatial borders, social values, economic interactions and political positionings are claimed, challenged and negotiated to produce new, if also transient equilibria. What has come to be known as ‘multiculturalism’ is now the norm of Australian contemporary urban society. Although this is viewed as a recent innovation, even a historical aberration, in fact, Australia’s cultural pluralism has many antecedents in the nation’s pre-colonial and colonial period, its ‘polyethnic past’. One example is Torres Strait in north-eastern Australia, a region uniquely positioned at the confluence of the Australian continent, South-East Asia and the Pacific. Here, as in other 19th-century northern centres, the convergence of Australian Indigenous people, Asian and other ‘Coloured’ immigrants and European colonists created a polyethnic society, whose members have, through time, forged the social and familial connections that underlie the claim of their descendants to be a single people. Thursday Island, the regional commercial centre, was predominantly an Asian town from its inception until its wartime evacuation in 1942. For three generations, the majority of its population was born in Asia or was of Asian descent. Our book examines facets of the complex history of Asian Torres Strait, which continues to evolve and influence the present. In the context of Torres Strait, ‘boundary’ is a salient, multifaceted concept. On one hand, it refers to artificially imposed maritime borders of geopolitical origin; more metaphorically, it refers to actual and perceived social and cultural divisions among ethnic groups. Both concepts are examined in the following chapters. For the Islanders of Torres Strait, South-East Asia and the 2 Navigating Boundaries Pacific, however, the notion of the shifting sea as a boundary is alien, the inverse of the European terrestrially focused perception. The boundaries of their sea territories are marked by naturally occurring, fixed and prominent land masses, such as reefs and rocks. Their surrounding territorial seas are not boundaries, i.e., constraining features of their environment, which serve to separate them from their island and mainland neighbours, but rather maritime highways, which connect them with others for reasons of trade and ritual. Thus, for the diverse peoples who came to inhabit Torres Strait, the sea emphasised connection through trade, navigation and kinship.1 We wish to emphasise this ‘cross-cultural difference in constructions of the sea’,2 which is crucial to an understanding of subsequent historical events in Torres Strait. We also stress the cultural affinities among the sea-oriented peoples of the small-scale, resource-poor islands of Torres Strait, Asia and the Pacific. These affinities enabled them — indeed, predisposed them — to find common ground, which predated their shared experiences of labour in the fisheries, life in a remote British colonial town under the White Australia Policy and pervasive prejudice expressed through administrative and legislative control. Subsistence farmers and fisherfolk on their islands of origin, they also shared a similar maritime physical environment and marine practices, tropical climate and seasons, flora and fauna, and modes of life, including longstanding, accepted protocols for establishing trading relationships. Their world views, too, coincided, resonating in similar myths based on the significance of the sea for the founding and sustenance of their societies. Social values emphasised the principles of mutuality and reciprocity; kinship and sharing underlay all significant social relationships. Trade was a necessity for all of these peoples and it was the sea that made possible their navigation to a wider world. These cultural traits, combined with the strategic geographical position of Torres Strait, which today shares a northern border with two separate nation- states, proved immensely conducive to the development of the region as a vital maritime trading centre during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, Asian migrants flocked to the region to forge new connections and contentions with Islanders and European colonists alike. Academic Scholarship Ann Curthoys, among others, has noted the ‘parallels in discourse, policy and practice’ between Indigenous Australians and Asians during the first half of the 20th century, which ‘continued to be rarely spoken
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