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VOLUME 3 PART 1 MEMOIRS OF THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM CULTURAL HERITAGE SERIES BRISBANE 21 JUNE 2004 © Queensland Museum PO Box 3300, South Brisbane 4101, Australia Phone 06 7 3840 7555 Fax 06 7 3846 1226 Email [email protected] Website www.qmuseum.qld.gov.au National Library of Australia card number ISSN 1440-4788 NOTE Papers published in this volume and in all previous volumes of the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum may be reproduced for scientific research, individual study or other educational purposes. Properly acknowledged quotations may be made but queries regarding the republication of any papers should be addressed to the Director. Copies of the journal can be purchased from the Queensland Museum Shop. A Guide to Authors is displayed at the Queensland Museum web site www.qmuseum.qld.gov.au/resources/resourcewelcome.html A Queensland Government Project Typeset at the Queensland Museum THE POST-CONTACT CREATED ENVIRONMENT IN THE TORRES STRAIT CENTRAL ISLANDS ANNA SHNUKAL Shnukal, A. 2004 06 21: The post-contact created environment in the Torres Strait Central Islands. Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, Cultural Heritage Series 3(1): 317-346. Brisbane. ISSN 1440-4788. The paper examines changes in the created environment wrought during the first century of sustained foreign contact with the Central Islanders of Torres Strait, who call themselves ‘Kulkalgal’. The geographical region covered is relatively narrow; the temporal extent far broader. It is primarily a work of synthesis, assembling early descriptions and oral accounts of the Central Islands from the historical record to identify the likely location and configuration of pre-contact Torres Strait Central Island settlements and sacred places. The paper is intended to provide further evidence for the general spatial principle that significant changes in a group’s social organisation and lifeways can be ‘read’ in part from the changes to their created environment. The Torres Strait Islanders, originally a Melanesian people who today constitute Australia’s second Indigenous minority, have received far less scholarly attention than Aboriginal people. The Central Torres Strait Islanders as an ethnolinguistic group have been largely ignored. Thus, the paper contributes to what has been published on the post-contact history of the Kulkalgal and provides useful data for future archaeological work in Central Torres Strait. r Kulkalgal, Central Torres Strait Islanders, Australian Indigenous history, pearling, spatial differentiation. Anna Shnukal, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, University of Queensland, St Lucia 4072, Australia (e-mail: [email protected]); received 15 June 2002. The paper examines the major spatial censuses; letters; diaries; headstone inscriptions; consequences of outsider (Pacific Islander, notes in family Bibles and prayerbooks. I have European and Southeast Asian) contact with the also drawn on oral sources, including the Kulkalgal of the Central Island Group of Torres anthropological fieldwork data generously given Strait, Australia. First, a range of historical to me by Peter Gillan, who worked on Masig information, much of it previously uncited, is (Yorke Island) in the early 1980s and socio- synthesised to form a picture of the ‘traditional’ linguistic fieldwork data I collected in the Central Kulkalgal in terms of environmental setting, Islands between 1981 and 2001 (Eseli, 1998; population, social organisation, settlement, Shnukal, 1985, 1995, 2000). subsistence, mobility and trade prior to British Geographically, geomorphologically and sovereignty over the Torres Strait islands in 1872 ethnolinguistically, the Torres Strait islands form and 1879. Second, outsider contact with the 3 major groups, which closely approximate Kulkalgal is examined in terms of population today’s political and administrative units: movements, environmental impact, settlement Western (usually divided into Top Western and patterns and land tenure. Understanding such Western Groups), Central and Eastern. Although changes not only provides insight into the traditionally belonging to a broad maritime long-term effects of colonialism in Torres Strait Melanesian culture area, which encompassed the (cf. Beckett, 1987), it also provides a baseline for Strait, islands to its NE and the border areas of its developing a ‘contact’archaeology of the Central 1 N and S mainlands (Barham, 2000: 227-278), Islands (cf. McNiven, 2001). each group was distinct, with its own origin Following the use of primary historical myths, technologies, main subsistence mode, traditional core activities, preferred alliances and information made by members of the 1898 2 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to language variety. Torres Straits, this paper makes known a range of Torres Strait Islanders, as Australia’s second previously uncited historical material for the Indigenous minority, have received less scholarly Central Islands of Torres Strait, including news- attention than Aboriginal people. Being neither paper accounts; reminiscences and memoirs; numerous nor sedentary, the Central Islanders official registers, reports and correspondence; were even more rarely the subjects of study and, 318 MEMOIRS OF THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM as a group, are poorly documented ethno- cays, they became the cultural and linguistic graphically, historically and archaeologically, by mediators in exchange cycles between the more comparison with other Torres Strait Islanders. populous Eastern and Western Islands and Most of our knowledge of pre-contact Torres between the N and S mainlands. (A table of Strait comes from the Reports of the 1898 Cambridge traditional and English island names is given in Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, led Appendix 1.) When Europeans began to explore by Alfred Cort Haddon, but the expedition made New Guinea, the Kulkalgal extended their only brief visits to some of the Central Islands. mediating role to serve as interpreters, pilots and Haddon (1935: 3-13, 23-28, 68-95) summarised guides (Chester, 1878; D’Albertis, 1880; Macleay, the then published geological, historical and 1875; Murray, 1873a, 1876). Their socio-spatial ethnographic material on the Central Islands and responses to contact serve as a microcosm of included information, principally about the ‘Cult cultural contact processes that affected all the of the Brethren’ and trading relationships, given Torres Strait islands to various degrees. to him by the Anglican priest, Revd W.H. 3 The events of Central Island history were MacFarlane. played out within — and cannot be understood Perhaps because of Haddon’s relative neglect without reference to — the defining and mutually of the Central Islands, or because they were reinforcing contexts of Torres Strait Islander life: responding to the same pragmatic and scholarly sociality and spatiality. No aspect of Kulkalgal imperatives, the few anthropologists and life was unaffected by the changes brought by the historians who have worked extensively in Torres expansion of the Queensland colonial frontier Strait have also tended to ignore the Central into their territories from the mid-1860s but overt Islanders or push them to the margins of their conflict was generally resolved within the realms work. What is available is often contested. The of kinship and territory, mediated by the concept major overviews by Beckett (1987), Singe of yabugud ‘road’. This term is used by the (1989), Sharp (1993), Ganter (1994) and Mullins Kulkalgal to refer to the land tracks which (1994) contain few references to the Central connect village, garden, well and beach; to the Islands, and then only as particular examples of sea pathways, which link islands, cays, atolls and more general themes. However, Lawrie (1970a) reefs; and to the intimate personal connections collected traditional Central Island stories from forged over time which determine mutual rights which a great deal of incidental detail can be and obligations and envelop people into dense gleaned; the human geographers, Ohshima networks of association. (1977a, 1977b, 1983) and Sugimoto (1981) and The human geographer, Bernard Nietschmann, the musicologist Michiya Hata (in Ohshima among others, recognised the significance of the 1983) were members of a Japanese research team spatial dimension to the cultural history of the which made 3 visits to the Central Islands in Torres Strait Islanders: 1975, 1977 and 1979; McCarthy (1939), Moore Events in the historical and mythical past occurred at (1979), Lawrence (1991, 1994) and Moore places, not simply at specific dates. Exactly where (2000) documented the trade routes between something is said to have happened is more important than PNG and Australia which pass through the when it happened. In travelling about their islands, waters Central Islands; and Shnukal (1985, 1995, 2000) and reefs, Torres Strait people pass through their history, which is linked to land and sea environments. The concept examined the diffusion of the regional creole into that history occurred at places, not at times, is emphasised the Central Islands, Maori immigrants, and by many indigenous peoples, and certainly by Central Islanders’ socio-spatial responses to Melanesians ... contact, respectively. Particular Central Island For Torres Strait Islanders there is a geography to history. sub-groups have been the focus of anthropological Discussions of the rememberedpast and the mythical past, research from the early 1980s: the Yam-Tudu songs, legends and everyday conversations are filled with