Southern sojourns: Harden Sidney Melville’s 1874 painting of a Torres Strait canoe animated by Kulkalgal and Kemer Kemer Meriam voices of expeditions along the Great Barrier Reef

Introduction
Torres Strait Islanders of Far North Queensland speak of their maritime identity and connections with the sea.¹ Cecilia Alfonso & Michael Kershaw, Gelam Nguzu Kazi – Dugong My Son, Kubin Community Council, Mua Island, 2001; Nonie Sharp, Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2002; Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Masked Histories: Turtle Shell Masks and Torres Strait Islander People, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2022; Samantha Faulkner (ed.), Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia, Black Inc., Collingwood, 2024. The deep history of this identity and connection is expressed clearly in the use of over 450 marine animal resources as documented in historical records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and archaeological evidence of marine foods dating back at least 7000 years.² Ian J. McNiven, ‘Torres Strait: seascape archaeologies reveal 9000 years of dynamic maritime cultural history’, in Scott Fitzpatrick & Jon Erlandson (eds), Oxford Handbook of Island and Coastal Archaeology, Oxford University Press, 2024, Online; Ian J. McNiven & Garrick Hitchcock, ‘Torres Strait Islander marine subsistence specialisation and terrestrial animal translocation’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, Cultural Heritage Series, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004, pp. 105–62. Indeed, Torres Strait Islanders have been described as ‘one of the most marine-oriented and sea life–dependent indigenous societies on the planet’.³ John Cordell, ‘Indigenous people’s coastal-marine domains: some matters of cultural documentation’, Turning the Tide: Conference on Indigenous Peoples and Sea Rights, Northern Territory University, Darwin, 1993, p. 159.

Another dimension of the maritime identity of Torres Strait Islanders is long-distance voyaging between their own islands and to the adjacent mainlands of Australia to the south and Papua New Guinea to the north. Today, such voyaging is undertaken using dinghies and outboard motors. In the late nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries, voyaging was by pearling luggers, although large double-outrigger sailing canoes continued to be used by some communities until the 1970s. Prior to the 1870s, all sea voyaging was by canoe. Whether canoe, lugger or dinghy, sea voyaging requires exceptional sailing and navigational skills that include encyclopedic knowledge and mental maps of the location of channels, reefs and stars. Determining location at sea was multisensorial, using myriad visual cues combined with the feel of waves through the body and even the smell and sound of reefs.

In this paper, we explore a little-known aspect of Torres Strait Islander sea voyaging that extended hundreds of kilometres south along the north-east coast of mainland Queensland. Although documented in historical colonial archives (textual and pictorial) and past and contemporary First Nations oral histories, these voyages are all but forgotten in recent historical and anthropological publications. Over the past five years, two complementary sources of information have appeared to shed new light on these epic voyages. First is a remarkable and unique oil painting finished in 1874 of a group of Torres Strait Islanders loading pieces of a European shipwreck into their canoe at Sir Charles Hardy Islands located 200 kilometres south of their homeland. This painting, created by English artist Harden Sidney Melville based on his own observations in the 1840s, was in a private Australian collection following its purchase in London in the 1970s and was subsequently acquired by the NGV from Horden House booksellers in Sydney in 2020.⁴ Ian J. McNiven & Myles Russell-Cook, ‘Seeing what they saw: Harden Sidney Melville’s Torres Strait canoe and five men at the site of a wreck on the Sir Charles Hardy Islands, off Cape Grenville, north-east Australia, 1874’, NGV Magazine, vol. 25, 2020, pp. 14–17; Horden House Rare Books, Catalogue, 2020. The painting was purchased by the NGV using funds from the Warren Clark Bequest and Ruth Margaret Frances Houghton Bequest.

The second source of information are detailed accounts of canoe voyaging along the Great Barrier Reef recounted in past and contemporary oral histories of the Kulkalgal peoples of central Torres Strait and Kemer Kemer Meriam peoples of eastern Torres Strait recorded by anthropologists for recognition of native title rights over Sea Country. These accounts allow us to enter the world of the men in Melville’s painting seen through the eyes of recent generations of Torres Strait Islanders.

To set the scene for a discussion of these sources of new information, we introduce the magnificence of Torres Strait Islander sailing canoes and selected historical and early oral accounts of voyaging expeditions along the Great Barrier Reef and through the near and offshore islands, cays and reefs that form the northern sections of the Great Barrier Reef to the east of Cape York Peninsula.

Torres Strait Islander sailing canoes
Double-outrigger sailing canoes used by Torres Strait Islanders are the largest portable object made by First Nations Australians. All island communities of Torres Strait had fleets of canoes prior to the arrival of missionaries, European traders and colonial administrators in the 1870s. These vessels measured up to 21 metres in length and could hold twenty adults. No museum in the world has an example of these huge canoes as they were simply too valuable to hand over or sell to Western collectors. Our knowledge of the classic nineteenth-century form and colour of these vessels prior to modifications to sails and rigging inspired by pearling luggers comes from two sources of artworks. First, European (mainly British) drawings, paintings and photographs, with the Mitchell Library in Sydney holding the earliest paintings by Lieutenant George Tobin who accompanied Captain William Bligh as they sailed past Erub (Darnley Island) in eastern Torres Strait in 1792.⁵ Ian J. McNiven, ‘Canoes of Mabuyag and Torres Strait’, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum – Culture, vol. 8, no. 1, 2015, pp. 127–207. Copy of painting courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA563.

Second, paintings by Torres Strait Islanders themselves, in the form of rock art on granite boulder overhangs in western Torres Strait that date back at least five hundred years.⁶ Liam M. Brady, Pictures, Patterns & Objects: Rock-Art of the Torres Strait Islands, Northeastern Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2010; Liam M. Brady & Ian J. McNiven, ‘The presence of absence: why does the post-contact rock art of Torres Strait (north-eastern Australia) not include paintings of European ships?’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2022, pp. 99–115.

Islanders obtained the hulls for these canoes through trade with the adjacent coastal communities of Papua New Guinea, where trees far larger than those found in Torres Strait could be sourced from tall riparian forests. In Torres Strait the canoes with their double outriggers and central living platform were further elaborated, with the addition of vertical masts and two large sails with rigging at the bow. Other bow attachments included a carved wooden figurehead of anthropomorphic or zoomorphic form and shells (often in the form of a mouth), cassowary feathers (beard) and a pair of painted eyes to transform the prow into a ‘head’. The stern was adorned with a tall wooden post ‘tail’ festooned with plant fibre tassels, while wooden staves with colourful feathers were inserted into the central platform and stern. Red and white linear designs were often painted along the length of the hull. The designation of the ‘head’ (with eyes) and ‘tail’ of the vessel is apt given that Torres Strait canoes were ‘animate object beings’ with sentience in their own right, capable of independent thought and indeed being ritually ‘woken up’ before a voyage.⁷ Ian J. McNiven, ‘Torres Strait canoes as social and predatory object-beings’, in Eleanor Harrison-Buck & Julia A. Hendon (eds), Relational Identities and Other-Than-Human Agency in Archaeology, University of Colorado Press, Denver, 2018, pp. 167–96.

Double-outrigger sailing canoes were ‘central to the functioning of Torres Strait Islander society in terms of marine subsistence and the movement of people and goods between islands and the adjacent mainlands of New Guinea and Australia’.⁸ McNiven, ‘Canoes of Mabuyag and Torres Strait’, p. 117.
In short, canoes underpinned the maritime way of life of Torres Strait Islanders. Early European mariners were amazed not only by the size of these canoes, but also by the strong, well-built men who crewed these vessels. For example, Commander William Igglesden of the East India Company’s armed brig of war Tigris observed in 1836 that:

the men are muscular and well formed, disfigured of course by soot ochre and grease; many of them wearing long hair in matted elflocks which gave a ferocious aspect, particularly when using their paddles, which as they brandished about, shaking their heads and chanting a kind of yell; the water was simultaneously struck with a force, that, made the canoe fairly rise with the impetus –Their large canoes were of great length; some that were alongside of us, being 50 or 60 feet [15.2 to 18.3 m] at least with a double bank of paddles, carrying from 10 to 20 men and upwards.⁹ Commander William Igglesden, ‘Log of Tigris on voyage to Torres Straits, May 1836 to November 1836’, Subseries LOG/C/35, collections held by the National Maritime Museum London (as filmed by the AJCP)

The dynamism and physicality of men paddling canoes in Torres Strait was captured visually by artist Oswald Brierly of the 1848–49 HMS Rattlesnake expedition in his published chromatograph of the Kai Marina (Big Shadow), a 15.9-metre-long canoe crewed by six Kaurareg men of south-west Torres Strait.¹⁰ Robert Methven, The Log of a Merchant Officer: Viewed with Respect to the Education of Young Officers and the Youth of the Merchant Service, John Weale, London, 1854. Copy of chromatograph courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, PXD67.

With large ocean-going canoes powered by wind and muscle, Torres Strait Islanders used their advanced sailing and navigational skills and knowledge of the sea to make long-distance voyages southwards through the Great Barrier Reef. These southern sojourns were undertaken during the wet season, from November to April, aided by north-westerly winds, returning in the dry season (May to October) to take advantage of the prevailing south-easterly trade winds. In 1849, Harden Sidney Melville, artist with the British Admiralty’s HMS Fly expedition to Torres Strait, published a hand-coloured lithograph of his 1844–45 observations of men on Erub and a canoe with a prow ‘meant to represent a monstrous mouth’ that was ‘being loaded for a voyage’ with food (coconuts) and lengths of bamboo filled with drinking water.¹¹ Harden Sidney Melville, Sketches in Australia and the Adjacent Islands, Selected from a Number Taken During the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. ‘Fly’ and ‘Bramble’ Under the Command of Capt. F.P. Blackwood, R.N. During the Years 1842–46, Dickinson & Co, London, [1849], Pl. XIX.

What did the Old People say?
In the early twentieth century, Torres Strait Anglican priest Rev. W.H. MacFarlane informed Cambridge University anthropologist Alfred C. Haddon that ‘old folks’ stated that ‘in earlier days’ the ‘men’ from the islands of Auridh, Masig, Dhamudh and Poruma of the Kulkalgal Nation of central Torres Strait ‘visited the islands off the east coast of North Queensland, particularly the Sir Charles Hardy group, and the Forbes islands, whither they resorted every south-east season to live for a while and to barter’ with local Aboriginal people for ‘stones for clubs, ochre for painting themselves and their zogo [ritual] stones, turtle grease, and other products’.¹² Alfred C. Haddon, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. Volume 1: General Ethnography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1935, p. 88. A number of islands and mainland locations had Islander names including Salsadi or Ubu Lag (Margaret Bay) and Marilag and Ekinpad (Pascoe River area and nearby offshore islands, and the adjacent mainland hinterland, respectively).¹³ Haddon, pp. 391, 394; C. Coral [W.H. MacFarlane], ‘When shadows lengthen. Yarns with the old identities of Torres Strait Islands. Passi, of Murray Island’, The Queenslander, April 11, 1925, p. 11; Wolfgang Laade, ‘Papers of Wolfgang Laade’, MS3802, Box 16: Central Islands, 1962–64, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra.

In the 1960s, German ethnomusicologist Wolfgang Laade was informed by Jessie Pearson of Poruma in the central strait that Kulkalgal people of Poruma and neighbouring Warraber once sailed as far south as Lizard Island to collect ‘club stone’ (i.e., stone used to manufacture stone-headed clubs) ‘which was used in their trade with Mer’ in the eastern strait.¹⁴ Wolfgang Laade, ‘Ethnographic notes on the Murray Islanders, Torres Strait’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol. 94, no. 1, 1969, p. 39. This testimony matches information conveyed to anthropologist Donald Thomson in the late 1920s by the Kuuku Ya’u people of Lloyd Bay that Torres Strait Islanders ‘came frequently in big canoes to Mitirindji (Quoin Island) off the mouth of the Pascoe River to obtain supplies of stone for their axes, and it is probable that tobacco was one of the important articles of exchange brought down during these voyages’.¹⁵ Donald F. Thomson, ‘Notes on the smoking-pipes of North Queensland and the Northern Territory of Australia’, Man, vol. 39, 1939, p. 82.

Torres Strait Islander oral histories recorded by anthropologists over the past century are clear: canoe voyaging along the northern Great Barrier Reef involved round trips of at least 400–500 kilometres to the Sir Charles Hardy/Forbes/Quoin Island groups, and at least 1200 kilometres to Lizard Island (Jiigurru). More specifically, Kemer Kemer Meriam usually followed the edge of the Great Barrier Reef south before cutting across to the mainland coast while Kulkalgal tended to travel down through the reefs, islets and cays of the near- and offshore areas between the Barrier edge and the mainland. These southern sojourns also caught the eye of nineteenth century European mariners sailing northwards through the Great Barrier Reef.

What did early European mariners see?
From the early nineteenth century, European vessels departing Sydney began using Torres Strait as a shortcut to India instead of taking the southern route across the bottom of the continent.¹⁶ Allan McInnes, ‘Dangers and difficulties of the Torres Strait and Inner Route’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol. 10, no. 4, 1979, pp. 47–73; Ian Nicholson, Via Torres Strait: A Maritime History of the Torres Strait Route and the Ships’ Post Office at Booby Island, Roebuck Society Publication 40. The crews and passengers of vessels taking the Torres Strait route soon began encountering Torres Strait Islanders along the north-east Queensland coast, south of Cape York, either on the water or camped on islands, including sandy cays. Such encounters were recorded numerous times, and it appears that this became common knowledge among mariners by the mid-nineteenth century. Here are a couple of examples.

In August 1834, the ship Charles Eaton was wrecked on Great Detached Reef, near Raine Island (Bub Warwar Kaur), located around 150 kilometres south of Torres Strait. Some of the survivors took to two rafts. After several days adrift they were picked up by Torres Strait Islanders in canoes and taken north to Boydong Island (named Ianakau by the islanders), located over 100 kilometres south of the strait, where most were massacred, except for four boys whose lives were spared. Two of the boys were taken to the Central Islands while the others were taken to the Eastern Islands of Torres Strait.¹⁷ Phillip P. King, A Voyage to Torres Strait in Search of the Survivors of the Ship ‘Charles Eaton’, which was Wrecked upon the Barrier Reefs, in the Month of August 1834, in H.M. Colonial Schooner ‘Isabella’, C.M. Lewis, Commander, E.H. Statham, Sydney, 1837; John Ireland, The Shipwrecked Orphans: A True Narrative of the Sufferings of John Ireland and William Doyley, Who were Wrecked in the Ship Charles Eaton on an Island in the South Seas, S. Babcock, New Haven, 1845; Alan McInnes, ‘The wreck of the Charles Eaton’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, vol. 11, no. 4, 1983, pp. 21–50; Ian J. McNiven, ‘Ritual mutilation of Europeans on the Torres Strait maritime frontier’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 53, no. 3, 2018, pp. 10–13.

In June 1841, HMS Beagle anchored next to Restoration Island, located nearly 250 kilometres south of Torres Strait. The ship’s commander, John Lort Stokes, noted: ‘In the morning we found that the island was occupied by a party of natives from Torres Strait. Their canoes, which were furnished with out-riggers, were hauled up on the beach’.¹⁸ John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia; With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in the Years 1837–38–39–40–41–42–43, T. and W. Boone, London, 1846, vol. 2, p. 256.

In April 1853, English navigator and author George Windsor Earl, in an article detailing the route for steamships between Singapore and Sydney in The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle, noted:

The westerly monsoon, which prevails from November to March … appears to be the fine season in Torres Strait … at least to the south of Cape York, as this is the time chosen by the Murray and Darnley Islanders for making their annual excursions to the islets which lie off the north-east coast of Australia.¹⁹ George Windsor Earl, ‘The steam route from Singapore to Sydney, via Torres Straits’, The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle, vol. 22, no. 4, 1853, p. 176.

European archival evidence demonstrates that Kulkalgal and Kemer Kemer Meriam men (and often women) from central and eastern Torres Strait, respectively, carried out annual expeditions in large outrigger canoes down the east coast of Queensland visiting offshore islands, cays and reefs, with the establishment of encampments on some islands lasting for several months. A range of subsistence and trade activities took place during these long voyages. It is also likely that ritual activities and intermarriage took place with Aboriginal people. Another reason for these southern sojourns is revealed in Harden Sidney Melville’s remarkable painting from 1874.

What did Harden Sidney Melville paint?
Melville’s Torres Strait canoe and five men at the site of a wreck on the Sir Charles Hardy Islands, off Cape Grenville, north-east Australia, 1874, is the only known nineteenth-century visual representation of Torres Strait Islanders voyaging down the east coast of Queensland and the northern sections of the Great Barrier Reef. The painting shows a group of Torres Strait Islanders in a huge double outrigger canoe pulled up on the rocky shore of the Sir Charles Hardy Islands. The canoe is crewed by five people – four men and what appears to be a young man, or perhaps a boy.

The canoe is of classic Torres Strait Islander form, with a large, curved hull, double outriggers, platform (with rare depiction of a clam-shell hearth), tasselled stern post, and elaborate prow with tassels (beard) and a painted eye. The eyes were a constant reminder to the crew that their vessel was similarly animate, both crew and canoe working as a team.

In shallow water to the left of the canoe are partly submerged pieces of a shipwreck – a large slab of wood (possibly a piece of deck or hull) and what looks like a section of mast. Three of the men appear to be loading onto the canoe platform something large and heavy with a length of rope attached to a wooden pulley. Clearly the men are salvaging pieces of wreck. Nineteenth-century historical records attest to Torres Strait Islanders cruising across their expansive territorial seas and reefs, ever on the lookout for European shipwrecks and much-coveted iron.²⁰ David R. Moore, Islanders and Aborigines at Cape York: An Ethnographic Reconstruction Based on the 1848–1850 ‘Rattlesnake’ Journals of O.W. Brierly and Information he Obtained from Barbara Thompson, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1979, p. 150. Iron fittings were removed from pieces of wood that floated ashore and reshaped into implements such as chopping and cutting tools. It may be no coincidence that the slab of wood near the bow of the canoe highlights iron fittings.

Melville was able to accurately depict details of the Torres Strait Islander canoe, people and salvaging operations because of his artistic skills and circumstances that allowed him to be an eyewitness to these cultural practices in the 1840s. Melville was clearly interested in the cultures of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, despite expressing colonialist and unsavoury views at times.²¹ Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History, Penguin, Melbourne, 2013, pp. 94, 101, 109, 111; Jane Lydon, ‘‘His own Columbus’: artist as field-worker aboard British survey voyages 1837–1850’, in Liz Conor (ed.), Colonial Myopia: Prints and the Inscription of Aboriginality, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, forthcoming 2025.

Harden Sidney Melville was born in London in May 1824 and died in late 1894 aged seventy. He and his brother Henry followed in the artistic footsteps of their father, also Henry Melville, a famous London engraver, lithographer and painter.²² Design & Art Australia Online (credited to staff writer), ‘Harden Sidney Melville’, 1992, last updated 2011, daao.org.au/bio/harden-sidney-melville/biography/, accessed 11 June 2024. As a seventeen-year-old talented artist, Melville ‘joyfully accepted’ an invitation for the adventure of a lifetime as official draughtsman onboard HMS Fly for the British Admiralty’s hydrographic survey and mapping expedition of the north-east coast of Australia, including Torres Strait, between 1842 and 1846.²³ [Harden Sidney Melville], The Adventures of a Griffin on a Voyage of Discovery, Bell & Daldy, London, 1867, p. 5. The Fly expedition departed Falmouth, England, on 11 April 1842. Melville is mentioned numerous times by naturalist Joseph Beete Jukes in the official 1847 published account of the expedition titled Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly. This two-volume set includes a selection of engravings made ‘from an extensive series of drawings’ made by Melville during the expedition.²⁴ Joseph Beete Jukes, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, T. & W. Boone, London, vol. 1, 1847, p. vii. In 1849, Melville published his own volume of sketches made during the expedition as a series of twenty-five hand-coloured lithographs, including the Erub canoe (see above), in Sketches in Australia and the Adjacent Islands.²⁵ Melville, Sketches in Australia. In 1867, Melville released his own account of the Fly expedition in The Adventures of a Griffin on a Voyage of Discovery, albeit written in the third person under the nom de plume of a ‘Griffin’.²⁶ Melville, The Adventures of a Griffin, 1867.

Jukes mentions visiting the Sir Charles Hardy Islands in 1843 and again in 1844 to obtain drinking water but makes no mention of Torres Strait Islanders.²⁷ Jukes, 1847, vol. 1, pp. 125–26, vol. 2, pp. 266–67. John Sweatman, who was on board the cutter Bramble, tender to HMS Fly, mentions coming across Torres Strait Islanders in ‘their canoes as far south as Sir Charles Hardy’s Islands’ in March 1846.²⁸ Jim Allen & Peter Corris (eds), The Journal of John Sweatman, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1977, pp. 24, 79. He adds that the southern ‘voyages of considerable length’ to the Sir Charles Hardy Islands occurred ‘during the westerly monsoon … whither they had probably gone to collect tortoiseshell, of which our tender observed nearly a hundred weight [50 kg] from one canoe’.²⁹ Allen & Corris, 1977, p. 36. Melville mentions visiting the Sir Charles Hardy Islands in 1843 but makes no mention of Torres Strait Islanders. However, in this same region, he notes that ‘remains of numerous wrecks strewed the rugged and inhospitable rocks of the Barrier Reef’.³⁰Melville, The Adventures of a Griffin, p. 126. Melville was aware that Torres Strait Islanders salvaged European shipwrecks having observed ‘portions of wrecked ships’ around huts on the sandy island of Dhamudh (Dalrymple Island) in central Torres Strait in March 1845.³¹Melville, The Adventures of a Griffin, p. 188

After the Fly expedition returned to England in 1846, Melville continued to draw, paint and write for a living. His illustrations, converted to engravings, appeared in many published books, including Wild Sports of the World (1862) and The Gallery of Geography (1864), the latter including an illustration captioned ‘Sir Charles Hardy’s Island, off Cape Upstart’.³² James Greenwood, Wild Sports of the World: A Book of Natural History and Adventure, S.O. Beeton, London, 1862; Thomas Milner, The Gallery of Geography: A Pictorial and Descriptive Tour of the World, W. & R. Chambers, London and Edinburgh, 1864, p. 916. It is probable that Melville’s original sketch for this illustration subsequently served as the template for the distinctively shaped rock outcrop depicted in his 1874 painting of Torres Strait Islanders.

A contemporary Erubam Le response to Melville’s painting
The following text is taken from an interview with Mr Kapua Gutchen Snr, Meuram/Samsep tribes, Erubam Le (people of Erub or Darnley Island), born 12 February 1957, regarding Melville’s 1874 painting recorded in Cairns by Garrick Hitchcock 15 October 2020:³³ Kapua speaks several languages including Torres Strait Islander English, a dialect of English. His narrative includes words from his first languages: Torres Strait Creole – also known as Yumplatok, Pizin, Broken and Ailan Tok – an English-based creole language that developed following culture contact in the region, and Erub Mer, the dialect of Meriam Mir, the Indigenous language of the Kemer Kemer Meriam of the eastern islands of Torres Strait, spoken at Erub (Darnley Island) and Ugar (Stephen Island). In collaboration with his co-authors, Kapua has made and approved minor edits to his 2020 interview, requesting that his original Torres Strait Islander English account be largely retained to reflect his speech, identity and storytelling.

I been look that painting, and I’m very proud of it, very good for thempla artists, them European artists, long time ago to paint them big canoes, which we call au nar. They, our Ancestors, arer, been sail come down all the way from our ged, home island, on their usual track, east side of northern Cape York Peninsula, which we call Adai. This place on painting here, Sir Charles Hardy Island, you see, they’ve obviously located wreckage from a European sailing ship. This tells us that whatever useful items can be retrieved, mainly metal, these would be salvaged from these wrecks, and will come in useful to our people. Them sort of metal objects we kolem malil. As soon as our people been come into contact with kole, Europeans, thempla steel, malil been increased the standard of our labour and craftworks considerably. Like for example, our Ancestors have learnt that they could now use hot metal prongs or steel plates etc. to punch holes or cut strong turtle shell or hardwood a lot quicker with this Whitemans’ malil; thus enabling them to produce much more turtle shell masks, traditional carvings, shell pendants and other Islander’s artworks etc. in lesser time for trading with European ships sailing through the Torres Straits. And so, our maritime Ancestors learnt quickly by using metal tools and other things they have traded or bartered off sailing ships to their advantage. They capitalized also above their traditional wauri tebud, trading partners, on both northern and southern mainland with these useful shipwreck items they would collect on their journey when travelling to trade with them. Our Ancestors’ trading partners were the Cape Peninsula Aborigines and southern coastal Papuans.

Sir Charles Hardy Island, no doubt, there would have been an ancient name for it. But today the Eastern Islanders, Kemer Kemer Meriam Buaigiz [buaigiz = tribal peoples] and Mura Kulkalgal Buaigiz of Central Islands refers to that place as Adi Island, probably from Hardy to Adi as heard in many of our Torres Straits Islander maritime dance songs. However also, Adi, translated in both Torres Strait Islanders’ traditional languages means ‘belonging closely to a sacred story’.

The design of the canoe painting at Sir Charles Hardy Island suggest to me that this is an Eastern Island, Meriam Nation canoe, it’s either from Erub, Mer, Dauar or Ugar islands. I acknowledge that all Kulkalgal and other Islanders in the Torres Strait would also have a similar design, of large canoes, that travelled within the Strait, and up and down to the north and southern mainland as ours. It needs to be told that although the European sailors of that day did record many sightings of our Ancestors’ canoes during their survey expeditions up and down the Cape’s north-eastern waterway, our Ancestors’ other voyages since time immemorial needs to be considered. So, there were a lot more voyages by our maritime forebears than the sightings that were recorded within them ships’ logbooks of the recent arrivals of British and other European mariners.

The miskor (clamshell) seen there in the painting, that was used as the fireplace where they can safely contain the fire on that canoe. So, as a fireproof thing, they cook inside the shell, in journey, that clamshell would carry the hot coals, wirwir, to restart the fire at the next place they would arrive at. Readily available Wongai and Sib, the digging stick tree, were used for firewood, coastal grown hardwoods ideal for best long-lasting coals on long journeys.

Some of our forebears’ voyages went further south than that Sir Charles Hardy Island. Because we didn’t have a written history, only oral, but we thank the British and other European mariners, for recording such events in their paintings, and these are the proofs of our Ancestors been there, done that in them Sea Countries.

Bub Warwar Kaur, that’s Raine Island, it’s in a northerly direction, north north-eastward, epe naiger pekem I suppose, from Sir Charles Hardy Island, it lays within the Great Detached Reef area of the Great Barrier Reef, Au Garar Garar Norgiz. That’s where they, our Ancestors would collect burzer, more commonly known as guano today, as fertilisers. They transit burzer back to our islands to improve their food garden’s soils there. This is because our Eastern Island peoples were a cultivating people also, because of our five volcanic soil islands. The hills on Erub where the ground soil is, are fertile, but only to a certain extent, so guano, or burzer as we call it, improves the soil where needed, at bigger gardens on hilly ground, but more so around maik gedub, ‘close-by gardens’ at our villages’ sandy soil. Since time immemorial, until today on Erub, our little villages called uteb are established within isolated little coves on sandy flat areas near beaches, where our Ancestors could physically see their sailing crafts from their grass huts when moored securely nearby on the foreshore. That sandy village soils there is called iser, meaning dusty soiled sand, so that particular type of poor soil needs to be boosted up with that substance, burzer. And afterwards when vegetables, especially them nuri, sweet potatoes are harvested from the burzer infused sandy area, they are big, clean skin and sweet, we call that iser lewer, sandy soil clean skin food. That was the need to pick up that guano from Raine Island, during every trip back to our islands, from trading with Aboriginal wauri tebud. The burzer would be stowed in woven baskets for transit, it is a really good stuff for gardening around the sandy area where the village is normally situated.

Whilst at Bub Warwar Kaur, our Ancestors’ food source there will be nesting turtles’ meat, turtle eggs, and birds’ eggs there, all of that, and eatable fish, shellfish and clamshells are also taken from that reef and other reefs and for food and utensils. Prized large wauri, poisonous cone shells, a Conus species, are also collected for trading or making dibidibi, which is the wauri tebud trading pendants. It’s like that, we call ‘that rest place’, ‘abele uteb’, to indicate where they would sleep, at that campsite. Uteb derives from the word ut/utui, meaning in the Torres Strait languages ‘to have sleep/rest.’ And teb/tebteb meaning ‘in isolation/away from the main crowd’. So, in their voyage away from the rest of their Tribal group, they would camp all along these little islands and cays, these become uteb where they would sleep, rest, eat and continue on, throughout their journey. That’s why we call them sort of places, uteb. Come from that word, used throughout Torres Strait, ut means to sleep or rest there.

Raine Island, this is why traditionally Kemer Kemer Meriam Buaigiz call it Bub Warwar Kaur. ‘Bub’ means ‘chest’ and ‘Warwar’ means ‘patterns’, the translation is ‘the various distinct chest patterns of all the gur ebur, seabirds, that are found there’. Meaning, we the Meriam Nation people have language names for all these seabirds found there according to their chest patterns, mabwar means ‘identifications’. And ‘kaur’ meaning ‘an island’. All of these gurkar ebur (seabirds and marine creatures) that are found at Bub Warwar Kaur are adi lubabat meaning ‘Sacred and Totemic’ to our Kemer Kemer Meriam Buaigiz. When our people gather at Tribal meetings on our communities or wherever, we must sit within our own respective Totemic Clan Groupings. This is called ‘ebur aragarag’. Bit similar to English people saying, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’.

Our ancient people sail down there to Ziai Daudai, the southern mainland, Queensland today, because there are lidlu, essential trade items, that Torres Strait Islanders needed to trade for with the Cape Aboriginal wauri tebud. These items are plentiful on the mainland, and our people would travel long distances to a trading designated arrival/departure point, which we call mimi uteb. The mainland is a big place, Islanders don’t just arrive anywhere, anytime, and expect any Aboriginal people to come out and trade. Our Ancestors would arrive in calmer season, which the wauri tebud Aborigines knows very well also, when Islanders’ canoes would come, and both wauri tebud parties will meet there, at these mimi uteb, designated area for trading. Trading not only takes place between the mainland Aborigines and the Eastern and Central Islanders, but between the Kaurareg wauri tebud Aborigines of Kaiwalagal Islands of southwest Torres Strait and our Ancestors and vice versa. This trading also includes the wauri tebud of southern coastal villages in Naiger Daudai, Papua New Guinea today, and vice versa. Everything, even children were given to Torres Strait Islanders through traditional adoptions, our customary lores to strengthen trading ties through that wauri tebud system. Wauri is the Conus shell used in exchange; tebud means ‘friend/syndicate’: trade partners culture. Women would also be given to marriage, either way, Islander woman given to Aborigines for wedding, and Islander take Aborigine woman back to the island, where lot of generation can trace their family trees, identity back to, until today. Our forebears also obtained red ochre and other ochre paints, live animals etc. them things from the peninsula Aboriginal wauri tubudgiz. And on Erub, Darnley Island, our home and other homes there, we’ve got stone clubs and axes, which we keep as memorabilia, memory things from our Ancestors. Anyone can come and see there, them stone axes are not made from the volcanic rocks of Erub and the Eastern Islands, they are made from usa kula, granite rocks, that can only be traded to us from the western Torres Strait islands or from the Australian mainland itself. These different colour ochre paints, they get traded to our Ancestors from down there on the southern mainland. Our ancient people sail all the way back to our islands, and then to wauri tebudgiz of southern coastal villages at Papua New Guinea, to trade there also. From this trading and interactions long ago, our people introduce the warup drum, in PNG called kundu drums, to the northern Cape Aboriginal wauri tebud. Just like us Islanders, warup drums are still being used within their corrobboree dances today. Our Ancestors also introduced bisi/doh, sago, to the Cape Aboriginal people. It is a PNG traditional food, processed from the sago palm tree. Today bisi papai/doh foods are always enjoyed by PNG people including both Torres Strait Islanders and northern peninsula Cape Aboriginal people, this is from trading. In the ancient time also, sometimes Islander wauri tebud would act as a go-between to bring canoes down from Dodogab Peke, the Fly River delta area in Papua New Guinea, for the northern Peninsula tribes, through the Torres Strait. That was our trading Ancestors’ job, people from the little islands in Torres Strait.

They, our Ancestors, use the wind to their advantages, they would return back again to Torres Strait when kerker sager starts to lightly breeze again, when the southeasterlies still young, not so ferocious, around April or May, they would make their return trip. Koki kerker, within the start of monsoonal months around November, our wauri tebud Ancestors would travel southward again with the northern wind, deum koki, a more softer monsoonal wind, to travel down southward to the northern peninsula area, and they would return back again using kerker sager, gared sager, southerly winds, to sail back to their island homeland.

Final thoughts
Torres Strait Islander voyaging along the northern Great Barrier Reef and interactions with mainland Aboriginal communities over the past two centuries are recorded in textual and oral histories. Similar historical archives record Torres Strait Islander interactions with peoples of Papua New Guinea. Archaeological evidence in the form of shared earthenware pottery traditions across all three regions dating back 2–3000 years ago indicate the extraordinary time depth of these long-distance connections. Indeed, archaeological evidence combines with oral histories to reveal a vast cultural interaction sphere across the Coral Sea taking in north-east Australia and southern Papua New Guinea.³⁴ Ian J. McNiven, ‘Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere’, in Ian J. McNiven and Bruno David (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2023, pp. 591–616; Sean Ulm, Ian J. McNiven, Glenn R. Summerhayes, et al., ‘Early Aboriginal pottery production and offshore island occupation on Jiigurru (Lizard Island Group), Great Barrier Reef, Australia’, Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 333, 2024; Sean Ulm, Ian J. McNiven & Kenneth McLean, ‘Aboriginal people made pottery and sailed to distant offshore islands thousands of years before Europeans arrived’, The Conversation, 10 April, 2024. The spread of these pottery traditions was a result of knowledge exchanges made possible by ocean-going canoes. Although the form of these ancient canoes is unrecorded, historical images of canoes allow us to imagine their magnificence.

Harden Sidney Melville’s painting uniquely captures the long-distance maritime voyaging heritage of Torres Strait Islanders. These southern sojourns down through the maze of reefs of the northern sections of the Great Barrier Reef in ocean-going, double-outrigger, dugout sailing canoes are equally recorded in past and present oral histories from Torres Strait. Although well-known to European mariners of eastern Australia during the nineteenth century, such voyages dropped out of the national historical consciousness during the twentieth century. In this sense, the rediscovery of Melville’s painting and its entry into the public domain via the NGV allows all Australians to eyewitness the exceptional maritime sailing and navigational skills and deep-time heritage of Torres Strait Islanders. Their knowledge and mastery of reef-filled seas allowed them to capitalise on European maritime ignorance and tragedy through salvage and innovative recycling and repurposing of enigmatic flotsam from the numerous ships that were lost in these waters.

Notes