There are many interesting things about the Torres Strait Islands, most of which you don't need to visit the Torres Strait Islands to appreciate.
The people are Melanesians -- related to people from Papua, the Solomons, and Fiji, and not to (other) aboriginal Australians -- who opted to stay with Australia when Papua New Guinea became independent. Thursday Island has the biggest settlement, with around 3600 people. It was once a centre for pearling, which supplied mother-of-pearl for shirt buttons and Victorian knick knacks. Pearling was one of the 19th century's more dismal jobs, combining overwork and overcrowding with shark attacks and decompression sickness. Then the plastic shirt button was invented, and did for Thursday Island what the silk hat did for Canadian fur towns. Now, the island produces crayfish, but mostly seems to get by on public spending. Wikipedia cites visits by Somerset Maugham (d. 1965) and Banjo Paterson (d. 1941) as evidence of its "fast-developing" tourism industry.
No one seems sure how the islands were named -- William Bligh comes up a bit -- but they were clearly coming thick and fast. You can look at a map and see the effort diminish. Prince of Wales Island, Horn Island, Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, Friday Island, and then islands named after assorted crew members who were probably standing nearby.
Thursday Island's a town of churches and drive-through liquor stores. The main strip also has a supermarket, a general store with huge knives and a fondue pot in the window, a "bazaar", a clothing store that's also the office of the member of parliament, and the shire council office, with windows displaying two Battle of the Bands trophies. Windows have heavy wire mesh to protect against cyclones. There are several social support agencies, whose windows offer advice on diabetes and legal problems. One window has real estate listings, and real estate isn't cheap: $300k or $400k might be average. Businesses close early. There are no 24-hour shops with well-organized teams of personnel. There's a guy. When it gets to be around the time he usually goes home, he goes.
My room's in a clean, expensive motel of cinder blocks and tiles, with a window that opens confusingly on an interior stairwell and a sliding door that opens on a shared verandah. After an hour or so, a group of sports fishermen settled down at the table outside my window with a huge orange cooler and began sinking beers. Fishermen whose real passion isn't fishing. They come here to drink beer like it's the end of the world and are puzzled to find themselves intermittently on a boat.
I get a map from the hotel -- a photocopied hand-drawn map with illegible street names, like a child's treasure map -- and go out to look around. The bowling club's green is a freshly-laid sheet of asphalt. The 'green fort', thrown up in the late 19th century in response to a long-forgotten peril (the Russian, as it happens) is a rough star of crumbling concrete and gun emplacements. Even with active maintenance, the jungle is taking the fort back -- breaking it down and growing over it.
Climbing across the centre of the island is a mix of bushwhacking and industrial infiltration. Up roads, across brush where a cockatoo seems to be fighting a tree, through the fort, along the mown strip around a chain-link fence, and then there's a road blocked by a construction site. An orange sign with an arrow directs "Pedestrians" into a rocky field of waist-high weeds. In the distance, orange-vested workmen stand still and watch as I clamber down the slope waving my hands in the air. There are flies on TI, and when they see you've brought 80% DEET repellent, they laugh at your adorable naivete. They buzz around, checking you out: If it would only stop moving, this would be the perfect place to lay some eggs and raise a family.
On the far side is Cook Esplanade, a potholed road that turns to dirt. Down the Esplanade are the rusted remains of a steam boiler, waist-high termite mounds, and an old track running along a ruined wharf out into the water. Partway along the wharf, ten thousand flies feast on the deflated carcass of what might once have been a dog. There's a crocodile warning sign. Though the dog probably now does this more effectively, someone has tried to emphasize the sign by painting "SIGN->" on a nearby rock. Back towards the main road is a boat ramp and a cluster of fire pits. A sign says, "Discarding of turtle and dugong remains in this area is unlawful. Offenders are liable to a maximum fine of $1000." It's bilingual in English and Torres Island Creole: "Youpla nor lau por sake gus, ban ar shel blo tortoi ene gus en bon blo dugong lo dis place. Bumbai you gor pay fine $1000".
The cemetery is famous for the care lavished on graves and the tokens or grave goods left on them. Some are invisible under heaps of fresh flowers, others under dead ones. There are toy cars and mounds of seashells. Newer gravestones have photographs of the deceased and colourful inlays. The place as a whole is a bit anarchic; no one is taking care of the cemetery as a whole. Older graves are ruined and weed-covered, and those of the Japanese pearl divers have tumbled down and become completely overgrown.
Along the main road are signs for "10,000 steps", a program that rather forlornly tries to convince the islanders to walk more. There's a bench, a water fountain, and directions to the next sign, where there will be more water and more encouragement. You can walk anywhere on the island in twenty minutes or so, but no one ever does. It seems ridiculous, but, after you've walked around the island once or twice in the humidity and the flies, it's harder to believe that you would do any differently.
The island's prospects as a tourist centre seem middling. The fishing is supposed to be good, but "fishing" seems to be mostly wearing orange and getting hammered, and there are other places for that, most of which don't have man-eating crocodiles. There's an expensive new cultural centre, but it was closed when I walked by, because the guy who does the culture goes home at 3. The dugong-carcass processing area is a romantic little spot, but the world has many. The outer islands (and I did look into it) are difficult and expensive to get to.
To get from TI to Brisbane, you walk to the wharf, take a ferry to Horn Island, take a bus to the airport, catch a flight to Cairns, switch to a flight to Brisbane, and then take a taxi. Seating on the ferry was a semicircle of plastic chairs bolted to the top of the boat. Beside me was an old islander woman holding a huge plush crocodile. She squinted wisely at the sky and said it was about to rain again, which it didn't. She muttered pleasantly but unintelligibly at me throughout the trip. No one outdoes me in incomprehensibility; I had a confused half-smile and a sympathetic grunt ready every time.
The tiny airport on Horn Island has two rooms full of plastic lawn chairs separated by a security check-point, through which people blithely wander to buy sandwiches or say goodbyes. Check-in was efficient and friendly, delayed briefly by a friendly but spirited discussion about whether enormous plush crocodiles are carry-on luggage (they are).
The people are Melanesians -- related to people from Papua, the Solomons, and Fiji, and not to (other) aboriginal Australians -- who opted to stay with Australia when Papua New Guinea became independent. Thursday Island has the biggest settlement, with around 3600 people. It was once a centre for pearling, which supplied mother-of-pearl for shirt buttons and Victorian knick knacks. Pearling was one of the 19th century's more dismal jobs, combining overwork and overcrowding with shark attacks and decompression sickness. Then the plastic shirt button was invented, and did for Thursday Island what the silk hat did for Canadian fur towns. Now, the island produces crayfish, but mostly seems to get by on public spending. Wikipedia cites visits by Somerset Maugham (d. 1965) and Banjo Paterson (d. 1941) as evidence of its "fast-developing" tourism industry.
No one seems sure how the islands were named -- William Bligh comes up a bit -- but they were clearly coming thick and fast. You can look at a map and see the effort diminish. Prince of Wales Island, Horn Island, Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, Friday Island, and then islands named after assorted crew members who were probably standing nearby.
Thursday Island's a town of churches and drive-through liquor stores. The main strip also has a supermarket, a general store with huge knives and a fondue pot in the window, a "bazaar", a clothing store that's also the office of the member of parliament, and the shire council office, with windows displaying two Battle of the Bands trophies. Windows have heavy wire mesh to protect against cyclones. There are several social support agencies, whose windows offer advice on diabetes and legal problems. One window has real estate listings, and real estate isn't cheap: $300k or $400k might be average. Businesses close early. There are no 24-hour shops with well-organized teams of personnel. There's a guy. When it gets to be around the time he usually goes home, he goes.
My room's in a clean, expensive motel of cinder blocks and tiles, with a window that opens confusingly on an interior stairwell and a sliding door that opens on a shared verandah. After an hour or so, a group of sports fishermen settled down at the table outside my window with a huge orange cooler and began sinking beers. Fishermen whose real passion isn't fishing. They come here to drink beer like it's the end of the world and are puzzled to find themselves intermittently on a boat.
I get a map from the hotel -- a photocopied hand-drawn map with illegible street names, like a child's treasure map -- and go out to look around. The bowling club's green is a freshly-laid sheet of asphalt. The 'green fort', thrown up in the late 19th century in response to a long-forgotten peril (the Russian, as it happens) is a rough star of crumbling concrete and gun emplacements. Even with active maintenance, the jungle is taking the fort back -- breaking it down and growing over it.
Climbing across the centre of the island is a mix of bushwhacking and industrial infiltration. Up roads, across brush where a cockatoo seems to be fighting a tree, through the fort, along the mown strip around a chain-link fence, and then there's a road blocked by a construction site. An orange sign with an arrow directs "Pedestrians" into a rocky field of waist-high weeds. In the distance, orange-vested workmen stand still and watch as I clamber down the slope waving my hands in the air. There are flies on TI, and when they see you've brought 80% DEET repellent, they laugh at your adorable naivete. They buzz around, checking you out: If it would only stop moving, this would be the perfect place to lay some eggs and raise a family.
On the far side is Cook Esplanade, a potholed road that turns to dirt. Down the Esplanade are the rusted remains of a steam boiler, waist-high termite mounds, and an old track running along a ruined wharf out into the water. Partway along the wharf, ten thousand flies feast on the deflated carcass of what might once have been a dog. There's a crocodile warning sign. Though the dog probably now does this more effectively, someone has tried to emphasize the sign by painting "SIGN->" on a nearby rock. Back towards the main road is a boat ramp and a cluster of fire pits. A sign says, "Discarding of turtle and dugong remains in this area is unlawful. Offenders are liable to a maximum fine of $1000." It's bilingual in English and Torres Island Creole: "Youpla nor lau por sake gus, ban ar shel blo tortoi ene gus en bon blo dugong lo dis place. Bumbai you gor pay fine $1000".
The cemetery is famous for the care lavished on graves and the tokens or grave goods left on them. Some are invisible under heaps of fresh flowers, others under dead ones. There are toy cars and mounds of seashells. Newer gravestones have photographs of the deceased and colourful inlays. The place as a whole is a bit anarchic; no one is taking care of the cemetery as a whole. Older graves are ruined and weed-covered, and those of the Japanese pearl divers have tumbled down and become completely overgrown.
Along the main road are signs for "10,000 steps", a program that rather forlornly tries to convince the islanders to walk more. There's a bench, a water fountain, and directions to the next sign, where there will be more water and more encouragement. You can walk anywhere on the island in twenty minutes or so, but no one ever does. It seems ridiculous, but, after you've walked around the island once or twice in the humidity and the flies, it's harder to believe that you would do any differently.
The island's prospects as a tourist centre seem middling. The fishing is supposed to be good, but "fishing" seems to be mostly wearing orange and getting hammered, and there are other places for that, most of which don't have man-eating crocodiles. There's an expensive new cultural centre, but it was closed when I walked by, because the guy who does the culture goes home at 3. The dugong-carcass processing area is a romantic little spot, but the world has many. The outer islands (and I did look into it) are difficult and expensive to get to.
To get from TI to Brisbane, you walk to the wharf, take a ferry to Horn Island, take a bus to the airport, catch a flight to Cairns, switch to a flight to Brisbane, and then take a taxi. Seating on the ferry was a semicircle of plastic chairs bolted to the top of the boat. Beside me was an old islander woman holding a huge plush crocodile. She squinted wisely at the sky and said it was about to rain again, which it didn't. She muttered pleasantly but unintelligibly at me throughout the trip. No one outdoes me in incomprehensibility; I had a confused half-smile and a sympathetic grunt ready every time.
The tiny airport on Horn Island has two rooms full of plastic lawn chairs separated by a security check-point, through which people blithely wander to buy sandwiches or say goodbyes. Check-in was efficient and friendly, delayed briefly by a friendly but spirited discussion about whether enormous plush crocodiles are carry-on luggage (they are).
