Exploring the islands of the Torres Strait

Take a look. Go on. What do you think that island is made of?” asked my guide Dirk Laifoo, handing me a pair of binoculars and gesturing northward. I took them and squinted at a jagged mass of dark brown bobbing on the open sea. My mouth fell open.
“It’s… metal,” I said slowly, then peered closer. “Are they baskets or something?” This small island, scorched by the sun and cast adrift in one of the most remote stretches of water in northern Australia, looked like something left behind from a Mad Max film.
“They’re the baskets that people used to hold pearl shells in,” Dirk nodded. “The workers at the pearl farm piled them up here for decades, and eventually they became an island of their own. Ecologically, it’s quite healthy now.”
I looked through the binoculars again and saw that bright corals clung to the darkest baskets at the bottom. Moving my eyes upwards, I spied tiny terns with fierce beaks perched atop the pile. It would not be the last occasion during my time in the Torres Strait Islands that my jaw was left hanging.
This clutch of some 274 tropical isles languishes between the northern tip of Australia’s Cape York and Papua New Guinea, and just 17 of them are inhabited. Across these you’ll find distinct cultures, languages and histories, yet the area is little explored by tourists, who only tend to venture as far north as Queensland’s glitzy Great Barrier Reef or the lush Daintree rainforest. The Strait is a more rugged prospect. It is a place where seawater pumps through the veins of islanders and the practices of navigating by the stars, reading the tides or fishing for trochus shells and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber) still thrive.

Many locals have links to the sea. Dirk’s great grandfather came over from China to set up in Queensland’s Palmer River Goldfields, but he ended up buying a small fleet of pearling luggers to try his hand at diving for the Strait’s coveted Pinctada maxima – the largest pearl oyster in the world.
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, huge quantities of mother-of-pearl shell were exported from northern Australia. It was a lucrative but perilous industry. Men walked the seabeds in heavy copper helmets, facing off with crocodiles, sharks and sea snakes. When the shallows were picked clean, pearlers were forced to dive off the continental shelf, a legendary place known as the ‘Darnley Deep’. It is an area so cavernous that many succumbed to the bends just trying to resurface, or simply drowned.
At the cemetery on Thursday Island (Waiben), the biggest hub on the Torres Strait, I came across a memorial dedicated to over 700 divers who died while fishing for pearls in the region. The archipelago is riddled with these hidden histories, little known to outsiders. As I explored, I began to find myself as captivated by these as the islands’ mangroves and wildlife.

Culture capital

The Strait’s main township sprawls across Thursday Island (TI), which is home to some 3,500 people. Many are government employees. The archipelago’s position – just a dinghy ride from Papua New Guinea – has long had strategic importance: firstly to the trade ships of the 1800s, and now for Australian defence and biosecurity. But it was clear from the moment I arrived that this was more than just an administrative hub.

From the wharf a sliver of beach on the mainland was still visible across the Strait. An old guy in a straw hat and chinos was taking pictures of seagulls while a small child hopped about in the shallows waving a snorkel next to a yellow sign that read: ‘Warning, Achtung, Crocodiles Inhabit This Area’. It was hot and humid. The slow putter of engines purred in the air and a man in a red tin boat leant over his hull to tug on a single fishing line draped in the water. The message was loud and clear: life here is slow; there is no need to rush.
Further into town, a few minutes’ walk from the wharf, the island remained green and tropical. Hairy coconuts speckled the middle of an empty road and red dragonflies, like flying poppies, motored through the air outside the small minimarket, their presence signalling the shift from the wet season to the dry.

The sun was beating down hard, yet the island’s 10km looping trail proved irresistible. I made it far enough around to spy witchy mangrove forests and black flying foxes roosting in the shadowy treetops overhead before the heat got too intense. The laid-back island atmosphere was clearly contagious and I turned back towards town. Besides, something else had caught my eye instead.
I made my way to Australia’s northernmost pub, the slightly battered Torres Hotel. This is one of the most isolated places on the planet to have a pint, but the locals I spoke to had other ideas.
“It’s too built up,” they agreed, saying that people from the outlying islands considered a trip to TI to be “going into town”.
Busy or not, the islands are a rich meeting point for languages, cultures and opinions. This is where two First Nations communities – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander – mingle and people sing loudly and proudly here about their heritage. As I strolled around I saw the names of ancestral villages written on pastel-painted front doors. Statues dedicated to ancestors were lovingly presented in front gardens and garlanded with flowers and gleaming pearl shells.
The fusion of cultures was most audible in the collision of Creole and English that drifted from busy street-side tables. Even the community notices, pinned here and there, revealed Japanese art galleries, Christian bookshops and community-centre events focused on healthcare for Torres Strait Islanders. Yet, for all the islands feel like their own world, they are far from cut off.
When I visited, Australia’s general election was in full swing and many locals wore T-shirts bearing political slogans or carted billboards onto rickety, sun-bleached ferries. It was also the 30th anniversary of the landmark ‘Mabo decision’, when a local Meriam man from Murray (Mer) island, Eddie Koiki Mabo, successfully fought at the High Court for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights to be acknowledged. He is something of a hero in the Strait, and flags and posters everywhere recalled the moment with pride.

Staying afloat

One constituency that doesn’t care much for politics are the crocodiles that shelter in the island’s creeks, their armoured tails stretched idly across the sun-baked mud flats. The same goes for the deadly box and irukandji jellyfish that are known to hang still beneath the surface of the seas. As Dirk and I made our boat trip around the islands, I kept my eyes peeled warily for both. Along the way, turtles upped their periscope heads to observe us and huge jabiru storks moved on spindly legs through the shallows as showers of fish leapt from the water in silvery arches of tossed glitter.
Dirk told me how, long ago, his father had brought horses over from the Australian mainland, swimming them through shark-infested waters: first to Friday Island, then to the larger Prince of Wales Island (Muralag). I asked him how his father had kept them from getting eaten. He raised two fingers in tandem, like a pistol, and pointed them down to the water.
As we motored onwards, a boat sped quickly past. Two men in vests smiled and raised their hands in greeting.
“They’ve been hunting for dugong,” Dirk smiled, explaining that only Torres Strait Islander people are allowed to catch dugong and turtle here. I asked him how the meat tasted.
“It’s a bit like beef,” he pondered. “We slow-cook it and make it into steaks. The rind is a bit like pork, but you can’t make crackling out of it, thankfully, otherwise the poor animals would be extinct!”
As the sun began to dip, I started to notice the bones of old shipwrecks on some of the beaches. We pulled in closer to one that was tipped on its side. Its rusting beams protruded like the ribs of a huge whale skeleton. These had been intentionally sunk to provide nursing grounds for new coral and marine life. We peered into the water to see long pipefish nibbling the spoils and oysters clinging to the hulls like giant sequins.
But not every shipwreck here is intentional. For seafaring vessels, the Torres Strait remains one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world. “Even I don’t know where all the sandbars are,” admitted Dirk. “I have to feel my way through. I’m always learning.” 

Many of the islands here – Prince of Wales, Thursday, Badu, Mabuiag and Dauan – are remnants of the Great Dividing Range, a 3,500km-long string of mountains. The waters around them churn and froth with powerful, unpredictable currents and whirlpools. Some islands are even being slowly submerged as sea levels rise, with many communities banding together to build important sea walls to protect low-lying mangrove islands from disappearing entirely.
Occasionally, as we circumnavigated these, I’d spot a lighthouse jutting out from the dense forest. They were dotted all around the archipelago to help ships navigate the reefs, sandbars and spits. Locals traditionally crossed these waters in light outrigger canoes; now heavy commercial ships must be piloted through by expert sailors who know every obstacle that lurks beneath the surface.
“The engine of my boat cut out once, and within seconds I was pulled metres down the channel,” Dirk told me as our hull was nibbled at by the teeth of a whirlpool. He then offered up a piece of advice: “If you fall in or wreck, just let the current take you and slowly swim with it, if you can, towards land.”
This was the nightmare that passengers faced during one of Australia’s worst maritime tragedies, which occurred not far from Thursday Island’s shores. On a moonlit night on the last day of February 1890, the mail steamer RMS Quetta, bound for London, struck an uncharted rock and sank within minutes. Of the 292 people on board, 134 lost their lives. A moving memorial to those who died is found in the Anglican church precinct in town. Another reminder that life here isn’t always so quiet.

The sound of bombs

Back in the 1940s, war came to the Strait. Even before that, conflict had been rife for generations in the form of tribal rivalries and European ambition. The imposing Green Hill Fort on Thursday Island is one relic of those days, built in 1893 to defend local shipping lanes from the Russians after the outbreak of the Crimean War. But it was during the Second World War that combat arrived with the biggest bang.
Horn Island (Ngarupai), just a short ferry ride from TI, was home to Australia’s most sophisticated operational airbase during the war. By the end of 1942, there were 5,000 troops stationed on the island, many of them local Torres Strait Islanders.
“Horn is like a time capsule for the Second World War,” explained local guide Vanessa Seekee as she drove me around the island. “Everything’s still out there in the bush: trenches, gunner placements, planes, underground rooms, artillery sites, bullets and shells.”
Looking around today, it was bizarre to think that during this period the Torres Strait was the second most bombed area in Australia, after the port city of Darwin. I spent a whole morning with Seekee uncovering discarded fuel drums, signal stations and aircraft wreckage, following roads and tracks built by hard-toiling troops. It was a fitting end to a visit that had been filled with unexpected finds.
Before I left, I thought back to the conversations I’d had before travelling here. Many of those I’d spoken to knew little about the Torres Strait; much less how to get there, what it looked like or even how to point to it on a map. But I had found so much here. This is a place of rugged beauty, filled with Indigenous, colonial and maritime histories. Every shore and untouched tangle of forest and mangrove seemed to tell a story; to hear them, all I’d had to do was listen.