Thursday I’m in love: Australia’s most exotic island
Thursday Island - the bluest waters you'll see outside of Tahiti.
FAR
from the typical tourist haunts of Queensland is an island with a
strong indigenous culture, an island frozen in time yet in the throes of
a real-estate boom.
A place where children run
free yet address visitors as “madam” or “sir”, of undulating green hills
and soft, sandy beaches surrounded by tropical waters full of dugong
and turtles.However, this is no ordinary backwater paradise. It’s home to the only significant Australian town straddling an international border and as such is a vital border security asset and economic bridge. It’s Thursday Island, or TI to the locals – one of 274 sun-kissed islands in the Torres Strait, the blindingly blue body of water dividing Papua New Guinea and Cape York Peninsula. And it might well be the most exotic and peculiar place to visit in all of Queensland.
Fishing on the edge of a jetty on Thursday Island.
Into the blue
The
infrastructure is unmistakably Australian, but the little airport
terminal on Horn Island, gateway to the Torres Strait, has a foreign
feel.
The locals are Melanesian, while the Westerners among them bear the swagger of outback station workers.
Our
luggage is delivered on a trailer to the front of the terminal, where a
woman in floral dress sells coach-ferry combo tickets to TI. After
boarding the bus I check my phone. The telco reception, surprisingly, is
as strong as in metropolitan areas.A five-minute ride ends at a small ferry terminal surrounded the bluest waters I have seen outside Tahiti. Standing on the stern of the ferry under the tropical sun in the middle of the Australian winter nearly makes a trip up here worthwhile on its own.
I’ve booked a tour of TI with Sandie Edwards of Torres Strait Tours. Sandie is the grand dame of TI, an icon who relocated here with her family in the 1980s and never looked back.
“TI
is beautiful. The diving and fishing are world class,” she says. “But,
in truth, we don’t get many tourists because the infrastructure isn’t
set up that way and there’s no real marketing.”
With tourism still
in its infancy, Sandie’s primary income – and that of most residents of
TI – comes from tropical rock lobsters.The largest and fastest growing of all lobster species, painted crays, as they’re called here, are in hot demand on mainland China.
They net the island $35 million a year and have made millionaires out of the most adroit local divers. Among them is Tony Assan, a TI elder who Sandie has asked to show me the sights.
Historic
Green Hill Fort on Thursday Island with 6-inch gun pointing out to see,
built in 1892 to defend against a Russian invasion that never happened.
Museums and forts
For
an island less than 4sq km in size, TI sure has a lot of public
servants. There are 47 government departments, a bureaucratic zoo with
army barracks, a naval training base, customs and border protection
offices, fisheries, maritime safety and federal police, too.
“PNG
and Indonesia are only four hours by dinghy to the north, so there’s a
huge risk from smugglers, poachers and disease like foot and mouth,”
Tony says. “The Government has to spend a ton of money here to protect
the rest of the country.”It’s also spending a ton on property. Tony has been offered $1.2 million for his family home, while his son unloaded a weatherworn prefab house to the police force for $700,000.
“We don’t have much crime on this island because there’s no unemployment,” Tony says. “Anyone can go crayfishing and make a buck or just reel some Spanish mackerel like these folk,” he says, pointing to a young family fishing by the water’s edge. “We have food everywhere here – oysters, octopus, fish, even deer. If we want some meat we don’t go the butcher. We go hunting instead.”
After stopping at the Gab Titui Cultural Centre to see an exhibition on masks, we drive up to Battery Point, the highest point on TI. It’s the site of Green Hill Fort, a historical structure with six-inch guns built in 1892 due to fears of a Russian invasion.
There’s a small underground museum packed with period memorabilia, though it’s the view that’s worth writing home about. From here one can see dozens of islands: Hammond, home to mixed-race descendants of Filipino migrants from the 1800s; Friday, where a Japanese man runs a pearl farm and gallery store; and Prince of Wales, a mountainous colossus where Tony and his kin hunt for deer.
In the far distance we can see the tip of Cape York and around us, in every direction, bright turquoise seas.
Torres Strait islanders celebrating the annual Coming of the Light festival.
The Japanese connection
Tony
drives me to a 200-year-old cemetery and shows me a large Japanese
memorial obelisk. Adorned with a sculpture of an old-style diving
helmet, it offers a window to the strait’s storied relationship with the
world.
Portuguese explorers discovered the Torres Strait in the
1600s, though it wasn’t until 1871 that first contact with islanders was
made, when British evangelists landed on Darnley Island, 200km east of
TI. The locals, fierce headhunters, accepted the evangelist’s copy of
the Bible, bringing an end to cannibalism and sorcery in the strait.
Remembered as the “Coming of the Light”, the event is celebrated on TI
on July 1 every year with a day of feasting.Vast quantities of pearl shells were discovered in the Torres Strait in the 1890s. The commodity was shipped to Europe where it was used to make shirt buttons, and it turned tiny TI into the economic hub of northern Australia. The boom attracted thousands of divers from Japan who worked as indentured labourers in what was one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Shark attacks were a constant but decompression sickness become an epidemic. The 700 Japanese graves at the cemetery are thought to be the tip of the iceberg.
During World War II, islanders of Japanese heritage were interned on mainland prison camps due to fears they might aid the enemy.
Ironically it was their descendants’ graves that spared TI from Japanese bombing in the following years, while neighbouring Horn Island was blown to smithereens.
Many of these prisoners of war returned to TI in the late 1940s but were later made redundant by another cruel twist of fate: the introduction of cheap plastic in the 1950s that replaced pearl shells in buttons.
The cemetery on TI also has Muslim and Chinese sections, each with their own stories.
A blood red sunset on Thursday Island.