108 Australian Geographic
Torres Strait Islander culture
is loud and proud. At the
Winds of Zenadth Cultural festival on
Thursday Island, dancers strut with
painted faces, wearing elaborate
headgear that ranges from traditional
white-feathered dhari headdresses and
dark crowns of cassowary feathers to
contemporary depictions of constellations,
totems, and even boats and planes.
Aaron Whap from the Kigu Dance team, from Mabuiag Island,
performs the Aeroplane Dance that retells the story of the
Japanese bombing raids during WWII.The Torres Strait islands are an archipelago of more
than 274 islands lying in the narrow passage of water
that separates Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula and
New Guinea. The sound, colour and movement of their
biennial festival vividly illustrates the renaissance of an
ancient culture. Named after Zenadth Kes – the Islander
name for Torres Strait – the event has been going from
strength to strength for 32 years. Its dance teams are
well-oiled machines, performing local stories of mythol-
ogy, astronomy, totems and the four winds of Zenadth
in perfect unison to the resonating thump of the long,
wooden warup drum. The air is filled with the haunt-
ing wail of singers belting out ancient songs in language.
(Two Indigenous languages are spoken on Torres Strait
islands – Kala Lagaw Ya and Meriam Mir. There are
also six dialects of Creole, which blends English with
the local language.) The dancing starts early in the
morning and goes until late at night.
One of the architects of the festival, the late Ephraim
Bani (chief of the Wagadagam clan and a renowned cul-
tural adviser and linguist ), once said: “The past must
exist, for the present to create the future.” The phrase is
engraved on a boulevard on the waterfront at Thursday
Island (TI), one of Torres Strait’s main islands.)DQQLQJWKHI ODPHV
Ephraim’s son Gabriel Bani likens his culture’s revival to
a fire. “Dad said the wisdom of the Elders is the firewood,
and he said his job was to push the wood into the fire and
fan the f lames,” says Gabriel, a cultural adviser and coun-
cillor of the Torres Shire Council, which organises the
festival. “Now he’s gone, that job falls in our lap.”Torres Strait life changed forever in the early
19th century. European ships began passing through
en route from Brisbane and Sydney to Asia (see Putting
Australia on the map, page 86); the sea cucumber and
trochus shell industries arrived; then missionaries, colo-
nisation and the pearling industry swiftly followed. Inter-
marriages took place and aspects of traditional culture
were lost. “Our Torres Strait Islander culture was in
serious danger,” Gabriel explains. “And that’s why Dad
and the other Elders put on the first festival in 1987. Their
main aim was to revive our culture.”
Li ke much of Abor ig ina l cu lt ure, Tor res St ra it Isla nder
culture was profoundly affected by colonisation, and later
by legislation such as the Aborigines Protection Act 1909,
which allowed the Protection Board to remove children
from their families – a policy that led to the Stolen Gen-
erations and fractured many Torres Strait and
Aboriginal families. “With the missionaries taking over,
all the cultural practices were seen as pagan,” Gabriel
explains. “They got rid of the traditional meeting places,
the sacred places, known as the kwods, and they put
curfews on us at night.”