Mapping the once and future strait: Place, time, and Torres Strait from the sixteenth century to the Pleistocene

ABSTRACT

Thematically, this article tracks European imagining, ‘discovery’, naming, and mapping of the geographical space between modern Papua New Guinea and Australia – called Torres Strait since the 1770s – and the local encounters with places and people which enabled or constrained that knowing from the early sixteenth century. The methodological focus is materiality. This cartographic knowledge was generated empirically in embodied encounters; materialized in charts, writings, or drawings; reinscribed materially in maps and globes; and translated into virtual materiality via high resolution digital imaging. The theoretical focus is time. Suspending awareness of later outcomes and nomenclatures, I approximate pasts as they might have seemed to diverse contemporary protagonists. This anti-teleological history is nonetheless episodic and chronologically sequential. I conclude by acknowledging other chrono-logics – Indigenous, Ethnographic, Archaeological, and digital – which enfold that conventional trajectory and qualify or disrupt History's linear temporality.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• materiality
• place
• time
• agency
• Torres Strait

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge funding by the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP1094562) and research support from the National Library of Australia which awarded me a Harold White Fellowship in 2010 to work on the Library's remarkable Maps collection. Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Capitalized, History and Historical signify the academic discipline formalized from the early nineteenth century in Europe and North America and subsequently globalized. Upper-case Ethnography/Ethnographic and Archaeology/Archaeological also connote formal disciplines.

2 The Englishman Flinders (1814a, xxiii, xxv), who sailed thrice through Torres Strait and as a midshipman with Bligh in 1792 endured a concerted canoe-borne attack from Zagai, echoed the Spanish opinion: the Islanders’ bows were ‘so strong, that no man in the ship could bend one;’ their clubs were ‘powerful weapons’.

3 Violent encounters with Indigenous Oceanian people are similarly commemorated in Magellan's Islas de los Ladrones (Islands of Thieves) for Guam; Schouten and Le Maire's Verraders Eylandt (Traitors Island) for Niuatoputapu in Tonga; Moordenaars Rivier (Murderers River), also on New Guinea's southwest coast; and Tasman's Moordenaers Baij (Murderers Bay) for Golden Bay in New Zealand.

4 Haddon (1901–35, vol. 1, 208, 238–247) defined ‘Daudai’ as the Islanders’ name for an area of coastal Papua southwest of Kiwai Island. The word koi (kai) means ‘large, great, big’ and magi (mugi) ‘small’ in the Mabuiag dialect of the Western Kala Lagaw Ya language (vol. 3, 103, 109).

5 Mid-sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscript maps depict a large, unnamed underwater bank south of Timor (Cortesão and Teixeira da Mota 1960–62, vol. 1, plate 97; vol. 2, plates 105, 156). Gerritsz’s (1622) map of the South Sea is the earliest I know to name it Sahul.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP1094562).