Totems, turtles and climate impacts on people and culture in the Torres Strait

Jade Croft

‘Where our stories come alive’ is a motto used by the National Museum of Australia (NMA), an institution that seeks to showcase Australia’s vibrant and complex past, even where this past contrasts with the sometimes-bleak uncertainty of our future. The impacts of climate change and declining biodiversity threatens entire communities, cultures and their stories and, if I’m feeling cynical, seems to offer an unfortunate reality obscured by the museum’s public relations slogan.

I write this essay far from my home in the Wet Tropics. I am in Canberra, home of the NMA. As I wade through the national stories offered up by the museum’s exhibitions and collections, I hope to find stories that reflect my own experience—that is, stories about First Nations people in Australia. I am particularly keen to find stories about Torres Strait Islanders and the Great Barrier Reef. The Torres Strait has a rich and diverse marine environment of over 680 reefs and consists of over 100 islands, 18 of which are inhabited, spread over more than 48,000 square kilometres between the southern coastline of Papua New Guinea and the tip of Cape York, Australia. The people who live there are diverse.

The museum has rich collections and visitors can learn about their own vibrant cultures through dance, song, art and artefacts. A current exhibit at the NMA called Great Southern Land aims to bring together concerns over climate change and the experience and history of human and more-than-human connections to each other and their environment. From ghost net sculptures skilfully crafted from fishing net waste by Torres Strait Islander artists, to the three life-size Orca whale replicas hanging from the ceiling, the exhibit inspired me to find a way to identify the voices and values of cultural producers from the Torres Strait. I found contemporary versions of turtle shell masks, an important cultural material for Torres Strait Islanders, and an artefact that motivated me to investigate not just cultural continuity but also the impact of climate change on the region and its culture. The research made me feel hopeful.

Adaptation and resilience

Climate change in the Torres Strait is a major concern, but it does not sit right with me that, in the media, Torres Strait Islanders are often framed as helpless victims—displaced persons in waiting who are incapable of adapting to the climatic changes already impacting their daily lives.¹ Despite good intentions, some publications even use phrases like ‘the Sinking of the Strait’,² which can encourage passivity or a view that the harmful impacts of climate change are simply inevitable, unpreventable and irreversible.

Victim narratives leave out the anthropogenic nature of climate change, as well as the adaptive capacities, resilience and strengths of these diverse and culturally rich communities. One way we can better understand these strengths is through contemporary art from Torres Strait Islanders themselves. In this essay I explore one key object from the NMA’s collection that seeks to put this story straight.

Maza Mawa

The mask pictured in Figure 1 is Maza Mawa, which means sorcerer or ‘mask of the reef’. It was crafted by Alick Tipoti, a Torres Strait Islander artist from Badu (Mulgrave Island). It is manufactured from materials such as fibreglass, resin, fibre, beads, rope and cassowary feathers. It is a continuation of the practice of crafting masks made from turtle, a traditional Torres Strait cultural material.

The thupmul (thorny or file stingray) shown at the bottom of the mask represents one of the main totems of Badu. The face in the middle is that of the storyteller. The sharp ends on both sides of the masks represent the fish tail. The cut-out wavy edges are the ripples on the sea created by a slight breeze, called ‘kaydheral’. These features demonstrate the artist’s respect for the sea and totemic animals associated with islands in the region.

Turtle shell masks were worn and used in various ceremonies, such as initiations and funerals or celebrations of different moon phases; however, none of the traditional masks remain in the Torres Strait.³ Most extant masks were collected in the nineteenth century by sailors, anthropologists, residents and missionaries.⁴ Although many masks and other cultural materials were destroyed or removed by missionaries,⁵ some masks remain, stored in various museum collections.

Figure 1: Maza Mawa.

Source: National Museum of Australia.

Turtle shell masks have always represented many different animal totems, and these masks would be donned for performance, the user ‘becoming’ the ancestral animal spirits represented. This historical use of turtle shell masks is important to artist Alick Tipoti. He makes and uses contemporary masks for performances, much as they would have been used traditionally. In 2015, Tipoti and a troupe of Zugubul dancers from Badu performed at Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In their language of Kala Lagaw Ya, they danced and sang for the masks made by Tipoti, to reunite them with the performance tradition from which they are rooted.⁶

Tipoti and traditions transformed

The lives of turtles and Islanders have been intertwined for a very long time, and Islanders’ social and cultural lives have been enriched by this relationship. Six turtle species breed or migrate through the Torres Strait.⁷ Archaeological examinations on Mer and Dauar found that use of turtle coincided with the occupation of the islands in 2600 BP,⁸ but the ceremonial use of turtle is also evidenced in oral histories and mythologies of the region. Aside from turtle shell masks, turtle was used for sculptural work, tools and status ornaments that were sophisticated in style and took great skill to craft.⁹

Tipoti’s masks bring together the spiritual and natural worlds of his Torres Strait homelands, the cultural worldview of his elders and ancestors, and techniques and materials from the contemporary art world. For example, rather than turtle shell, which is diminishing supply, he uses fibreglass for the masks. The historical commercial harvest of green turtle, marine pollution and other factors have contributed to the vulnerable conservation status of turtles in Australian waters.¹⁰

Tipoti’s mask-making not only connects to the past and highlights traditions but also showcases the resilience, adaptability and continuity of Torres Strait Islander culture and traditions. Climate change is an increasing threat to turtles and other marine species that are integral to Torres Strait Islander ecosystems, practices and cultural worldviews. Tipoti’s masks, a cultural product utilising contemporary versions of turtle shell, are witness to our survival, despite colonialism, Christianity and the changing climate. We survive and strive for resilience even in this Anthropocene.

Community and climate change

So how does this discussion of Tipoti’s mask at the NMA relate to climate change today? The totemic system exemplifies how Indigenous communities have lived in harmony with the environment for thousands of years. However, due to climate change, ancestral homelands are becoming increasingly less hospitable and ecosystems less robust and diverse. With the declining health of coral reefs, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation of ancestral homelands, Torres Strait Islanders’ health and wellbeing is similarly at risk.

In a report from 2016, the Torres Strait Regional Authority showed that severe weather and changes in ocean temperature and chemistry will negatively impact many marine species and ecosystems, in particular coral reefs, seagrass meadows (and, therefore, dugong) and turtles. The Torres Strait is the dugong capital of the world, and, as slow breeders, dugongs are vulnerable to impacts on population. Dugong is an important cultural food to Islanders, a totem and an integral part of initiation, the hunt being a rite of passage.¹¹ For turtles, climate change poses threats mostly to their breeding success. The incubation of turtle eggs is influenced by sand temperature and rising temperatures skew the gender of offspring towards female, threatening the future of turtle species. Rising sea levels and severe weather also lead to the inundation of important breeding beaches and cays, leaving eggs drowned or resulting in the loss of breeding sites altogether. These impacts could see a catastrophic decline in the northern green turtle population in coming decades.¹² From the perspective of marine species, similar to the perspective of Torres Strait Islanders, the places that are ‘home’ are at risk of being transformed or lost forever.

More hot days places stress on Islanders mentally and physically and, when combined with flooding, there is also an increased chance of disease. Without access to adequate health facilities, the physical and mental health and wellbeing of Islanders is greatly at risk. Combined, these issues make it difficult to partake in traditional practices, which in turn negatively impacts health and spiritual wellbeing. With diminishing supplies of natural resources like turtle shell, pearl shell and cassowary feathers, Islanders must find alternatives to maintain their connection to the practices of their ancestors. Islanders express concern at the rapidly changing landscape, for whereas their ancestors were adept at reading the land and its changes, now change comes unexpectedly and rapidly, causing distress and sadness.¹³

Fighting for a future: Curating and climate change

Sites of cultural diversity and political agency, museums communicate national stories to local and international audiences. They work with local communities and knowledge holders to help shape non-Indigenous Australians’ relationship to place. Through increasing collaboration with Islanders, museums are well placed to ‘extend their engagements with Islander communities to explore how the revivification of interest in Torres Strait cultural material might also contribute to or support adaptive strategies’,¹⁴ thereby giving rise to greater resilience for these groups.

In engaging with Indigenous cultural products, whether stolen, donated or commissioned, museums take up a responsibility as caretakers of past and present cultural knowledge and values. If the NMA is ‘where our stories come alive’, then it is vital that these stories are told properly and that the communities whose stories are being represented justly reveal the strength and resilience of their ancestors, themselves and the future of their communities.

Museums reveal the closeness and complexities of humans and ecosystems through art, storytelling and science. Stories that reflect our different truths shine through to empower and give agency to both visitors and cultural producers. Relational museums encourage audiences and collections, curators and designers, to be in conversation with one another, to share authority and exhibit ‘pathways through which stories flow’.¹⁵ In this way, institutional spaces such as the NMA create new communities by ‘enabling people from different cultural and social positions to come more gently into relationship with each other’,¹⁶ which is necessary for highly politicised issues such as climate change. As memory institutions, museums shape expectations and possibilities,¹⁷ making them, in part, responsible for defining the narrative and complexities around the causes and effects of climate change and how we move into the future.

In summary, it is imperative that Australians question the ‘helpless victim’ and ‘drowning islands’ narrative often portrayed of the Torres Straits and engage actively with a more hopeful future in tune with our natural environment.

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1. 1 Karen McNamara and Kevin Parnell, Constructing the Torres Strait: Report on Policy, Media and Public Opinion (Cairns: Reef and Rainforest Research Limited, 2010), 4, www.rrrc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/131-JCU-McNamara-K-et-al-2010-Constructing-the-Torres-Strait.pdf.

2. 2 Owen Cordes-Holland, ‘The Sinking of the Strait: The Implications of Climate Change for Torres Strait Islanders’ Human Rights Protected by the ICCPR’, SSRN Electronic Journal 8, no. 6 (2007): 405, doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1129087.

3. 3 Leah Lui-Chivizhe, ‘Telling Torres Strait History through Turtle’, in Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change, ed. Jennifer Newel1, Libby Robin and Kirsten Wehner (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 66.

4. 4 Bruno David, W. Bowie, M. Nomoa, P. Ahmat, J. Crouch, Liam Brady, M. Quinnell, A. Herle and I. Mcniven, ‘Archaeology of Torres Strait Turtle-Shell Masks: The Badu Cache’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 1 (2004): 20.

5. 5 Ibid., 21.

6. 6 University of Cambridge, ‘Collaborative Work with Torres Strait Islanders’, accessed 3 December 2023, maa.cam.ac.uk/research/maa-research-projects/collaborative-work-torres-strait-islanders.

7. 7 Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Masked Histories: Turtle Shell Masks and Torres Strait Islander People (Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2022), 31, doi.org/10.2307/jj.1176770.

8. 8 Melissa Carter, ‘North of the Cape and South of the Fly: Discovering the Archaeology of Social Complexity in Torres Strait’, in Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Studies, ed. Bruno David, Bryce Barker and Ian J. NcNiven (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), 297.

9. 9 Lui-Chivizhe, Masked Histories, 165.

10. 10 Ibid., 53.

11. 11 Ephraim Bani, ‘Initiation’, in Woven Histories, Dancing Lives: Torres Strait Islander Identity, Culture and History, ed. Richard Davis and Australian Institute of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), 231.

12. 12 Torres Strait Regional Authority, Torres Strait Adaptation and Resilience Plan 2016–2021 (Torres Strait Islands: Torres Strait Regional Authority, 2016), 38, apo.org.au/node/272021.

13. 13 Karen McNamara and Ross Westoby, ‘Solastalgia and the Gendered Nature of Climate Change: An Example from Erub Island, Torres Strait’, EcoHealth 8, no. 2, (June 2011): 235, doi.org/10.1007/s10393-011-0698-6.

14. 14 Lui-Chivizhe, Masked Histories, 172.

15. 15 Jennifer Newell, Libby Robbin and Kirsten Wehner, Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 31, doi.org/10.4324/9781315620770.

16. 16 Ibid., 32.

17. 17 Alex Byrne, ‘Institutional Memory and Memory Institutions’, Australian Library Journal 64, no.4 (2015): 259, doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2015.1073657.