Torres Islands - History

History

According to the meagre archaeological data currently available regarding the prehistory of this group, the Torres Islands were probably first populated around 3200 years ago. There is abundant evidence (both archaeological and oral) that prior to contact with Europeans the settlement pattern of the Torres Islands was quite different from the coastal villages of today. Most villages and extended family areas (nakamals, or ‘gemël’) were apparently located on higher ground, away from the shore, and were inhabited by fewer people. Thus, the surface area of the islands would probably have been dotted with small clearings in the middle of which one could find a handful of households and ritual spaces.

The Torres Islands were discovered by Portuguese explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailing in the Queirós expedition of 1606. This navigator also discovered the Strait that bears his name between New Guinea and Australia. Other European explorers reached the islands in the 19th century, but were quickly incorporated into the sphere of influence of the Melanesian Mission in the early 1880s. It was as a result of the pressure applied by the Mission that Torres people began to concentrate in coastal settlements, where they could be more easily accessed and controlled by outsiders. It was also at this time that a Torres islander, known today by his Christianised name of Adams Tuwia, was first taken to the Mission's headquarters on Norfolk Island, where he eventually became ordained a priest. However, the first Melanesian to be ever be ordained a priest was George Sarawia, from the neighbouring Banks Islands, where the Anglicans had set up their regional centre of operations. Importantly, as a result of this strategy the Mission's leadership decided to adopt the language of Mota Island (in the Banks) as the language of choice for translating and transmitting the word of God across the broader Banks, Torres and Temotu region. Thus, according to local accounts, the teaching of Mota in the Torres mission school continued up until the early 1970s, and for this reason it is still possible to find several elder Torres Islanders who are partly fluent in Mota.

Notwithstanding the presence of the Mission in the late nineteenth century, the first non-local missionary to actually reside in the Torres for an extended period only arrive in the opening decade of the 20th century. This was the Rev. Walter John Durrad, who lived on Tegua and then moved to Lo between the years 1905 and 1910. The first permanent mission station and church-house of the Torres Islands was originally established by Durrad on the south coast of Tegua, but was eventually moved to Vipaka, on the south west side of Lo, following an apparent rumour of incestuous behaviour by the high chief of Tegua, whose sin was judged to be too abhorrent for the sensitivity of the Mission's leadership. More importantly, during this time - between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth - the population of the Torres Islands suffered catastrophic decline as a combined result of the various epidemic diseases that were introduced by Europeans and the accelerated out-migration provoked by Blackbirding. According to vaguely worded Mission records located at the Diocese of Banks and Torres headquarters on Sola (Vanua Lava), at some time in the early 1930s the total population of the Torres group numbered no more than 56 persons. Hence, the subsequent recovery of the indigenous population of these islands, along with the continuity of linguistic and cultural values that they still exhibit, can be described as nothing less than remarkable. Despite the fact that they belonged to a broader regional complex of human and material exchanges that extended well into present-day Temotu province (in the Solomons), the Torres Islands eventually became part of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides in 1906, and were subsequently incorporated into the Republic of Vanuatu in 1980.