Tiwi Islands
The Tiwi Islands are part of the Northern Territory, Australia, to the north of Darwin adjoining the Timor Sea. They comprise Melville Island, Bathurst Island, and nine smaller uninhabited islands, with a combined area of.
Inhabited before European settlement by the Tiwi, an Aboriginal Australian people, the islands' population was 2,348 at the. National Geographic has characterised contemporary Tiwi Islands society as reflecting an enduring fusion between the indigenous Tiwi people's traditional beliefs and these later European settlers' Catholicism.
The Tiwi Land Council is one of four land councils in the Northern Territory. It is a representative body with statutory authority under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, and has responsibilities under the Native Title Act 1993 and the Pastoral Land Act 1992.
Geography and population
The Tiwi Islands were created by sea level rise at the end of the last ice age, which finished about 11,700 years ago, with the flooding occurring an estimated 8,200 to 9,650 years ago. The story of the flooding is told in Tiwi traditional stories and creation myths passed down orally from generation to generation ever since.The islands are located in the Northern Territory about to the north of the Australian mainland and are bounded by the Timor Sea in the north and the west, in the south by the Beagle Gulf, the Clarence Strait and Van Diemen Gulf and in the east by the Dundas Strait.
The island group consists of two large inhabited islands, and nine smaller uninhabited islands. Bathurst Island is the fifth-largest island of Australia and accessible by sea and air. Melville Island is Australia's second largest island.
The main islands are separated by Apsley Strait, which connects Saint Asaph Bay in the north and Shoal Bay in the south, and is between and wide, long. At the mouth of Shoal Bay is Buchanan Island, with an area of about. A car ferry at the narrowest point provides a quick connection between Melville and Bathurst Islands.
They are inhabited by the Tiwi people, as they have been for thousands of years before European settlement in Australia. The Tiwi are an Aboriginal Australian people, culturally and linguistically distinct from those of Arnhem Land on the mainland just across the water. In 2021, the total population of the islands was 2,348, of whom 87% were Aboriginal people.
Most residents speak Tiwi as their first language and English as a second language.
Most of the population live in Wurrumiyanga on Bathurst Island, and Pirlangimpi and Milikapiti on Melville Island. Wurrumiyanga has a population of nearly 1500, the other two centres around 450 each. There are other smaller settlements, including Wurankuwu Community on western Bathurst Island. According to an economic report commissioned by the Northern Territory Government, fewer than one in ten Tiwi Islanders live away from these major settlements in rural locales across the two main islands.
History
Indigenous
The Aboriginal Tiwi people have occupied the area that became the Tiwi Islands for at least 40,000 years, with creation stories relating their presence on the islands at least 7,000 years before present.Early contact with foreigners
Tiwi Islanders are believed to have had contact with Macassan traders, and the first historical record of contact between Indigenous islanders and European explorers was with the Dutch "under the command of Commander Maarten van Delft who took three ships, the Nieuw Holland, the Waijer, and the Vosschenbosch, into Shark Bay on Melville Island and landed on 30 April 1705". Van Delft remained at the Tiwi Islands for a few months but was eventually forced off after skirmishing with the Islanders resulting in two of his sailors being wounded.Claims that the pre-colonial Tiwi Islands were raided by slave traders from Portuguese Timor have been made since the early 19th century, sometimes in support of the unorthodox theory of the Portuguese discovery of Australia. Early British sources cited Portuguese slave raids as a source of the supposed hostility of Tiwi Islanders to intruders, and recounted anecdotal evidence of Tiwi Islanders who spoke words of Portuguese. However, no direct evidence exists of these practices in Portuguese sources or in Tiwi oral tradition.
There were other visits by European explorers and navigators in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including by Dutchman Pieter Pieterszoon, Frenchman Nicholas Baudin and Briton Philip Parker King.
King's was the first British expedition to interact with the Tiwi Islanders. Although the meeting of the two peoples was tense, iron tools were traded by the British for fish, water and sago. King named Melville Island, Bathurst Island and Apsley Strait on this journey.
British colonial outpost
In February 1824 Captain Gordon Bremer was appointed by the Admiralty, upon instruction from the British Colonial Office, to take possession of Bathurst and Melville Islands, along with the Cobourg Peninsula on the mainland to the east, subject to the land being unoccupied by any people except "...the Natives of those or any of the other Eastern Islands". In September 1824, Bremer established a British military outpost, which was also the first British settlement in northern Australia, at Fort Dundas on Melville Island, near present-day Pirlangimpi. Fifty Royal marines were garrisoned at the fort and within a month hostilities resulted in an Islander being shot dead. Over the next four years the Tiwi speared the livestock, tore down British huts and killed three white men. Several marines also died of malaria and Fort Dundas was subsequently abandoned in 1828. As "the first attempted European and military settlement anywhere in northern Australia", the site is on Australia's Register of the National Estate.Despite the failure of the settlement, Bremer had claimed the northern area of the continent and adjacent islands as part of New South Wales. Jurisdiction of the Northern Territory, including the Tiwi Islands was taken over by the Government of the Colony of South Australia by instruction from the Colonial Office in 1863.
Buffalo shooters
After the abandonment of Fort Dundas in 1828, no further meaningful foreign incursions occurred into the Tiwi Islands until the 1890s. By this time, the water buffalo that had been left by the British on Melville Island, had proliferated and a potential market for their meat and hides was identified. The Tiwi Islanders, however, were still regarded by the British as a fierce people and an 1888 police report stated an armed force of around twenty men would be required "to exterminate the inhabitants and gain possession of Melville Island".In 1895, Edward Oswin Robinson, Barney Flynn and Joe Cooper led an armed expedition to Melville Island assisted by "a small tribe of mainland blacks" to establish a buffalo shooting station. Within a few months, Cooper had been speared by the Tiwi but not mortally wounded. The harvesting of thousands of buffalo continued until 1896 when buffalo numbers reduced and the shooters also faced increased Tiwi resistance, resulting in Cooper and the others leaving the island.
Cooper returned to Melville Island with his brother Harry in 1905 to resume the buffalo shooting business. Before leaving the island in 1896, Cooper had kidnapped several young Tiwi men and women and infants. He used these people upon his return in 1905 as envoys and bargaining tools to ensure a peaceful re-entry. He also brought with him a group of around 20 Iwaidja men from the Cobourg Peninsula, armed with Martini-Henry rifles, who acted as his bodyguard, personal militia and buffalo shooters.
Cooper established his head-station at Paru and his riflemen subjugated the Tiwi by rape, murder and abduction. Cooper was able to maintain his brutal control until a government inquiry in 1914 forced him and his Iwaidja militia off the island.
Catholic mission
Just before the South Australian government handed over the Territory to the Federal Government of Australia in 1911, it gave notice that up to 5,000 acres of land was available north of the 18th parallel south, which included land on Bathurst Island. In September 1910 the German Catholic missionary Francis Xavier Gsell applied for a license to establish a Christian mission in a similar way to land grants made in British New Guinea. In the same month the South Australian government declared the whole of Bathurst Island an Aboriginal reserve, and granted for the mission. After earlier making his vows as a Missionary of the Sacred Heart, Bishop Francis Xavier Gsell had already become familiar with the wider region, having spent time in New South Wales in the 1890s, followed by time in New Guinea. Before his relocation to the Tiwi Islands he had also been the Northern Territory's Apostolic Administrator. The mission was established by Gsell on Bathurst Island at Nguiu in 1911. A later timber church built in the 1930s remains a prominent landmark in Wurrumiyanga.The Catholic mission had positive impacts, through access to education and welfare services, but also negative effects through the suppression of Aboriginal language and culture by some in the early days. Following growing concern around the erosion of the Tiwi people's language and culture, a concerted revitalisation effort commenced in 1975, led by both clergy and lay Catholics. The Tiwi artwork in the Catholic church, and the translation of Biblical stories into Tiwi, are both notable examples of this effort. Sister Tess Ward in particular, alongside local Tiwi women, worked to encourage the continued transmission of the Tiwi people's oral history and spent years recording Tiwi culture and language in written form.
As part of the Australian government's set of policies directed at Aboriginal Australian people, Nova Peris' mother, Joan, was raised in this mission after being taken from her mother; she was one of the Stolen Generations. The mission has since taken on a more mediagenic role, serving as a key location in the 2019 Australian romantic comedy movie Top End Wedding starring Aboriginal Australian actress Miranda Tapsell.