Thursday Island Cemetery
Thursday Island Cemetery is a heritage-listed cemetery at Summers Street, Thursday Island, Shire of Torres, Queensland, Australia. It was established and includes the Japanese Cemetery and grave of the Hon. John Douglas. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
History
Thursday Island Cemetery was established, ten years after the formation of a permanent settlement on the island. It contains hundreds of graves, including between 600 and 700 Japanese, entrepreneurs and fortune hunters of all nationalities, Torres Strait pilots, sailors and ships' passengers drowned at sea, as well as generations of Thursday Islanders. The Hon. John Douglas, a former Premier of Queensland and long-term Government Resident on Thursday Island, is buried in the cemetery.Thursday Island is located within the Prince of Wales group, just off the northwest tip of Cape York Peninsula. Although one of the smallest of the Torres Strait Islands, Thursday Island is the principal port and administrative centre for the district. It is also Queensland's and Australia's most northern town.
The original inhabitants of the Muralag islands, the Kaurareg people, shared some cultural characteristics with Cape York Aborigines and spoke the same basic Australian language, Kalaw Lagaw Ya. However, they were a maritime people who lived from harvesting the sea, shifting camp sites regularly. Wai-ben had no permanent water supply, and no permanent Kaurareg settlement was established there.
During the first half of the 19th century British shipping began to make regular use of Torres Strait, entering into a passing trade with the Islanders. Colonial occupation commenced in the 1860s and 1870s with the arrival of beche-de-mer crews, pearl-shellers, Protestant missionaries from the southwestern Pacific, and government officials.
Queensland had no jurisdiction over the Torres Strait until its annexation in 1872 of the islands of the southern half of the Strait, a measure intended largely to protect Queensland interests in the pearl-shelling and beche-de-mer fisheries in the Strait and along the Great Barrier Reef, and to regulate the employment of South Sea Islanders in these enterprises. At annexation, Torres Strait Islanders acquired the same official status as mainland Aborigines.
The official Queensland Government settlement at Somerset on Cape York was established in 1864, but was moved in 1877 to the newly surveyed town of Port Kennedy on the southern side of Thursday Island. The new location provided a sheltered, deepwater anchorage, and was more centrally located along the main shipping route through the inner channel of Torres Strait – the principal trade route to Asia and the northern route to England. The first sale of crown land at Port Kennedy was held in April 1878. Although only sections 1–3 at the southwest end of the town were offered for sale, allotments in these sections were eagerly purchased by Queensland entrepreneurs.
In 1879, at British Colonial Office direction, Queensland jurisdiction was extended to the islands of the northern half of the Torres Strait. This enabled Britain to secure the Torres Strait shipping channel without having to annex New Guinea.
By 1884 Port Kennedy was the principal port for cargo and passengers being trans-shipped to Normanton, and was the hub of the pearl-shell and beche-de-mer fisheries in the Torres Strait. The town had a permanent population of about 70, and served a district of nearly 700 inhabitants. In addition, within from 3 to of Thursday Island pearl-shell and beche-de-mer fishing stations were employing about 1500 people of all races. In late 1884, for example, about 100 Japanese divers were recorded at Thursday Island. At this period about 800 or 900 tons of shell were exported annually to New South Wales, Britain and other places, and the Queensland Government was collecting substantial revenue from licenses.
A local census taken identified over 300 persons resident on Thursday Island, comprising "whites", Malays, Manilla, Chinese, Japanese, East Indian, Arabs, and "natives". Further successful sales of crown land at Port Kennedy were held in January 1885 and September 1888, and by 1890 the island's population had grown to 526, composed of Europeans, Chinese, Torres Strait Islanders and Aborigines, South Sea Islanders, Malays, Filipinos, Japanese, Singhalese, Indians, and a few Thais, Arabs and Africans. This ethnic and cultural mix characterised the communities of the Torres Strait prior to the Second World War.
With the expansion of non-government settlement on Thursday Island, the provision of a public cemetery became a necessity. It has not been established where the earliest burials on the island took place, but the earliest section of the present Thursday Island Cemetery – 8 acres along Summers and Blackall Streets, on a high ridge in the centre of the island – had been identified as a suitable site for a cemetery by January 1887. It was proclaimed as a permanent cemetery reserve on 8 July 1887, and in September cemetery Trustees were appointed. The trustees were drawn from amongst the town's principal "white" entrepreneurs. By the time the cemetery reserve was officially surveyed in February or March 1888, several interments had taken place and a track off Summers Street into the cemetery had been established. The trustees employed the same surveyor to survey the cemetery into denominational and/or nationality divisions at this time, but no record of this survey is known to have survived. In February 1888 the Trustees formed regulations and by-laws for the effective operation of the cemetery, and in mid-1888 paid nearly £100 for the construction of wire fencing on the reserve. By the end of 1889 a sign-board had been erected, and work had started on the formation of paths within the cemetery. During 1893, the Trustees had shade trees planted and further work on clearing and making cemetery paths was undertaken.
The Trustees soon found that much of the reserve was unsuitable for burial purposes, being too steep and rocky, which escalated the cost of burials and made drainage of the site difficult. In the wet season, the cemetery paths became gullies, and had to be repaired on a yearly basis. In the mid-1890s, as the population of Thursday Island increased rapidly, the Trustees requested two extensions to the cemetery reserve. On 11 July 1894 the reserve was doubled in size to 16 acres, with the addition of a strip of land about half the width of the existing cemetery reserve, which extended north to the military track along the foreshore. This included more level, less rocky land, and also provided access along the foreshore road to the hospital on Point Vivien, in the southwest corner of the island. The reserve was expanded yet again on 29 April 1896 to 26 acres 1 rood 4 perches, when the northern boundary of the eastern half of the reserve was also extended as far as the military road. These extensions encompassed the area now known as the Japanese Cemetery, near Aplin Road.
Japanese divers made a significant contribution to the development of the pearl-shell industry in the Torres Strait. Europeans who established the industry in the Strait in the late 1860s and early 1870s relied initially on South Sea Islander labour, who tended to dominate the Torres Strait Islanders. In the 1870s boats equipped with helmeted apparatus for divers appeared, and in the 1880s the pearl-shellers turned to a more skilled, often more daring, and less confronting labour supply – Japanese divers recruited principally from Hong Kong and Singapore. In the 1880s the proportion of Japanese divers in the Strait was no greater than any other ethnic group, but from 1891, when the Japanese Government removed its ban on emigration, numbers increased significantly. By 1893 the Japanese were the largest ethnic group in the Torres Strait pearl-shell industry, and completely dominated the industry between 1900 and 1940. By 1900 all the luggers built at Thursday Island were crafted by Japanese, and a "Japanese town", with boarding houses, a public bath, stores and a brothel, had been established at the eastern end of Port Kennedy. This was destroyed during the Second World War by American troops, who reputedly utilised the building materials for barracks.
The pearl-shell industry came to a halt during the Second World War when Naval authorities requisitioned most of the luggers. After the war there was a brief resurgence of the industry, but pearl-shelling declined dramatically in the 1960s when competition from the booming post-war plastics industry usurped traditional uses for pearl-shell, such as buttons and knife handles.
Pearl-shell diving was a hazardous occupation and fatalities were high. One source suggests over 1,000 divers lost their lives in Torres Strait to "the bends", from drowning or through shark attack. Thursday Island Cemetery contains between 600 and 700 graves bearing Japanese names. One authority records that most Japanese divers professed to be Anglicans, so that they could be buried at the Divers' Cemetery within the Thursday Island Cemetery. Certainly there was a strong Japanese presence within the Anglican community on Thursday Island. A Japanese school had been established by the Japanese community on the Anglican church precinct in Douglas Street by 1900, and the Japanese contributed to fund-raising for building the Church of England Parish Institute and various additions to the Quetta Memorial Cathedral Church in the 1890s and early 1900s.
In 1979, the Monument Building Committee of Japan erected a memorial/shrine in the Thursday Island Cemetery, to honour the hundreds of Japanese who worked, lived and died in the Torres Strait between 1878 and 1941. A resident of Japan established a trust of about $100,000 to ensure the future maintenance of the Japanese gravestones.
With the expansion of the Torres Strait pearl-shell industry in the early years of the 20th century the town of Thursday Island also grew, and a further extension to the Thursday Island Cemetery was made on 9 January 1913, with the addition of about 5 acres of mostly flat, less rocky land along Aplin Road to the west, bringing the area of the reserve to 31 acres 2 roods 9 perches. This remains the current extent of the Thursday Island Cemetery reserve. The extension was intended to accommodate mostly "pagan" burials, which constituted a large proportion of burials in the Thursday Island Cemetery at this period. From 1912 until after the Second World War, Torres Strait Islanders were prohibited from residing on Thursday Island, which accounts for the smaller proportion of Islander graves of this period in Thursday Island Cemetery.
One of the more significant graves in the cemetery is that of the Hon. John Douglas, CMG,, pastoralist, Liberal politician 1863–79, and administrator, who died on the island on 23 July 1904. He was deeply involved in developing the settlement on Thursday Island. He was an active warden in the Church of England and on 24 May 1893 laid the foundation stone of the Quetta Memorial Church. He served on various local committees, and was a Cemetery Trustee from 1889 until his death. He won the respect of the Torres Strait Islanders, who in the early 1900s funded construction of the west aisle of the Quetta Memorial Cathedral Church, dedicated in 1913 as the Douglas Memorial Chapel.
Although Thursday Island Cemetery contains hundreds of burials, the earliest of which date to at least 1887, there is no surviving record of interments prior to 1939. The Register of Interments held by Torres Shire Council starts on 31 March 1939. There are no entries between 22 July 1940 and 11 February 1948. Most Thursday Island civilians were evacuated in 1942 and did not return until 1946 or later. Thursday Island was administered by military authorities during 1942–45, and from mid-1946 to February 1948, Thursday Island Cemetery was managed by the local stipendiary magistrate. When local trustees were re-appointed early in 1948, they found that the cemetery was in poor repair, no maintenance having been carried out since 1940, and claimed £315 from the War Damage Commission to effect necessary repairs. They also discovered that the Minute Book, Cash Book and Cemetery Register to 1939, which in 1942 had been left on the island in a locked safe, were missing.
It took the Trustees some years, but by 1952 they reported that the cemetery was in good order, with fences, gates and roads repaired. The greatest difficulty was in securing grave-diggers. In the early 1960s the Trustees attempted to persuade the Thursday Island Town Council to take on the management of the cemetery, but eventually, Queensland Government officials and local priests took on the role of trustees. Despite the establishment of municipal government on Thursday Island as early as 1912, the cemetery remained the responsibility of community trustees for over a century. In 1991 Torres Shire Council assumed control of the reserve and new by-laws were gazetted.
The cemetery contains the Commonwealth war graves of four service personnel, two Royal Australian Navy sailors of World War I and two Australian Army soldiers of World War II who are buried in adjacent graves.