My Island Home: A Torres Strait Memoir

By John Singe, St Lucia: UQP, 2003, 212 pages, paperback, . Reviewed by Clive Moore in the June 2004 issue.

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John Singe, a school teacher in Torres Strait, Papua New Guinea and north Queensland since 1970, is an established author of the region, having published The Torres Strait: People and History (1979), Culture in Change: Torres Strait History in Photographs (1988) and Among Islands (1993). My Island Home, as its title suggests, a memoir of his years in the Strait, 1970 to 1996. It is the story of an ordinary graduate of Brisbane's Kelvin Grove Teachers' College in 1969, who chose to be posted to Queensland's most northern outpost and stayed on, marrying twice to Strait's women. The book has a 'Boy's Own Annual' feel to it that is seldom achieved in Australia writing, but has often been duplicated in the writings of Papua New Guinea Kiaps (government officers), young Australian men thrust into unusual circumstances, or of similar men living in small Pacific Islands communities. Singe has written a history of school teaching in Torres Strait, but much more is about what a teacher does after work hours, describing an Australian man maturing in a maritime environment amongst Melanesian people. It is also a history of a society undergoing massive change and, arguably, decline. In 1970 Torres Strait was still an isolated region of Queensland with its culture changing but more or less intact. By 1996 the level of social deterioration was one of the reasons that drove Singe and his family south to Cairns.

Singe has pieced his Torres Strait years back together by using diary notes from 1970 to 1976 and letters written home to his parents, and faithfully safeguarded by his mother. This gives the book a sense of immediacy and also distance, as it is the public rather than private adventures that are recorded -- heroic tales fit to be told to the family. Because of the sources, the book is not a personal memoir. It fails to tell us much about Singe's bachelor life or his married life, although readers may suspect that his coyness guards many secrets. Instead it is the story of an outdoor man who enjoyed hunting and travelling around the islands. Thursday and Prince or Wales (Muralag) Islands, his work and living places, are the centre of the narrative, but almost all of the islands are included in his travels. The intricacies of Islander life gradually emerge from the descriptive and often quite humorous accounts.

The book is a casual ethnography and modern history of Torres Strait by a well-informed participant observer. Leading individuals are identified, which enables the reader to search for details through the index and the text, and so too are some of the odd characters who lived in this most multicultural corner of Australia, left over from its pearling days. The short sojourn spent teaching in Papua New Guinea in the mid-1970s is not well described, and has a tourist quality totally lacking in the Torres Strait part of the book. However, reactions to the Torres Strait Treaty negotiations and Papua New Guinea independence in the 1970s, and the position of the under caste of New Guineans who have slipped into life in the Strait are included, as are the campaigns for independence in the 1980s, and Singe's quite clear distaste for the unpleasant social changes that helped drive him south in the mid 1990s. Almost totally missing is the landmark 1992 High Court Mer (Murray) Island land case that altered Indigenous legal history in Australia, an indication that the actions of Torres Strait Islanders on the Australian mainland do not register largely in the Strait.

I learnt a great deal about Torres Strait from reading Singe's book, and have had to revise many of my impressions of the contemporary scene. If I learnt one thing totally new it was the infiltration of deer introduced by the Dutch into Indonesia's Papua Provinces (Irian Jaya). They have spread substantially into Papua New Guinea's neighbouring Western Province, but I had no idea that they were swimming their way south and can now be expected to appear on the Queensland mainland. My Island Home is an interesting account that deepens the rather limited written sources on Torres Strait.

Citation

• Clive Moore. 'Review: My Island Home: A Torres Strait Memoir by John Singe' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• One of the last frontiers on earth, the Torres Strait is a vast waterway dotted with tiny islands and peopled by fiercely proud communities with a rich cultural heritage.
  
  My Island Home is one of man's story of his adventurous life on this frontier - not in the nineteenth century but in the last decades of the twentieth. Aged 19 and fresh out of teachers college, John Singe first arrived at Thursday Island in 1970 and soon began exploring Torres Strait for himself.
  
  Peopled by many wild and wonderful characters, this tropical paradise proved to be no place for the faint-hearted. As a diver, John Singe survived shark attack and frequently faced the Strait's unpredictable moods when sailing the waters from Cape York to Papua New Guinea. Driving taxis on TI, and taking on the rigorous challenges of hunting and fishing expeditions, provided the eager newcomer with an unexpected education.
  
  As well as charting one man's Indiana Jones-like adventures, this entertaining book voyages across contemporary Islander cultures and lifestyles. Much more than a travel saga, My Island Home traces the long, rewarding journey of its author - drawn irresistibly to the gregarious people and unlimited horizons of the Torres Strait.

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