A double exile: Filipino settlers in the outer Torres Strait islands, 1870s–1940s

Abstract

Surprisingly little has been published about the early Filipinos in northern Australia and their relationships with local Indigenous people, compared with their Japanese, Indonesian and even Chinese contemporaries. Despite their origins in the 19th-century marine industries, each community manifests different characteristics, composition and historical trajectories. Examining the similarities and differences among them sheds light on early Australian history and the role played by government policy and powerful individuals in regions far from centres of power and poorly served by communications. The early Filipinos of Broome and Darwin were in general more socially and legally constrained and hence relatively less prosperous than the Filipinos of Torres Strait. Most of the latter lived on Thursday Island, the regional commercial centre, while others established majority Filipino communities on adjacent Horn Island (from 1889) and Hammond Island (from 1929). The subject of this article, however, is the small group who chose to live for an extended period on the outer (more remote) islands with their Torres Strait Islander wives and children and were thus doubly exiled - both from their homeland and the Filipino communities of Thursday and Horn Islands. It also examines the link between ancestral identity and land, arguably the topic of most interest to their descendants, and demonstrates the tenuousness of land claims made by contemporary Torres Strait Islanders of Filipino descent on the sole basis of orally-transmitted accounts of land acquisition.