From the other side. Recently collected oral evidence of contacts between the Torres Strait Islanders and the Papuan peoples of the southwestern coast

Abstract

Although the folk tales of the Papuan people of the southwestern coast of Papua New Guinea were first collected by Landman and similar collections of tales were made in the Torres Strait by Haddon, Laede, Beckett and Lawrie, little attempt has been made to collect the oral evidence of the long and continuous history of contact between Islanders and Papuans who collectively share the Torres Strait region. During fieldwork in 1985 in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea, as part of research on the material culture of the Torres Strait and Fly River estuary canoe trade, the author collected a number of oral accounts which specifically document this history of contacts in the daily life of the people of the south-western coast of Papua New Guinea. The aim of this article is to present, with annotations, a number of these recently collected oral accounts from the Papua New Guinea side of Torres Strait.