By Professor Ian J. McNiven, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, Melbourne
During the nineteenth century Europeans became increasingly aware of the extraordinary diversity of indigenous cultures across New Guinea and Australia. Along with such awareness was a desire by museums, especially in England, Europe, and Australia, to obtain examples of objects that illustrated this cultural diversity. As museum shelves and cabinets filled with objects, patterns began to emerge in the geographical distribution of objects. Within the Australasian region, many objects were restricted in distribution to New Guinea while others seemed restricted to Australia. It quickly emerged that Torres Strait, that archipelago of islands spread across the 150 km of sea separating the mainlands of Australia and New Guinea played a critical boundary role in the distribution of objects. This role can be summed up in the phrase ‘bridge and barrier’, coined in the early 1970s as the theme for a symposium held at the Australian National University in Canberra that critically examined to what extent Torres Strait influenced the distribution of natural (plants and animals) and cultural (indigenous) phenomena between the New Guinea and Australian mainlands. Yet the sentiment of Torres Strait as a bridge and barrier to the distribution of cultural phenomena was born in the nineteenth century with a somewhat dubious pedigree.
Torres Strait as a barrier was the dominant view amongst nineteenth century anthropologists interested in macro-scale cultural patterns and the distribution of cultural phenomena between New Guinea and Australia. That is, Australia and New Guinea were seen as two very different cultural realms with Torres Strait represented as an impervious boundary. The research paradigm was essentialismwith a research agenda fixated on documenting so-called deep-seated cultural and biological differences between the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and Australia. This approach is illustrated by the representation of Torres Strait as a racial boundary (Melanesia/Papuan peoples in New Guinea, and Aboriginal peoples in Australia). Of greater significance was seeing Torres Strait as representing one of the most important cultural boundaries in the world, being the edge of the agricultural world (Australia was seen as the only continent of hunter-gatherers) and the edge of the pottery and bow and arrow world (Australia was seen as the only continent without pottery and without the bow and arrow). As scholars of the colonial history of anthropology know well, such essentialised differences between New Guinea and Australia were couched in terms of evolutionary development to represent Aboriginal Australians as somehow less developed and less advanced than their northern New Guinea neighbours.
Torres Strait as a bridgegrew in popularity amongst anthropologists during the twentieth century as evidence mounted for overlaps in the distribution of cultural phenomenon, especially different classes of objects, between New Guinea and Australia. In this new guise, Torres Strait was represented as a permeable boundary to cultural diffusion. However, Torres Strait was positioned as a one-way bridge such that cultural traits and certain classes of objects moved from New Guinea into North Queensland but not the other way. Here the research paradigm was diffusionism with a research agenda focused on documenting the transfer of so-called ‘advanced’ cultural traits (and objects) from New Guinea into Australia. The best known exponent of this diffusionist approach was anthropologist and archaeologist Fred McCarthy at the Australian Museum in Sydney. In 1940, McCarthy published a paper titled “Aboriginal Australian material culture: causative factors in its composition” in the Australian anthropology journal Mankind. In this paper, McCarthy created a list of over 50 cultural traits (mostly different types of objects) forming part of Australian Aboriginal cultures, especially those in North Queensland, which he interpreted as being ‘introduced’ from ‘New Guinea via Torres Strait’. On the surface, some objects on his list are plausible candidates for a New Guinea origin, such as outrigger canoes, bows and arrows, and shell fish hooks. In other cases, the list includes cultural traits whose New Guinea origin is more a case of wishful thinking, such as stone axes, multi-pronged spears, shell containers, and bullroarers. As American anthropologist Herbert Noone (who was a colleague of McCarthy) quipped in 1946: ‘So much evidence has been put forward to indicate that the Australian aboriginal has brought, or borrowed, many traits of his culture from overseas sources, that one is led to look for anything of his that is left’. McCarthy believed that no examples existed of objects or cultural traits of Aboriginal origin moving from Australia into New Guinea via Torres Strait.
In the late 20th century, the idea of Torres Strait as a one-way bridge for cultural diffusion was given a makeover by anthropologists and archaeologists. Torres Strait was now represented as a two-way permeable boundary with a research paradigm emphasising cultural interactionand a research agenda focused on examining gradual or clinal changes in cultural differences between New Guinea and Australia. For example, at the 1971 Torres Strait (Bridge and Barrier) symposium, anthropologist Jeremy Beckett pointed out that previous ideas on cultural differences between Aboriginal and Papuan societies had been overstated and based on spurious ‘stereotypes’ and ‘defective data’. A few years later in the 1977 book Sunda and Sahul, English archaeologist David Harris produced evidence demonstrating that the old idea of a dichotomy between Melanesian ‘horticulturalists’ and Aboriginal ‘hunter-gatherers’ was simplistic and did ‘more to obscure than to clarify the real complexity of traditional subsistence economies’ between New Guinea and Australia. This new view was informed by mounting evidence showing that numerous groups across New Guinea were hunter-gatherers and numerous Aboriginal groups across Cape York Peninsula modified the growing conditions of plant resources, including the planting of yam gardens.
My feeling is that the idea of Torres Strait as a ‘bridge and barrier’ is in need of a theoretical overhaul, particularly because neither the concepts of ‘bridge’ nor ‘barrier’ fully help explain similarities and differences in the distribution of objects between New Guinea and Australia. However, by overhaul I do not wish to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Aspects of diffusionism and interaction remain useful and relevant. Missing from past approaches however is the notion of agencyand giving greater emphasis to people and communities deciding to accept or reject cultural traits and controlling the degree to which different classes of objects are shared between New Guinea and Australia. Torres Strait also again takes centre stage with the agency paradigm but neither as a bridge (permeable boundary) nor barrier (impervious boundary) but as a socially and culturally constructed border zone. In short, we need to look at how people controlled the movement and flow of particular objects and ideas between New Guinea and Australia. Fundamental to such control is exposure to different objects and ideas through interaction and networking.
In 2004 I coined the concept of the ‘Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere’ (CSCIS) as a way of exploring the way people in North Queensland and southern Papua New Guinea shared objects and ideas and decided on which objects and ideas would be shared between the two regions via Torres Strait and which objects and ideas would not. The basis of the CSCIS is a series of enchained canoe voyaging and trading networks starting in the southeast tip of Papua New Guinea and extending westwards along the entire 1200 km long southern coastline of Papua New Guinea, across Torres Strait (150 km), and running down the east coast of North Queensland for at least 600 km to Lizard Island. Interestingly, Fred McCarthy published a paper in 1939 that similarly pointed out that northeast Australia and southern Papua New Guinea were linked by a series of major ‘trunk trade routes’. These trunk trade routes extended along coastlines and also connected with trunk trade routes that extended well inland along rivers. Three major canoe voyaging trading networks and numerous small trading networks link communities along the 2000 km of coast comprising the CSCIS. The three major trading networks going from east to west are the Mailu trading network (southeast coast and linking in with the Massim region), the hiritrading network (extending out of Port Moresby and taking in the Gulf of Papua), and the Torres Strait trading network (linking communities from the Fly River mouth region and across Torres Strait to Cape York and down the east coast of Queensland). Due to the interlinking of these trading networks it is theoretically possible for objects and ideas about objects to be moved and shared to and fro along the entire 2000 km length of the CSCIS. But theory is one thing, reality another.
In the second half of this paper I use a series of examples to illustrate how certain types of objects were shared along the length of CSCIS while other types of objects were only partly shared. I have divided the examples into three different groups: objects shared between New Guinea, Torres Strait, and North Queensland; objects shared between New Guinea and Torres but not North Queensland; and objects shared between Torres Strait and North Queensland but not New Guinea. Each object type is associated with a distribution map showing the location of individual examples of objects (marked by a dot) that I have assembled from a range of sources such as online museum catalogues (Australia, UK, Europe, and USA) and published references to and photographs of objects (mostly tribal art and anthropological texts). The resulting distribution maps provide a ‘big picture’ view of object distributions, although they are in some respects an artefact of where objects have been documented/collected. My database of hundreds of plotted object locations is still under construction and will continue to grow as I obtain access to more museum catalogues.
Objects with a geographical distribution shared across New Guinea, Torres Strait, and North Queensland are consistent with Torres Strait Islanders facilitating the shared uptake of these objects between the continental landmasses of Australia and New Guinea. Two objects types illustrate this broad geographical sharing: bamboo smoking pipes and conusspire pendants. Bamboo smoking pipes are spread widely across New Guinea and Torres Strait with their distribution continuing southwards along more than 1000 km of the northeast coast of Queensland. New Guinea and Torres Strait bamboo pipes tend to feature intricate geometric designs carved into the surface. Use of bamboo smoking pipes across all three areas was highly gendered and restricted mostly to men. The geographical distribution of these objects matches in many respects the distribution of bamboo plants. Indeed, the southern extent of Aboriginal use of bamboo smoking pipes maps reasonably well onto the southern extent of native bamboos in coastal Queensland.
Conusspire disc pendants are made from the top (spire) of large Conus(cone) shells. The spire is removed from the rest of the shell either by sawing or chipping away with a hammerstone. The spire blank is ground down (usually on both sides), often leaving evidence of the internal spiral whorls. They come in two major types – disc type (complete except for small drilled hafting holes) (considered here) and ring (annulus) type (incomplete due to removal of central sections of the disc). Considerable regional variability exists as to how the disc type was worn. In Torres Strait and North Queensland, most conusdiscs had a hole drilled through the edge for a string to allow suspension around the neck. In parts of the New Guinea Highlands, conusdiscs feature of drilled notch for direct attachment to the nasal septum. Other New Guinea communities tended to attach a series of conusdiscs with a central drilled hole to a woven band which could be worn in a range of ways, including around the neck or attached to the waist. As a general rule conusspire discs were worn by men and women (and sometimes by children) and were often considered a prestigious body adornment. My distribution map of the occurrence of these objects in comprehensive for North Queensland and Torres Strait but less so for New Guinea. Nearly all coastal groups using conusspire discs could have obtained Conusshells from nearby tropical reefs.
Objects with a geographical distribution shared across New Guinea and Torres Strait (but not North Queensland), or Torres Strait and North Queensland (but not New Guinea), are consistent with mainland communities flanking Torres Strait to the south and north respectively rejecting the uptake of these objects for a broad range of social and cultural reasons. Dog tooth adornments and conusarmbands provide two informative examples of objects with shared and accepted uses across New Guinea and Torres Strait but rejected by mainland Aboriginal peoples of North Queensland. Dog tooth necklaces and chest adornments are usually highly valuable and prestigious objects and are found across many parts of New Guinea and the islands of Torres Strait. They often feature in bride-price payments and ceremonial regalia. All are made using dog canine teeth and usually have a hole drilled through the root end to allow attachment to strings or woven bands/patches. Some strings of dog teeth comprise hundreds of teeth representing many dozens of dogs. Along the central north coast of Papua New Guinea, hundreds of dog teeth are arranged side-by-side to form dense tooth clusters attached to woven pads. The presence of dogs across New Guinea and Australia indicates that manufacture of dog tooth objects is not related to raw material availability. Clearly, a fundamental difference exists between Melanesian peoples of New Guinea (including Torres Strait Islanders) and Aboriginal peoples of Australia in terms of their social and cultural relationship with dogs. For Aboriginal peoples, manufacture of necklaces out of marsupial teeth was considered appropriate whereas use of dog teeth was considered unacceptable.
Conusarmbands made from the outer (body) whorl of large Conusshells have a highly restricted distribution to the Cenderawasih Bay region of West Papua and along the south coast of Papua New Guinea (including the Massim region) and Torres Strait. They were high status valuables used as ceremonial regalia and as part of bride-price and trade payments. Unlike conusspire disc and pearlshell body adornments, relatively few conusarmbands were traded inland. Despite spanning over 1200 km of PNG’s southern coastline, conusarmbands are manufactured in only a few regions, such as the Massim (e.g. home of the famous kulaexchange network), Mailu, and Torres Strait. Most of the toea conusarmbands of the Port Moresby region were imported from the east by the local Motu people who then distributed the armbands to various communities along the Gulf of Papua during the hiritrade expeditions. As such, many conusarmbands from the Gulf are indistinguishable from conusarmbands from the Massim. As with dog tooth objects, availability of Conusshells along the Great Barrier Reef indicates that lack of use of conusarmbands by Aboriginal people had nothing to do with raw material availability. Again, conusarmbands were considered by Aboriginal peoples of North Queensland to be socially and culturally irrelevant. Rejection of such objects is an identity statement in its own right.
Two examples of objects found across North Queensland and Torres Strait but not New Guinea are spearthrowers with shell handles and nautilus shell bead bands. Spearthrowers with a broad blade shaft and a handle featuring a pair of oval-shaped pieces of baler (Melospecies) shell were common amongst Aboriginal groups of Cape York peninsula. These distinctively shaped spearthrowers were traded northwards into the islands of Torres Strait. Although peoples of the New Guinea coast opposite Torres Strait were aware of such objects they were never taken up as a part of their technology. A similar story goes for necklaces and headbands comprising small rectangular-shaped beads of nautilus shell. Although these finely made and beautiful objects were used by various Aboriginal groups across Cape York peninsula and also on some islands of Torres Strait, they were never made and used by peoples of New Guinea. The presence of nautilus shells along much of New Guinea’s coastline indicates that raw material availability was not behind the lack of use of nautilus shell bead bands. As with conusarmbands and Aboriginal people, nautilus shell body adornments (at least of the small bead form) were socially and culturally irrelevant to New Guinea people.
In conclusion, it is clear that Aboriginal peoples of North Queensland and Melanesian peoples of southern New Guinea were indirectly linked by canoe voyaging and trading networks via Torres Strait. Such coastal and maritime connections provided an extraordinary opportunity for the sharing of cultural ideas and traditions and objects of various forms. Such connections are expressed through the shared tradition of use of conusspire disc body adornments and bamboo smoking pipes. Yet restricted uptake of other types of objects indicates that shared knowledge of objects did not always translate into shared uptake of objects. The fact that spearthrowers with shell handles and nautilus shell bead body adornments were used across far North Queensland and Torres Strait (but not New Guinea) and dog tooth body adornments and conusarmbands were used variously across New Guinea and Torres Strait (but not North Queensland) reveals that certain objects were rejected for a range of social and cultural reasons. Indeed, it is likely that reasons for acceptance and rejection were object specific and that no one answer can explain the complex patterns of object distributions spanning what I call the Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere (CSCIS). To complicate matters further, reasons for acceptance and rejection of different types of objects by Aboriginal peoples of North Queensland and Melanesian peoples of New Guinea would have varied through time. In short, continuities and discontinuities in the geographical distribution of object types spanning North Queensland and southern New Guinea probably changed through time due to changing social and cultural circumstances. In this connection, insights into the age and origin of ancient earthenware pottery that Professor Sean Ulm (JCU) and I excavated recently on Lizard Island at the southern end of the Coral Sea Cultural Interaction Sphere are eagerly awaited.