Out of my depth on Thursday Island, Torres Strait
Culturally clueless, no experience, couldn’t speak the lingo … life as Australia’s most northerly newspaper editor.
As we fly over Cape York, I press my nose against the egg-shaped Perspex window and stare past the whirl of the Dash 8’s propeller. My gaze fixes on the wild terrain as we hurtle towards Australia’s most northerly community – one of the world’s most remote. (Everyone thinks the tip of Cape York is the most northerly point of Australia, but it’s not – there’s another 150km of country, Sea Country, that falls under our flag.) It’s the last leg of a two-day trip across the continent, from Bass Strait to Torres Strait, and I feel a flutter of trepidation. I’ve left behind my friends and family. I won’t see my wife and toddler daughter for three months. Like most Australians, I don’t know a damn thing about the Torres Strait, its people, its culture or its history, but I am about to become the region’s newspaper editor. Am I mad?
The thing that terrifies me is that I’m about to start a job I blagged my way into. It is actually my first “real” full-time job, with super, holiday pay, the whole nine yards. I have previously done just about everything to get by. I’ve been a musician, an actor, a playwright and guerrilla filmmaker. I’ve been a dishpig, driven trucks, picked fruit, weeded gardens, painted houses, laboured on construction sites and even worked briefly as a telemarketer. I spent the second half of my 30s traipsing around the globe trying to work out who the hell I was, until I fell into travel writing.
I returned to Australia in 2009 with a Brazilian fiancee and three maxed-out credit cards. We retreated to my childhood home in Hobart and crashed on Mum and Dad’s couch… for 18 months. I figured it was time to leave home (again) once my wife got pregnant. Now that I was a father and a husband, my wife decided I should get my proverbials together. So I started writing freelance for glossy travel and adventure sports mags, and in between that I scratched out an existence as a handyman, which kept me at the level of poverty to which I had grown accustomed.
Then one Monday morning I saw a job online for the editor of a newspaper in a remote indigenous community. It said they wanted someone with three to four years’ newspaper editing experience – I had none. So I wrote an unconventional application letter, which began, “To be frank, I would chew my right arm off for this job” – followed by an offer to work at half-pay for three months while I learnt the ropes. I then showed off my investigative journalism skills by digging out my future employer’s details and sending my application to his private email address. Two days later I got a phone call to say I had the job.
A fortnight later, in May 2013, I’m on a Dash 8 flying into an uncertain future. The plane drops towards a patched-up bitumen runway on Horn Island, the only one of the islands big enough and flat enough to have a landing strip. The first thing I notice is nothing: there is so much of it. Scraggly scrub interspersed with 3m-high termite mounds. Stepping off the plane and crossing the tarmac, I read a large sign on a cyclone fence telling me I am in Kaurareg Country. I become acutely aware of being suburban Caucasian. I’m now the minority, and I will be for the foreseeable future.
The air-conditioned courtesy bus takes us to the ferry for Thursday Island, my new home. With a population of around 3000, it’s the administrative hub of the Strait and has almost half the region’s population. It also has the only hospital, police station, bank, courthouse, post office, all the federal and state government departments and Australia’s most northerly Army battalion, known as the Sarpeyes, Creole for “sharp eyes”: “the eyes and ears of the north”. A couple of Sarpeye soldiers are on the ferry in full camo fatigues – and thongs. It’s bloody hot, after all.
I step off the ferry and the gusty south-easterly buffets me down the pier past an old Islander lady sitting on a milk crate fishing with a handline; she has a bucket with half a dozen small fish in it. On one of the island’s two hills, two wind turbines slowly turn – apparently the first in Australia. I drag two suitcases of everything I thought I would need (one of them, six years later, is still under the bed full of everything I actually didn’t need, which is basically everything other than board shorts, T-shirts and thongs). In slacks and a long shirt, I’m completely drenched with sweat by the time I reach the seating area in the car park where I wait to meet my boss for the first time.
A family sitting in the shade look nonchalant as they swish flies away with “sweaters” – small hand towels printed with frangipani flowers and fringed with lace – and pat down their brows. They laugh and talk among themselves, in Creole, or Yumplatok, the lingua franca of the region and one of four languages spoken, of which English is second or third. How did I not know English isn’t the first language here? Torres Strait Creole, and the similar Kriol, spoken across the northern part of the country, is a uniquely Australian language. It has thousands of speakers and is the second most widely spoken language across Northern Australia. But I, like most whitebread Aussies, didn’t have a clue about this until I found myself sitting like a gormless fool listening to them laugh and chide, perhaps at me.
It then really strikes me how little I know of the people I am about to write a newspaper for, how little I know of all First Nations cultures in the country I call home. But I am no more pig-ignorant than most of mainstream Australia. How many of us know there were well over 500 First Nations clan groups that at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet spoke more than 250 different languages and 800 dialects? A quiet sense of shame undermines me. I, like many urban Australians, have travelled extensively around the world; I have spent time with indigenous groups in South America, I have sat with Buddhist monks in Thailand and China and sadhu holy men in India, but I know so little about my own backyard. Is it not just our cultural cringe that makes us such prolific travellers, but also the shame of our unreconciled history with this land’s first inhabitants?
I sit there waiting for my boss. A house and a company car come with the job. Everyone seems to drive around in LandCruisers and I wonder which one will be mine as they roll into the car park to drop off or pick up passengers. My heart sinks when I see a tiny Hyundai Getz hatchback pull up and Corey, my boss, jumps out. About my age, with blond hair in a surfie cut, he’s dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. We shake hands and he helps me squeeze my bags in the back. I wonder how I’ll ever be taken seriously in this little symbol of impotence. With us both at 1.8m-plus, I feel like we are squeezing into a clown car.
It’s a short drive – as all drives are on the island – to my new home. The two-bedroom ground-floor apartment sits right on the beach. The back door opens onto a 4m-deep sun-bleached lawn fringed with a few shrubs stunted by the constant salty sea breeze and the occasional king tide that comes up to the back door. The “newsroom” is a small home office annexed off from the apartment; it’s clad in cement board, with a corrugated Colorbond roof and rusting steel framing, but the seafront position is nothing short of spectacular.
Unpacking, Corey eyes off my suit. “You won’t be needing that, not unless you’re going to an Elder’s funeral,” he says dryly. “Or maybe if an important politician came to the island?” I ask. “An Elder’s funeral for sure, but not a politician – I make a point of wearing shorts, T-shirt and thongs.” I make a mental note to do the same.
The first two days of the job are overwhelming. Corey instructs me at a frenetic pace how to do things, as I madly take notes. Scraps of paper covered in my desperate illegible scrawl blow around the office like confetti each time the door opens and the sea breeze barrels in. I know I’ll never read them: even if I could make out my own handwriting, I realise I will simply never get the time.
Corey rattles off the names of VIPs I should know, people I should avoid, Indigenous protocols to remember, faux pas to never make. I forget it all as fast as he tells me. In between all the really important and complex technical things I must know but forget, it’s his asides that stay in my mind. “Be careful going out on a Friday night – the young blokes like to punch out whitefellas, but it’s fine during the day.” “Watch out for the Papuans, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them.” “Be really careful about printing names, it’s a small island, and you will have a family here after all.” Right, that I remember.
These comments are usually followed with “but it’s a really nice place”. And it is a really nice place; just under the surface bubble tensions and unresolved issues, feuds and fallings-out, but they all have to live together on this small island isolated from the rest of the world by hundreds of kilometres of croc- and shark-infested waters.
The next day, after breakfast, Corey abruptly says: “I think you’ll be fine – no need for me to hang around.” He grabs his carry-on, leaves me half a bag of boutique Gold Coast coffee beans and half a carton of beer in the fridge, and takes the afternoon flight back south.
Flying solo on my first big story, I go down to the island’s Anzac Park on Mabo Day, June 3, which commemorates the date in 1992 that the High Court passed its historic decision in the Mabo native title case. I make reams of notes on impassioned speeches by community leaders whose names and faces are all new and unknown to me. Eddie Koiki Mabo is revered here as the national hero he rightly should be, and I don’t want to cock this up on my first edition.
Feeling out of place, I sense my photographing people is an intrusion – but I need to fill column space. I frame up an Islander man in my camera’s viewfinder. In his early 30s, tall and barrel-chested with shoulder-length manicured dreadlocks and a trimmed beard, he gives me a salubrious smile and I shoot. As soon as I do, his smile drops away and he looks at me sternly. “In our culture we believe a photograph steals our soul,” he says. After a pregnant pause, when I’m no doubt looking utterly mortified at my crime, Frazier Nai, a councillor from the outer island community of Masig, puts me out of my misery. “Nah, all good bala [brother], just kidding,” he says as the grin returns. Nothing is straightforward in the Straits.
Aaron Smith was the last editor of the Torres News, which merged with Cape News in 2019 to become Cape & Torres News. Edited extract from The Rock by Aaron Smith (Transit Lounge, $29.99), out now.
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