GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE » 315
lacked pigs, pottery, and bows and arrows. Furthermore, the strait is not
an open-water barrier but is dotted with a chain of islands, of which the
largest (Muralug Island) lies only 10 miles from the Australian coast.
There were regular trading visits between Australia and the islands, and
between the islands and New Guinea. Many Aboriginal women came as
wives to Muralug Island, where they saw gardens and bows and arrows.
How was it that those New Guinea traits did not get transmitted to Australia?
This cultural barrier at Torres Strait is astonishing only because we may
mislead ourselves into picturing a full-fledged New Guinea society with
intensive agriculture and pigs 10 miles off the Australian coast. In reality,
Cape York Aborigines never saw a mainland New Guinean. Instead, there
was trade between New Guinea and the islands nearest New Guinea, then
between those islands and Mabuiag Island halfway down the strait,
then between Mabuiag Island and Badu Island farther down the strait,
then between Badu Island and Muralug Island, and finally between
Muralug and Cape York.
New Guinea society became attenuated along that island chain. Pigs
were rare or absent on the islands. Lowland South New Guineans along
Torres Strait practiced not the intensive agriculture of the New Guinea
highlands but a slash-and-burn agriculture with heavy reliance on seafoods,
hunting, and gathering. The importance of even those slash-andburn
practices decreased from southern New Guinea toward Australia
along the island chain. Muralug Island itself, the island nearest Australia,
was dry, marginal for agriculture, and supported only a small human population,
which subsisted mainly on seafood, wild yams, and mangrove
fruits.
The interface between New Guinea and Australia across Torres Strait
was thus reminiscent of the children's game of telephone, in which children
sit in a circle, one child whispers a word into the ear of the second child,
who whispers what she thinks she has just heard to the third child, and
the word finally whispered by the last child back to the first child bears no
resemblance to the initial word. In the same way, trade along the Torres
Strait islands was a telephone game that finally presented Cape York Aborigines
with something very different from New Guinea society. In addition,
we should not imagine that relations between Muralug Islanders and
Cape York Aborigines were an uninterrupted love feast at which Aborigines
eagerly sopped up culture from island teachers. Trade instead alter-