The Torres Strait Connection: Townsville as the Gateway to Thursday Island

Townsville's role as the principal mainland centre serving the Torres Strait Island communities, whose 18 inhabited islands stretch across the sea between the tip of Cape York Peninsula and the coast of Papua New Guinea, creates the commercial, governmental, and social connections that make the city the effective capital of the Torres Strait Islanders' engagement with mainland Australia. The Townsville-based government agencies, the regional arm of the Queensland Department of Communities, the federal government's Indigenous Affairs functions, and the Torres Strait Regional Authority, coordinate the services and the policy programs that the islanders' communities require from a mainland base that the direct flight connections to Thursday Island and the major islands make operationally practical.

The Torres Strait Islander community in Townsville, one of the largest communities of Torres Strait Islanders in a mainland city, maintains the cultural practices, the community organisations, and the social networks that sustain the identity and the wellbeing of community members who have chosen mainland residence without severing the connections to the islands that are their home country. The community's cultural events, including the Coming of the Light celebration in May that marks the arrival of Christianity in the Torres Strait in 1871 and that remains one of the most significant events in the Islander cultural calendar, provide the public expressions of identity that community cohesion requires.

The fishing industry of the Torres Strait, particularly the cray fishing and the mud crab harvest that the strait's reef and mangrove environments sustain, connects to the Townsville fish market and the export trade through the processing and distribution infrastructure that the mainland connection provides. The Torres Strait fisheries are managed through the treaty arrangements between Australia and Papua New Guinea that govern the traditional fishing rights of both countries' fishing communities in the shared waters of the strait.

The climate change vulnerability of the Torres Strait Islands, many of which are less than three metres above sea level and face the prospect of inundation if sea levels rise as climate projections suggest, creates the migration pressure that may ultimately bring many islanders to Townsville as permanent residents if the islands become uninhabitable. The Torres Strait's climate story is one of the most confronting examples of climate change's human consequences in Australia.

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