torresstraitislands

Torres Strait pearl-shelling was almost entirely dependent on imported indentured labour from both Asia and the Pacific, the crew of the Combination's Three Cheers fleet being typical – 3 Europeans, 40 Japanese, 23 Filipinos, 12 Malays, 35 South Sea Islanders and 20 New Guineans.40 By the late 1890s, divers were having to go deeper for shell, and the majority were Japanese, who were the very best. Deep water full-dress helmet diving was not only dangerous, but a highly skilled occupation, and it took two or three years to train good men. Source: www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.2005.9668351

When the pearling season commences on the Aru Islands, each of the three major boat types—sampans, belangs and junkos—are involved in collecting and transporting shell. Sampans: The sampans, dugouts of 3 to 6 meters that sometimes car-ried outriggers and a sail (and in Dobo even an outboard motor), are a multi-purpose inshore craft. They are employed in fishing, general transport, and pearl shell gath-ering. Many people could make sampans, and one could be con-structed at short notice anywhere on the Aru Islands. Belangs: The belangs seen on the foreshore at Dobo come in from villages, bringing pearl shell or copra (dried coconut) for sale. Usually there is a whole family on board. Junkos:The typical junko is a 10- to 20-meter-fong plank on-frame carvel-built vessel, with a counter stern, ketch rig and diesel engine. Source: www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/sampans-belangs-and-junkos/

In the mid-1800s, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace traveled for eight years through the archipelago that now forms Indonesia. It was Aru that dazzled him most. He wrote in his journal, “I think how many besides myself have longed to reach these almost fairy realms, and to see with their own eyes the many wonderful and beautiful things which I am daily encountering.” His six-month stay in Aru inspired his revolutionary ideas about how life evolved on Earth. He was co-credited with the theory of evolution by his more famous contemporary, Charles Darwin, who had a similar revelatory experience in the Galápagos Islands. In 1857, when Wallace arrived in Aru’s main town of Dobo, he found a bustling port connected to the world by ancient trade routes that gave it a distinctly global feel. Fine pearls and tortoiseshell made their way to Europe, while delicacies such as shark fins, birds’ nests and sea cucumbers went to China. Aru also exported greater bird-of-paradise feathers, silky yellow plumes that adorned the crowns of rulers in distant lands, from Spain to Nepal. Dobo was peopled by Buginese and Chinese merchants sailing in on wooden ships; traders from elsewhere in the Moluccas, as the region was then known; and Aruese bringing out exotic goods from the interior. “I dare say there are now near five hundred people in [Dobo] of various races,” Wallace wrote, “all met in this remote corner of the East, as they express it, ‘to look for their fortune’; to get money any way they can.” In the second half of the 20th century, the Indonesian government sought to settle the nomadic foragers living in Aru’s forests into permanent villages along rivers and coasts. Like indigenous peoples across the country, the Aruese were forced to convert to one of the six state-sanctioned religions; they mostly picked Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. But while the government made some incursions into their lives — in the early 1990s, the navy angered villagers in southern Aru when it commandeered their lands for an air base — the Aruese were generally left alone. Numbering more than 60,000 people at the turn of the century, speaking 14 different indigenous languages and organized into clans spread across 117 villages, they governed themselves based on complex systems of traditional law. Even as they transitioned to a more settled lifestyle, they relied largely on nature, hunting deer, boar and wallabies and harvesting crabs, tree gum and other natural goods. They maintained a spiritual connection to the forest, believed to be inhabited by the souls of their ancestors. Source: news.mongabay.com/2019/10/saving-aru-the-epic-battle-to-s...