Father David Passi calls it black man’s science _ a malevolent force on the island or Mer in the Torres Strait.
“”Oh yes, Malo has an evil side,” he said. “”And I know its power.”
He spoke of gardens poisoned by sorcery and people killed by it. His grandfather refused to teach it to him because it was evil.
“”It is such a destructive force economically,” he said. “”Why plant a garden up there if it will be poisoned by a man sitting on the beach.”
“”Is it real?” I ask.
“”Oh yes. In one place you get a tiny yam and the bananas die. In the next patch you get huge yams and good bananas. It is black man’s science. Don’t ask me how it works; but I have seen it’s effects.
“”At first they did it to revenge other wrongs, and then jealousy of other people’s gardens and then just for the fun of it,” he said, shaking his head.
Malo is the indigenous law and myth of the island.
As an Anglican minister on an island saturated by indigenous culture, Father Passi has to try to get the best from both worlds, spiritually and materially. He is also on the council of elders, in whom is entrusted the observance of indigenous culture and the determination of land tenure.
The local community council looks after general services for the 400 occupants of the 9 sq km island.
The Malo law is a way of life. Its main force and public expression is one of good. The 25 laws are very similar to the Ten Commandments plus a prohibition on most of the seven deadly sins and a some prescriptions about conservation.
Before the coming of European missionaries, what the islanders call the Coming of the Light in 1871, self-sufficiency was paramount. One of its grim necessities was a population restriction. Each couple was allowed to rear only one boy and one girl through to adulthood, though more if other deaths required. Subsequent children were killed if the pregnancy had not been terminated beforehand.
When the missionaries arrived the population was about 800. The whites brought other, equally grim, forms of population control _ white diseases. The population fell to about 400 in 1913 and then steadily rose to about 700 in 1960.
Thereafter many went south to Queensland to work (usually cane-cutting or railway-fettling) or for their children’s education, only to return to the island for major ceremonies or permanently when they retired.
There are now nearly four times as many Meriam people off the island as living on it. But despite the comings and goings, the islanders have retained much of their tradition, especially their system of land tenure.
This is what enabled them to win the Mabo case.
Eddie Mabo was one of the islanders who went south. He was politically active, however, and was determined to get greater autonomy for his people. As an activist he pushed the case, but died a few months before the judgment came down. The other two plaintiffs live on the island and have land on it and neighbouring Dauar Island a kilometre away. They are Father Passi and James Rice, the deputy president of the Council of Elders.
Are people coming back since the Mabo case?
“”Not many; some,” says Father Passi. “”In a way it hasn’t changed a thing. We have always owned these islands and we always will.”
He says some people on Mer intend to go to Dauar to live.
“”No-one can stop us,” he said. “”They cannot man-handle us.”
Indeed, Father Passi’s view of the Mabo case is perhaps one of the wisest around, at least as far as Torres Strait is concerned.
There is no need for a court case or a claim over Dauar. It is obvious whose island it is. Why waste money on white lawyers for a court case. No-one else is claiming the land.
The sea rights are different. Father Passi; the chair of the community council, Ron Day; the president of the Council of Elders, Doug Bon; and anyone else you ask on the island all say sea rights are as important as land rights.
For Islanders the relationship with the land is similar to their relationship with the sea. I went out fishing with Trigger, a 60-year-old Islander who has been fishing here most of his life. He knows the name of every bommie and reef.
Different families own different parts of the reef that gets exposed at low tide. They have built fish traps of metre-high stone walls in three-sided rectangles of about 30 metres each side. The walls are under water at high tide and as the tide goes out. the fish are trapped behind the walls, making easy pickings.
Without security of sea rights, however, there is little hope for reducing the 80 per cent unemployment rate. It is not a question of permitting the islanders to fish, but in stopping or at least reducing fishing by non-islanders.
Day’s council is putting in a $200,000 freezer and seafood processing plant. It will store 20 tonnes of seafood and has great potential to increase the wealth of the island. But if the trawlers take all the fish and damage the reefs, the scope for indigenous fishermen is reduced.
But it is difficult to see how the Islanders can get sea rights under the Mabo case logic. The court held that common law respected native title and to the extent that the Crown had not extinguished it piece by piece since 1788, it continued to exist and was an enforceable right against all but valid state or federal legislation. Nowadays indigenous people were better equipped to call upon the common law for protection, the court said.
However, sea rights are another matter. Outside the three-mile limit, the common-law has never recognised any proprietary rights, and perhaps there are none within it.
Mabo has raised great expectations over sea rights. Some in the islands wants an exclusive zone for indigenous people’s fishing and payment for passage of trading ships through Torres Strait.
Fighting for that in the winner-takes-all world of the law courts, might not be very clever. Negotiation over shared fishing rights, based on legislation might have been smarter, but the court actions have already begun.
One thing about the Mabo case is that everyone has concentrated on indigenous people rights vis-a-vis miners, pastoralists or tourist operators. There is another element. Disputes among indigenous people themselves over who owns what.
Already one island group has launched a sea-rights case that appears to cut across the fishing rights of another. The representative plaintiff in that case appears to take the attitude: never mind once we get the sea rights we’ll be able to sort it out as brothers later on.
Human nature is not like that, no matter what the colour of the skin. That’s what they said in Africa: once the colonialists go, we’ll be able to sort it out as brothers.
Even now, there are some land disputes on Murray, let alone the potential that sea rights would cause for dispute between islands. They have disputes over possession, caretakership of land owned by people who go south, borders and land use. However, the Council of Elders seems to work them out without expensive batteries of lawyers. They have a tribunal if necessary.
At the first post-Mabo handover last week, the elders walked around the boundary with a woman in her 70s who had returned from the mainland after some decades to take up her family holding. The caretaker had agreed to the handover.
The Murray Islands have great natural beauty. They are at the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef, 270km north-east of Cape York Peninsula.
The coral comes right to the shore in places. The clarity of the sea makes you think you can touch coral that is in fact 15 or 20 metres down.
But rampant tourism and game fishing is not wanted.
Day says: “”I am not a businessman. But if I invite businessmen to this island they will take over overnight.”
Father Passi says tourism is a false economy, spiritually and financially. “”We do not want to live for tourists.”
Perhaps the sharks and the viciously strong tidal currents in the strait will help keep tourists away.
Father Passi wants a slow return to the cultural and spiritual values of the past. The Mabo case helped.
“”We can see the Government eye to eye,” he said. “”I would like to see our people take our culture seriously, so that they do not feel inferior. You have to see people eye-to-eye. Once you feel inferior, that’s the end of you.”
He wants greater indigenisation of the Anglican Church.
“”I stand in my own culture,” he said. He wants to fit the best of Malo with the best of Anglicanism. Just as he wants to rid the island of the bad elements of Malo he wants to get rid of the Anglo-Saxon superiority that he sees in the Diocese of Carpentaria, which embraces the top part of Cape York as well as the islands. Indeed, he would like to see a separate Torres Strait Diocese.
But there are more malevolent forces than the bad elements of Malo at work in the Murray Islands: the dole which gives rise to dependency and, on Father Passi’s admission, laziness.
There is virtually no private enterprise on the island, no local produce market no buyers and sellers. The store is council run, and without competition, opens idiosyncratic hours with indifferent service and appalling prices.
Booze is not the problem it is in some mainland indigenous communities. Day’s council seems to have regulated it reasonably well: 5-7pm Monday to Saturday at the canteen with no takeaways except for six cans on Fridays.
Inevitably, some comes in on the barge and there is binge drinking as there is in any group with high unemployment. The dependency leads people to eat supermarket food off the barge, so obesity is high.
None of these things are easy to fix. One court case is not a panacea; nor will sea rights be, if they get them.
But in these beautiful surroundings and seas abundant with wealth, as Father Passi and Ron Day hope, there should be a way to reduce dependency on the state without destroying the cultural values which have been the life of these islands for so long.