Leah Lui-Chivizhe charts her own path to write an islander-oriented history of turtle shell masks

Abstract

Leah Lui-Chivizhe describes her approach, on her initial visit to the British Museum to study their collection of Torres Strait Islander masks, as ‘less of the modern “native” looking at “our old things” and more of the earnest research student’ (xxi). Less of one and more of the other at that particular moment but in her book, Lui-Chivizhe seeks to combine these identities. As a Torres Strait Islander scholar, it was her express intention to write ‘an islander-oriented history’ of turtle shell masks: to conduct research into the questions about the past that mattered to Islanders, using terms that made sense to them. The introductory chapter orients the reader to Torres Strait conceptions of space and time. The cyclic rhythm of the seasons is overlaid for islanders by a chronology that divides into two periods: the bipotaim (the old times) ‘before everything changed’ (164) with the coming of Christianity in 1871 and pastaim, the time since then. While the final chapter of the book introduces a series of vignettes on contemporary artists’ work, the main focus of the book is on masks collected in the nineteenth century and understanding them in the context of the bipotaim. The book’s mission is thus shadowed by loss. A fact, which I think needed more emphasis, as it only gets passing mention in the introduction, is that by the 1870s there were few masks remaining within communities on the islands. Turtle shell masks entered museums and private collections world-wide from about 1830 on. Those collected after the 1870s were likely commissions as the full-scale conversion of the islands to Christianity disparaged the old ways, leading to masks being destroyed. For Lui-Chivizhe, writing this book was a way, as she puts it, to ‘take back’ the masks (164). One way she does this is through reconnecting them with their origin stories. In her quest for information about the time ‘before...’ Lui-Chivizhe casts a wide net, utilising sometimes-incongruous sources. For example in Chapter 2, the hard material science of archaeology that produces dates for human habitation of the Strait (even if broad windows) is paired with a reading of culture hero narratives as historical texts when they lack co-ordinates for locating when the actions described took place. Lui-Chivizhe’s use of these stories as historical sources – stories which ‘reach back to mythic time’ and characteristically combine natural and supernatural explanations of the world (6) – is an essential plank of her islander-oriented approach and one of the strong