Before engaging with native title, Warraber Islanders pursued a successful claim using the TSILA. This Act establishes procedures by which Torres Strait Islanders can make application to the Queensland state government to claim lands designated as ‘transferable’.^[8] Between 1996 and 1998 Warraber residents pursued a claim under this legislation over five uninhabited nearby islands: Yarpar (Roberts), Ullu (Saddle), Bara (Bet), Guiya (Poll) and Aurid (recorded by Haddon (1935) as Yaywad). These islands were regularly visited by Warraber and Poruma people, though none had permanent residents. In the past some of these islands had also been used in intermittent gardening and camping, largely linked to movements in marine industry activities.

The TSILA claim was lodged on grounds of ‘customary affiliation’.^[9] The legislative terms delineating this basis for establishing a land claim state that the Land Tribunal assessing the claim must be:

Clearly, this approach to customary affiliation is quite broad in scope. Particular core terms (for example ‘connection’, ‘associations’, ‘responsibilities’) are not specifically defined. Instead, there is repeated recourse to ‘Island custom’, which is presumed a priori to elucidate such concepts. The TSILA offers the following definition of Island custom:

As a result, the terms of TSILA have a rather encompassing and inclusive tenor, notwithstanding its design as an alternative to native title (and notable limitations in the forms of tenure it makes available to successful claimants). Indeed, this appears to have formed an aspect of the policy intentions of the government of the day. For example, the phrase ‘spiritual or other associations’ in the first passage cited above originally read ‘spiritual and other associations’ (as it does in the equivalent Queensland Aboriginal Land Act 1991). The alteration was explained in parliament by the then Queensland Minister for Family Services and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs:

The claim itself takes the form of an application of transfer, essentially an administrative rather than judicial process.^[12]

In the case of the Warraber claim, an entity known as the Gau Clan formed the claimant group. The Gau Clan derives its local coherence from visions of the Vanuatuan ancestor figure of Bubarei. Bubarei is the earliest known outsider to father children on Warraber Island with an Islander woman named Wawa (who resided on Warraber, but whose own origins were in fact from a different island in the Torres Strait). Their 10 children formed the first generation of porena Warraberans, who were provided with land by neitiv landholders at that time, and hence incorporated by custom into Warraber’s population. As the earliest known porena male ancestor, and as a prolific progenitor, Bubarei is a figure to whom all residents of Warraber in fact possess traceable genealogical links. The Gau Clan is not, then, a ‘clan’ in the classic anthropological sense; membership is not limited to descent but can be asserted on the basis of any combination of consanguineal or affinal connection to any of Bubarei’s descendants. In this way the Gau Clan was able to encompass the entire population of Warraber (who are all in fact related in some sense) while simultaneously stressing the majority status of the porena population and the special regard given to porena historical figures.

Clans, and their associated totems, were not part of everyday discourse at Warraber during my period on the island, nor did they play any role in shaping social relations. Once reputedly critical in defining marriageability, kinship has long displaced clanship in this role (an observation Haddon makes in reference to the Western Islands as early as 1904 (1904: 160–1). Sugimoto (1983: 92), who conducted brief fieldwork on Warraber in the 1970s, noted that ‘the totem clans seem to have played an important role in village life before the advent of Christianity, but they are hardly functioning now.’ Intent on linking local patronyms to specific totemic clans, Sugimoto remains ambiguous as to what these residual functions may have been. He described eight totems as extant among Warraberans; some 25 years later I could identify only two—gau (associated with poren people, as described) and womer (linked to neitiv identity).^[13]

However varied the presence, meaning and contemporary relevance of totems and clans throughout the region, Warraber people have been aware for decades of the role of totemic clans as identificatory categories associated with territorial interests in island communities in the Torres Strait. As a vehicle for representing the Warraber population as a whole in the context of the TSILA claim, the emergence of the Gau Clan can certainly be seen in terms of the dynamics of objectification discussed by Glaskin (Chapter 3), where self-conscious definitions of culture are fostered that may have an important role in internal group definition and reproduction. Totemic symbols and clan names are now undergoing something of a contemporary renaissance in the Torres Strait, appearing on gravestones and in the speeches associated with tombstone unveilings—an iconic event within ‘Torres Strait Islander culture’.

In the context of Meriam people and the revitalisation of the Malu-Bomai cult, Beckett (1995: 30) has discussed the capacity for cultural reflexivity and objectification in the Torres Strait, the development of what he terms a ‘relativistic view’ of their own culture by the Meriam, influenced in part by their reading of Haddon. He also suggests that renewed interest in the cult would have been unlikely had it not resonated with the contemporary life of Meriam people, and points to the ‘sensuous everyday experience’ (1995: 30) of presence on Mer Island as pivotal in this regard.

Importantly, local discourse surrounding the Gau Clan on Warraber stressed its ability to reflect locally salient notions of social relatedness that are rooted in the idioms of Christianity and kinship. This is most aptly expressed in the local phrase ‘ol wan pamli’ (‘all one family’), which communicates an ethical sensibility linked to idealised notions of island community and sociality. The Gau Clan, as a representational vehicle, was able to reflect these overt values in embodying an inclusive and seamless group of landholders, undifferentiated by local neitiv/poren distinctions. In this sense the Gau Clan effectively represented Warraber as a community of co-residents, with equal rights in land, given additional coherence and moral content through residents’ collective identification as Christians. In other words, existing ‘representational flows’ (Merlan 1998: 180), which in this case included those of Torres Strait and Australian ideas concerning indigeneity as well as local understandings of Christianity, were engaged by local people themselves to produce images partaking of the past but also expressing and satisfying contemporary sensibilities.