Tiwi Erotic

The Tiwi are the people of Melville and Bathurst Islands, two large, wet, monsoon forested islands about fifty miles north of Darwin across the Clarence Strait. That strait is most of the story. When rising seas cut the islands off from the Australian mainland after the last ice age, the Tiwi were left to work things out alone for thousands of years, and they did. Their language, Tiwi, is an isolate, and nobody has convincingly tied it to any mainland family. Their toolkit went its own way too, doing without the spear thrower mainland groups relied on and favoring heavy barbed spears carved with more care than a weapon strictly requires. The name they use for themselves means something close to we, the people, which tells you how the crossing looked from their side.

Two ceremonies carry Tiwi life. Pukumani is the mortuary sequence: months of song, dance and ocher body design, ending with carved ironwood poles, tutini, standing around the grave and left to weather down. Kulama comes at the close of the wet season, keyed to a ring around the moon, and turns on the preparation of a yam that is poisonous until it is handled correctly. Men and women compose new songs for it every year, and the composing is the point. Both feed a working art economy: carving, painting and printed fabric moving out through island art centers at Wurrumiyanga, Milikapiti and Pirlangimpi. The Pukumani poles commissioned from Melville Island in the late 1950s did as much as any single work to change how Australian galleries handled Aboriginal art.

Catholicism arrived in 1911 with a mission on Bathurst Island and stayed. Most Tiwi are Catholic, and the church at Wurrumiyanga carries Tiwi design rather than imported iconography; the faith sits beside ceremony instead of replacing it. The mission ran straight into the older Tiwi marriage system, in which girls were promised at or before birth and senior men accumulated wives, an arrangement that made the Tiwi among the most written about peoples in twentieth century anthropology and is history now. A Tiwi man took the first Japanese prisoner captured on Australian soil, a pilot shot down after the 1942 raid on Darwin. The islands are Aboriginal freehold today, administered through the Tiwi Land Council, and outsiders need a permit. The loudest day of the year is the Australian rules grand final in March, treated locally as a national occasion by a population of roughly two and a half thousand that has sent a remarkable number of players into the professional game.