Badu people

Badu people are an Indigenous Australian group of Torres Strait Island people based on the central-west Badu island.

Language

The language traditionally spoken by the Badu people and their Mabuiag neighbours is Kala Lagaw Ya,[1] a member of the Pama-Nyungan language family.[2]

Ecology

Badu, together with Moa Island to its West from which it is separated by a narrow channel, is one of the largest in the Torres Strait. Circular in form, roughly 6 kilometres in diameter it is surrounded by complex tides that can run up to 7 knots. Generally sparsely wooded, and rocky, the northern part of the island is fringed with dense mangroves.[3]

Headhunting

Badu Island in particular, with the publication of Ion Idriess's novel The Wild White Man of Badu (1950), gained a reputation as an island of headhunters, though the practice was widespread throughout the Torres Strait. Taking the head of one's enemy was a ritual practice, involving a cane hoop and a special bamboo knife (upi) for severing the head, then boiling it and dressing it with beeswax noses and eyes fashioned from nautilus nacre.[4]

History

Willem Janszoon in the Duyfken as early as 1605 sailed close to the island of Badu while en route back to the East Indies after a reconnaissance of New Guinea for the Dutch East India Company. The impression left of the region was of a waste land populated by cruel savages.[5] The island itself, together with Mabuiagm was later charted by William Bligh.[6]

Badu islanders murdered three Europeans from the Thomas Lord which had anchored off the island while searching for trepang in June 1846.[7][8]

Notes and references

    Citations
    1. Stirling 2008, p. 171.
    2. Lawrence & Lawrence 2004, p. 19.
    3. Kaye 1997, p. 9.
    4. Dixon 2013, pp. 114–115.
    5. Kaye 1997, p. 20.
    6. Kaye 1997, p. 32.
    7. Moore 1979, p. 179.
    8. Shnukal 2008, p. 25.

    References
    • Beckett, Jeremy. (1987). Torres Strait Islanders: custom and colonialism. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-37862-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
    • Dixon, Robert (2013). "Cannibalising indigenous texts:headhunting and fantasy in Ion L. Idriess's Coral Sea Adventures". In Creed, Barbara; Hoorn, Jeanette (eds.). Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-71308-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
    • Kaye, Stuart B. (1997). The Torres Strait. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 978-9-041-10506-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
    • Lawrence, David; Lawrence, Helen Reeves (2004). "Torres Strait:the region and its people". In Davis, Richard (ed.). Woven Histories, Dancing Lives: Torres Strait Islander Identity, Culture and History. Aboriginal Studies Press. pp. 15–29. ISBN 978-0-855-75432-7.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
    • Moore, David R. (1979). Islanders and Aborigines at Cape York. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. ISBN 978-0-855-75082-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
    • Shnukal, Anna (2008). "Traditional Mua" (PDF). Memoirs of the Queensland Museum. 4 (2): 7–33.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
    • Stirling, Lesley (2008). ""Double reference" in Kala Lagaw Ya narratives". In Mushin, Ilana; Baker, Brett Joseph (eds.). Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 167–201. ISBN 978-9-027-20571-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
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