Made from turtle shell, wood and bird feathers, and designed to transform its wearer into a crocodile, the striking mask at the centre of this display reflects the strong cultural, economic and spiritual links between the Torres Strait Islanders and their ‘sea country’.
The crocodile is an important totem on the islands, and crocodile masks are worn by male dancers in funerary rites and other ceremonies. Shells and nuts hang from the crocodile’s jaw and make a rattling sound as its wearer dances.
The mask is part of an extensive collection of costume and dance ornaments collected on the Australian Museum expedition to Torres Strait by Charles Hedley and Allan McCulloch in 1907. While it was collected on the eastern island of Mer, the mask-making tradition from which it comes is from the western Torres Strait. It is likely that the mask was made as a replica to demonstrate the islands’ old traditions to the visiting researchers. Many of these traditions had been abandoned with the adoption of Christianity in the 1870s.
Hedley and McCulloch also collected the dari or feather headdress which sits to the right of the crocodile mask. Dari were worn mostly by fierce tribal warriors. More recently, the dari became an important symbol of the campaign for land rights. Led by Eddie Mabo, islanders from Mer were the first of Australia’s Indigenous people to be granted native title, in 1992. The officially recognised flag of the Torres Strait Islands now features a stylised dari at its centre.
The two arrows in this showcase represent the cultural links between the Torres Strait Islands and New Guinea. Though they were collected on the island of Mer, they were most likely brought back from New Guinea by local warriors. The arrows were rediscovered in the Museum’s collections 117 years after they were thought to have been destroyed along with most of the Museum’s anthropological collections when the Garden Palace exhibition building was destroyed by fire in 1882.