Torres Strait

The Torres Strait is a body of water which lies between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is approximately 150 km wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost continental extremity of the Australian state of Queensland. To the north is the Western Province of the independent state of Papua New Guinea.

Geography

The strait links the Coral Sea to the east with the Arafura Sea in the west. It is very shallow, and the maze of reefs and islands can make it hazardous to navigate.

Several clusters of islands lie in the Strait, collectively called the Torres Strait Islands. There are at least 274 of these islands, of which 17 have present-day permanent settlements.

These islands have a variety of topographies, ecosystems and formation history. Several of those closest to the New Guinea coastline are low-lying, formed by alluvial sedimentary deposits borne by the outflow of the local rivers into the sea. Many of the western islands are hilly and steep, formed mainly of granite, and are peaks of the northernmost extension of the Great Dividing Range now turned into islands when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. The central islands are predominantly coral cays, and those of the east are of volcanic origins.

The islands' indigenous inhabitants are the Torres Strait Islanders, Melanesian peoples related to the Papuans of adjoining New Guinea. The various Torres Strait Islander communities have a distinct culture and long-standing history with the islands and nearby coastlines. Their maritime-based trade and interactions with the Papuans to the north and the Australian Aboriginal communities have maintained a steady cultural diffusion between the three societal groups, dating back thousands of years at least.

Two indigenous languages are spoken on the Torres Strait Islands, Lagau Ya and Meriam Mìr, as well as Brokan ^*, otherwise called Torres Strait Creole. In the 2001 Australian national census, the population of the islands was recorded as 8,089, though many more live outside of Torres Strait in Australia.

History

The first recorded European navigation of the strait was by Luis Vaez de Torres, a Portuguese seaman who was second-in-command on the expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós who sailed from Peru to the South Pacific in 1605. After Queiros's ship returned to Mexico, Torres resumed the intended voyage to Manila via the Moluccas. He sailed along the south coast of New Guinea, and may also have sighted the northernmost extremity of Australia, however no specific record exists which indicates that he did so.

In 1769 the Scottish geographer Alexander Dalrymple found Torres's report of this voyage in Manila, and it was he who named the strait after Torres. In 1770 when James Cook annexed the whole of eastern Australia to the British Crown, and indeed Cook sailed through the strait after sailing up the Australian coast. The London Missionary Society arrived on Erub (Darnley Island) in 1871. The Torres Strait Islands were annexed in 1879 by Queensland. They thus later became part of the British colony of Queensland, although some of them lie just off the coast of New Guinea.

Torres Strait is mentioned in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a dangerous strait where the submarine, the Nautilus, is briefly stranded. Geography of Australia | Geography of Papua New Guinea | Straits

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