Mua people

Mua people (Mualgal) alternatively the Moa, are an indigenous Australian Torres Strait Island people based on Moa(Banks Island). According to Alfred Cort Haddon their lifestyle, culture, myths and kinship networks overlapped closely with those of the Kaurareg on neighbouring Muralag.^[1]

Language

They speak a dialect of Kalaw Lagaw Ya of the Pama-Nyungan language family.

Mythology

According to the Mua, fire was brought to the island by Waleku, the frilled-necked lizard augadh, as it fled from Mawatta in New Guinea.

On death, one became a mari, a particularly dangerous spirit because it had not yet been detached from the world. Then, with a death rite, the mari, envisaged as a spirit with feathers on its head, was transformed into a markai (ghost). The released spirits of the dead, once they became markai travelled beyond the last western island, to Boigu then to Kibu, over the western horizon. Two other spirit forms were buk and padutu; these were fertility spirits. Particular areas of an island were thought to be inhabited by dhogai (devil women) or adhiadh (giants).^[2]

Ecology

Mua island, lying east of Badu (Mulgrave Island), is dominated by Mt Augustus, also known as Mua Pad (Mua Peak), with its twin boulders (Baudhar),^[3] the highest peak in the Torres Strait. Archaeological evidence points to habitation on Mua since the mid-late first millennium. The poor quality of the soil is explained by a myth which has the culture hero Gelam gathering up the best soil and foodstuffs and, on a dugong canoe, abandoning Mua to travel over and settle east, on the island of Mer.^[4] The quality of its soil is poor and the local vegetation thin, while swamps and mangroves are characteristic of the littoral zone. Notwithstanding this low fertility, Mua afforded a notable variety of fruit and tubers: aubau (noni fruit); goegoebe (bellfruit); kawai (red wild apple), kupa (white apple); mai a red fruit baked in oven pits (amai); putit (yellow cherry); sizoengai(black fruit); uzu (white island fig); wanga (a plum-dized black fruit); wangai (island plum) and yararkakur(monkeynut); kurub (varieties of island banana), and six varieties of yam: buwa, kuthai, gabau, mapet, usari and thapan. They also cooked a seed-pod (biyu sama) harvested from mangroves.^[5]

The timing of the foraging and hunting cyclea depended on the seasons. Specialists among the elders, the zugubaumœbaig or star gazer, determined by close observation of the heavens, the rhythms of the tides and seasons.^[6] The onset of the south-east season is signaled by the dawn rising of the Yam Star (Kek) over Baudhar.^[1]

Men would fish beyond the shores for Black spinefoot, parrot fish, dugong, turtle and crayfish, or shot the Torresian pigeons (goeinau) using a variety of weapons: wap (harpoon spear, such as the thoelu wap fashioned from bloodwood), amu (rope), gabagaba (a club with a round stone head). Women could fish inshore, near reefs, using a wali line woven from the dhani (wild fig), or scouring the shoreline for Hawksbill turtle eggs (which however they were forbidden to eat during lactation), and the akul,goba and silel varieties of shellfish. Only after menopause were women allowed to partake of goeinau pigeon flesh.^[7]

Social structure

Like other Torres Strait island cultures, Mua society was ruled by a gerontocracy of male elders, often maidhalgal (men of magic) whose mastery of magical techniques and lore was fundamental to the regulation of both social groups and the natural increase in foods. They lived part of the year in solitude, or with a few select assistants, directed the initiation rites at sacred ceremonial grounds (kod), and were reputed shapeshifters, reminiscent of shamans, capable of coercing both nature and men through sorcery, through secret herbal lore and the manipulating of effigies (wauri).^[8]

Before the white presence made itself felt, Barbara Thompson related that the Mua were divided into two distinct groups; the Mualgal and the Italgal.^[9] Whether this binome represents a trace of a moiety, or of the confluence of two originally distinct peoples, is unknown.

As in general with the Western Torres Isles cultural complex, territory on Mua was quadripartite, though classified according to at least 10 totemic clans^{[lower-alpha 1][10]} (buwai) of patrilineal descent, which were in turn divided into moieties: the basic unit consisted of roughly 25 members. Each clan had its augadh or totemic kindred spirit.^[11] Much later reports speaks of 4 dominant clans, correlated with wind directions

Warfare and inter island relations

The Mua were traditional enemies of the Badu people and their allies, the Mabuiag people of the Bellevue island of Mabuiag. The two groups appeared to have engaged in a cycle of war, whose aim was not conquest, but rather the acquisition of women and the accumulation, via headhunting, of skulls for trade. Everyday like on Mua was never free of a wariness driven by fear of being attacked by sea raiders.^[14]

There was no warrior class, and while all youths (kernge) underwent three stages of an initiatory trajectory, there was one social role, that of the paudagarka, a sorcerer 'man of peace' exempt from warfare.

In addition to the standard wap, they armed themselves for warfare with a kalak (spear) and kubai (spear-thrower), a dagal (a two or three-pronged javelin), and malpalau nai (small club), a greased gabagaba, and bows and arrows. Heads were decapitated by an upi or bamboo knife.^[15] One was reluctant to fight without the presence of the relevant emblematic totem (augadh) worn by a warrior.^[16]

In 1870 the Mabuiag raided the Mua twice: 20 Italgal died in the first attack alone. After the second assault, coordinated with the Badu, the casualties were significantly higher.^[17] The estimated 250 Muans of 1875 were reduced to no more than 50 within 2 decades through the effects of pearler seizures of womenfolk and epidemics like measles.

Mua death rites were like those of the Kaurareg. After the mari (spirit) left the body when a tarabau ai (death feast) was conducted, at which point it could become a markai (ghost).^[18] The body was then laid on a sari (mortuary bier raised on four legs) and left until decomposition stripped the flesh from the bones, and the latter were rubbed with red ochre, gathered within a bark sheath and buried in a sand mound surrounded by shells, skulls and dugong bones. The practice of tinting the bones with red ochre is atypical of the Torres Straits mortuary customs, and may have been introduced to the Mua via the Kaurareg from aboriginal usages in the Cape York Peninsula.^[18]

History

If the Mua are a branch of the Kauraleg, their origins would overlap with the latter. The legendary lore of the area states that the Kauraleg were originally the Hiamu from Iama, one of the Bourke Isles north-east of Mua, who travelled north to settle on Daru off the coast of New Guinea south of the Fly River, and who were eventually driven off and sailed back south to settle on Mua.^[19]

The first mention of Mua in European records goes back to William Bligh's entry in the logbook of HMS Bounty, dated 11 September 1792, noting its high mountain. Bligh named it Banks Island in honour of Sir Joseph Banks.^[20] To the Mua, as for other Torres islanders, white people seermed to be markai (the ghosts of released spirits) whose return was forbidden.^[2]

By 1870, due to successive onslaughts by the Badu and Mabuiag, the surviving remnants of the Mua had been driven off their coasts, inland. A settlement with missionaries was established in 1871.^[17]

Notes

Footnotes

Citations

References