If It’s Sunday, This Must Be Thursday

It’s Tuesday (here): I’ve been trying since Sunday to get online, but serious bandwidth issues have prevented it. Hence, my posts aren’t as timely as I would like. My remedy is, after I report on tomorrow's excursion in Darwin, Australia, assuming I can get online, I am going to launch a second blog for the second half of the trip. I think it’s the sheer size of the file that’s the problem. Stay tuned... and wish me luck!

Greetings, once again, from the Great Barrier Reef! Just got this photo from the chap who took it. What I’m wearing is called a ‘stinger suit.’ Protection from jellyfish. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t align my flippers.

Now, on to the new...

Passing through the Torres Strait (#5) late Sunday, I changed oceans and entered the Indian. I’m now crossing the Arafura Sea en route to Darwin (#6). The map above shows you the next few ports of call as well.

The 93-mile-wide Torres Strait divides the northernmost point of Australia ­(Cape York) from Papua New Guinea, a country and civilization brought to most people’s attention in 1935 by anthropologist Margaret Mead. I’m not going there. On Fiji, I visited reformed cannibals. I don’t feel a pressing need to visit headhunters, reformed or otherwise. But Thursday Island was tame enough.

Thursday Island, known as TI, is in the Shire of Torres and has a population of around 2,600, most native Thursday Islanders with a few whites thrown in. At first this was going to be just a stop with no planned shore excursions. The island gets only 6 or 7 cruise ships per year. But Viking pulled together a few things to do, and sent the rest of off by tender to spend a few hours walking around. The people are quite religious (Christian missionaries accomplished their mission) and most things were closed — including the Cultural Center, which we would like to have seen. Despite that, we managed to shop. We were welcomed to the island by this community leader, who gave us a capsule view of the Australian government’s treatment of the island’s Muralags and other aboriginal people. As you might imagine, it was not good.

Someone standing between this warrior’s legs would come up to his knees. A formidable opponent. His traditional white headdress is part of the Thursday Island flag.

The island’s main industry since the late 1880s was pearl fishing, or pearl diving (think divers in canvas suits and diving bells). But the pearls weren’t for necklaces and earrings: they were for shirt buttons. By the 1950s, plastic buttons had arrived on shirtfronts, and the industry declined. Today Islanders work on pilot boats — the reefs are very tricky to navigate — and do other trading. In its heyday, pearl divers had come here from many Asian countries to work, so the Islanders are a DNA mix. This included indentured divers brought in from Japan. When WWII was declared, here was an island off the shore of an English country with Japanese people and their descendants living on it. So, naturally, they were interned on the island. Which may be what saved TI from being bombed by the Japanese. The Allies used the island as a wireless station during the war. A walk around town took us to a park where we were entertained by Ukulele Ladies… the dance troupe is forming in the background.

My assistant reporter talked with the left-most lady, with the gray hair. The last surviving member of The Mills Sister — not to be confused with The Mills Bothers — she was selling CDs that included their big hit, ‘Frangipane.’ Wiki: ‘All three sang and Rita played guitar, Cessa the ukulele and Ina the tambourine. Cessa and Ina retired in 1996 and Rita continued on a solo career. They started singing in the 1950s and in the 1980s started to tour outside the Torres Strait. They performed all over the Pacific and in Europe. Their version of “TI Blues” (a song written by Seaman Dan) has been called “a signature tune for the Torres Strait."’ You can try to find ‘Frangipani’ on youtube — loading it for you is way beyond this network’s capability. Besides Ukulele Ladies, there were local dancers — youngsters led by two older men, accompanied by drum and guitar with the ukes playing backup.

A walk along the main street to see the rest of the town... without stops, that would have taken all of 10 minutes.

The cars you see are all the cars that were out on a quiet Sunday noontime. Other than the drivers of said cars, I saw three local teenagers hanging out on the sidewalk and a woman carrying a gallon of milk from the local convenience store cum post office, below.

I made a couple purchases at Mona’s Bazaar, and took a few more snaps of TI’s main street. Mona had many typical island dresses, like the ones worn by the ukulele ladies above. I did not buy one of those.

The hardware store was open. My onboard Pilates instructor was seen walking out of it carrying a large box fan. Turns out, one of the crew’s AC is on the fritz, so Caitlyn bought him a fan.

Living above the store...

It was an enjoyable, albeit blistering hot, way to spend our Sunday on Thursday. #

For your reading pleasure. This comes to you courtesy of a Ukululu who was relieved to learn it was 1) not my ship and 2) that I have not been arrested:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/17/cruise-ship-on-which-big-brawl-broke-out-to-dock-in-melbourne