Resisting colonial betrayal following Papua New Guinea’s independence, Torres Strait Islanders were integral to the bilateral Australia-Papua New Guinea Torres Strait Treaty. On the treaty’s 40th anniversary, why is this ignored?

February 2025 marked the 40th anniversary of the Torres Strait Treaty—the bilateral treaty between Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia established following PNG’s independence from Australia’s colonial rule and the subsequently necessary demarcation of territory in the border region between the two countries. Discursively, political and media institutions of the centre (in distinction to the periphery of the border region) showed little interest in the anniversary. Foreign Affairs Minister, Penny Wong, and Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Pat Conroy, issued brief statements emphasising the bilateral aspects of the treaty; Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, did not release a press statement. Other than an online article from SBS’s NITV, no major news outlet reported on either the anniversary or its celebration. The treaty should, however, be celebrated as a remarkable achievement of Zenadth Kes peoples—Torres Strait Islanders—in the face of profound colonial betrayal, and should be recognised as one of the greatest political achievements of First Nations Australians.

Without consultation from Torres Strait Islanders, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam proposed to excise virtually half of Torres Strait and give it to Papua New Guinea. It was their response to this proposal that established the key features of the treaty—namely, the location of the border—and that also affirmed and articulated a Torres Strait Islander national identity. Identifying the site of decolonisation as located in territory instead of people (to transpose an idea from Tracey Banivanua-Mar), Whitlam’s decolonisation failed Torres Strait Islanders. 

What is now identified as “Torres Strait” results from bordering processes comprising four crucial periods since contact: frontier, colonisation, decolonisation (of PNG), and post-treaty. The first was a period of increasing contact with foreigners prior to colonisation in which the region was a frontier: “an area over which political control by the regional metropoles is absent or uncertain.” Colonisation followed principally to regulate frontier activities—namely, exploitative maritime industries and subsequent missionary activities. Colonial-period bordering was characterised by the circumscription of territory through a legislated border-as-boundary, the establishing of legitimised colonial dominance within this territory through regulative legislation of the autochthonous population, and a largely concurrent process of contact and colonisation taking place in the mainland to the north (i.e., present-day PNG), contributing to a symmetrical border. This active process established the border structure and institutions that later became critical at PNG’s independence.  

PNG’s formal decolonisation and ultimate independence unfolded rapidly under Prime Minister Whitlam, who gave an election promise of independence by 1976. Beyond Whitlam’s own ideologies, this occurred principally because of Australia’s obligations to decolonise its territories under UN obligations that had been completely neglected and resisted by the previous governments following the end of WWII, resulting in international condemnation in response to the publication of a UN visiting report in 1968. 

With PNG’s movement towards independence well under way, it became necessary to decide an international border. Instead of re-affirming the extant border, Whitlam, in a perceived anticipation of an appeal by PNG to the International Court of Justice, proposed pre-emptively ceding Torres Strait above the arbitrary line of 10 degrees south, ceding Maubiag, Iama, Mer, Erub, Ugar, and Dauan, Saibai, and Boigu, along with uninhabited islands and all of their reefs and seas. Whitlam, who had never visited Torres Strait, made this proposal without the consultation of Torres Strait Islanders—Australian citizens—to split their territory and send the northern half to become citizens of a country to which they had no such affiliation. Islanders, however, had in fact resolved in 1973 with their Papuan neighbours and Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Peterson, that the border remain unchanged. Whitlam did not care to listen; neither did Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser after Whitlam’s dismissal.  

The existential threat posed by this proposal—that citizens were to be arbitrarily excised and spirited away to another country—was further exacerbated by contemporary demographic challenges in Torres Strait: that half of the Islander population had left Torres Strait by the mid-1970s, pulled by employment opportunities in Queensland and Western Australia following the loosening of colonial domination in the years after the end of WWII. Such a demographic shift of depopulation in the homelands and migration to the mainland raised profound questions for Torres Strait Islander identity and for the future of the homelands.  

Torres Strait Islanders responded vocally to Whitlam’s proposal, organising in the “Border No Change” movement (notably supported by Sir Joh as well as progressive figures including Nugget Coombs). They accomplished two crucial things through “Border No Change” (or “Border Not Change”). First, the protest ultimately succeeded in its demands, defeating Whitlam and Fraser’s proposal, as well as that of their counterparts at Waigani, with the eventual treaty’s borders being based on that of the 1879 boundary. Second, in the face of major demographic changes, the movement unified Islanders across both the Strait and in the mainland: Torres Strait Islanders re-asserted themselves as citizens of Australia, pushing back against their betrayal and rejecting the essentialist notion comprising Whitlam’s decolonial paradigm and the fundamental assumption justifying his proposal: the exaltation of Torres Strait Islander’s Melanesianness. Out of this rejection of an imposed identity emerged the crystallisation of a Torres Strait Islander “national identity”—a development of major political importance to the present day. The treaty represents an assertion by Zenadth Kes peoples against their abandonment by the Australian state through a perverted decolonisation. It is thus a profound and defining political accomplishment and should be celebrated as such. 

At present, however, it is entirely unrecognised by all institutions in the centre. The nonrecognition of such history ultimately occurs in a society that has failed to reckon with its brutal and disturbed foundations (comprising processes ongoing to the present day). Ignorance is enhanced by the treaty being a major moral and policy failure from Australia’s progressive darling, Gough Whitlam. How could the man, preserved so iconically pouring sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hands as he returned Daguragu Station to the Gurindji people in 1975, simultaneously betray Indigenous Australians elsewhere? Facing moral ambivalence, we turn away. 

Instead, however, on the 40th anniversary of the treaty, readers ought to reflect on how and why such an epistemic discordance exists. This discordance at the centre obfuscates the reality at the periphery: that Torres Strait Islanders are highly formidable actors within the international governance framework of the treaty. Australia benefits from this discordance, as the implication that Indigenous groups have input into international affairs (“stakeholders” is inadequate) evidences a colonial complexity fundamentally challenging the authority of the centre—of institutions in Canberra. Yet recognition is vital to truth-telling and to reconciliation. Here, this should begin with the state’s recognition: from ministers for Foreign Affairs, for the Pacific, and for Indigenous Australians.  

Samuel Wassmann is a Master of Political Science student at the Australian National University and Assistant Editor at Australian Outlook. He is Assistant Investigator in a Rechnitz Grand-funded research project.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.