SEMINAR: Anthropology & Sociology Seminar Series

This paper focuses on public writing on the island of Saibai, Torres Strait. Public writing includes housenames, memorials, t-shirts and tombstone epitaphs, all of which are accompanied by extensive visual material. Read in isolation, the housenames, epitaphs, monuments and t-shirts yield thematically distinctive accounts of how Saibai Islanders have constructed social and historical ideas about themselves. Even though each genre expresses different themes and each text is self-contained, these public writings are constantly open to self-directed interconnected readings. That is to say they are read in an ecological manner, in the sense of each piece of public writing having the potential to be read in relationship to other pieces of public writing, as well as the sense of their physical emplacement in a socially constructed village space. Through an examination of public writing on Saibai, a number of issues are made apparent. One issue is the challenge they pose to a view of indigenous writing that routinely sees it as largely defined by its post- or anti-colonial position. Associated with this is a concern with what constitutes indigenous, citizen and migrant in this region of Australia. A further issue concerns literacy and the personal and socio-economic transformational weight put on literacy competency. Lastly, this paper offers a model of writing that utilises ideas of ecology and ecosystems to help in understanding how different texts relate to each other and other expressive materials.