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Kaurareg (alt. Kauraraiga, plural Kauraraigalai, Kauraregale) is the name for one of the Indigenous Australian and Papuan groups collectively known as Torres Strait Islander peoples, although some identify as Aboriginal Australians. They are the traditional owners of Thursday Island (Waiben) as well as a number of Torres Strait Islands.
The Kaurareg are lower Western Islanders, based on the Muralag group. In common with the other peoples of the Torres Strait Island, they commanded impressive sailing outrigger canoe technology, traded throughout the Straits, fishing and trading with other Torres Strait Island groups. Similarly, they also regularly visited the Australian mainland of Cape York Peninsula, and retained ceremonial, marriage and trading alliances with several Aboriginal groups there. However they have been displaced many times since colonisation in the late 1800s. Subject to reprisals after being blamed for an incident in which a Western schooner and its crew were destroyed in 1869, their numbers rapidly diminished with the onset of white colonisation and administration. After World War II, descendants of the Kaurareg began to return to their traditional islands, and lay claim to native title over several of them.
The Kaurareg had close links with the tribes of northern Cape York, which was home to a number of Aboriginal groups. These were the Djagaraga whose territory extended from Cape York to Fly Point; the Gumakudin whose land was to the southwest of Cape York; the Unduyamo who were in the northern part of Newcastle Bay, and the Yadhaigana whose country went from Jackey Jackey Creek to Escape River. A.C.Haddon, surveying the field reports of the ethnography to date, esp. the narratives collected by Gunnar Landtman, classified the Kaurareg as descendants of the ancient Hiamu people of the island of Daru off the southern Papuan coast. These Hiamu in turn, according to folk history, had come from Iama in the Bourke Isles. The Hiamu, it was said, were repeatedly worsted in encounters with Kiwai invaders, and abandoned Daru and moved to Muralag.
Three Kaurareg men were captured, found guilty and executed by the native police led by police magistrate in Somerset at that time, Henry Chester. His successor, pastoralist Frank Jardine, set out on a punitive expedition seconded by a Captain McAusland of the Melanie and his crew of kanakas (native police). According to Jardine's son, the armed kanakas ran amok, and a great slaughter of Kaurareg on Muralag is thought to have taken place, though accounts differ. Jardine, led additional attacks against the Kaurareg people on the island during the 1870s.
Jardine soon afterwards went on leave, and Chester, who took over as the resident government administrator, took further measures against them. Misinformed that Gascoyne's wife and child were living with the Kaurareg, he had kidnapped a Kaurareg elder, Passiwapod, as a pawn to ransom in exchange for the Gascoynes. The elder was released when the information proved to be false; the Gascoynes were in Melbourne.
In April 1870 Chester again set forth in HMS Blanche with 25 marines and eight Australian native police, five of whom were recently released from St Helena's prison where they had served time for rape and armed robbery. The site of the Muralag massacre was examined, 20 other islanders taken prisoners, one severely wounded, and all but two of their canoes burnt. This time the men turned out to be Kulkalaig from Nagir. Cape York Djagaraga aboriginals with Chester identified three Kulkalaig men as the culprits behind the Sperwer incident, and, on learning this, Chester had the three summarily executed. It is widely thought that the Kaurareg were indeed uninvolved, though the reprisal visited on them for it was responsible for their decimation.
The Anglican Reverend Canon John Done, who had arrived as a missionary in 1915 and was much impressed by the Torres Islanders spirituality, noted in 1919 the 80 remaining Kauraregs' desperate situation – the worst of all the Islanders – and by 1920 they had been reduced to 67, after influenza swept the area. In March 1922 the Kaurareg were again moved at gunpoint to Moa Island, where they remained until 1947. In 1947 the elder Elikiam Tom insisted on returning to Kiriri, but, denied residence by the Catholic Mission because he refused to convert, he went over to Horn Island (Narupai) where, together with Kaurareg elders from Moa, the returnees built what became Wasaga village. The Department of Native Affairs tried to shift them to Red Island Point on the mainland, but they managed to resist further displacement.
A large population of Kaurareg people still lives on Horn Island, and Elders have continued to fight for connection to the remaining islands within what they consider as their homelands.
In 2001 a federal court ruled to return the seven islands to Kaurareg control.
Administered by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA), the Kaurareg declared their independence from Australia in 2002, after regaining native title over their ancestral land. They call their lands the United Isles of Kaiwalagal.
Historical records indicate that the Kaurareg Aboriginal people are the traditional owners for Thursday Island; however there are () no active native title claims over this area. The Kaurareg people refer to Thursday Island as "Waibene". For thousands of years the Kaurareg followed traditional patterns of hunting, fishing and agriculture and maintained close cultural and trading ties with the Aboriginal groups of the Northern Peninsula Area of Cape York.
A 2012 community forum identified that
The forum found that community fragmentation, followed by loss of culture and identity, disempowerment and government systems, were the things affecting the Kaurareg people negatively the most.
The story of these people was featured in the SBS television program Living Black. Kaurareg men were long-haired and went naked, save for as belt, while the women, apart from periods of mourning when it was removed, and replaced by a soger (long fringed skirt) wore a leaf petticoat ( zazi), and had closely cropped hair. Both Nose piercing and wooden lobe plugs were customary.
Death rites among the Kaurareg were apparently the same as those prevailing among the Mua and other Islanders. Once the deceased's mari (spirit) left the body, the latter was laid on a sara (mortuary bier raised on four legs) and left until decomposition stripped the flesh from the bones, and the latter were rubbed with red, gathered within a bark sheath and buried in a sand mound surrounded by shells, skulls and dugong bones.
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