Strait Talking

The Winds of Zenadth festival is one of Australia’s most vibrant celebrations of song, dance, language and history.

- Aaron Smith

Torres Strait Islander culture is loud and proud. At the Winds of Zenadth Cultural festival on Thursday Island, dancers strut with painted faces, wearing elaborate headgear that ranges from traditional white-feathered dhari headdresses and dark crowns of cassowary feathers to contemporary depictions of constellations, totems, and even boats and planes.

The Torres Strait islands are an archipelago of more than 274 islands lying in the narrow passage of water that separates Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula and New Guinea. The sound, colour and movement of their biennial festival vividly illustrates the renaissance of an ancient culture. Named after Zenadth Kes – the Islander name for Torres Strait – the event has been going from strength to strength for 32 years. Its dance teams are well-oiled machines, performing local stories of mythology, astronomy, totems and the four winds of Zenadth in perfect unison to the resonating thump of the long, wooden warup drum. The air is filled with the haunting wail of singers belting out ancient songs in language. (Two Indigenous languages are spoken on Torres Strait islands – Kala Lagaw Ya and Meriam Mir. There are also six dialects of Creole, which blends English with the local language.) The dancing starts early in the morning and goes until late at night.

One of the architects of the festival, the late Ephraim Bani (chief of the Wagadagam clan and a renowned cultural adviser and linguist ), once said: “The past must exist, for the present to create the future.” The phrase is engraved on a boulevard on the waterfront at Thursday Island (TI), one of Torres Strait’s main islands.

Fanning the flames