Turtles, Leah Lui-Chivizhe shows us in Masked Histories, are at the centre of Torres Strait Islander lives. They follow the Pacific currents and slipstreams, arriving in the Islands in the mating season of surlal, making available their eggs, their meat, their shells. For millennia, marine turtles have provided Islanders with material for subsistence and ceremony – allowing them to practise ceremony with turtle shell masks so evocative of Islander cultures and histories. 

One result of more than a century of colonial intrusions into Islanders’ relationships with turtle has been to remove the masks from the islands and from Islander contexts, disrupting social relationships in the Torres Strait and surrounding the masks with colonising story. Today, many of these masks sit in museums in Australia, England, and elsewhere, having been taken by a succession of colonial visitors and collectors. In these museums, with this provenance, the masks have historically been made to speak of social dissolution, of inexorable processes of loss forming a backdrop to the salvage expeditions that gathered them up.

Alice Te Punga Somerville describes the often painful practice of clearing away the accumulated junk of colonial storytelling to catch a glimpse of an alternative future, of a place that ‘allows your people to live in it’. Masked Histories shows us what happens when the story of turtle begins with that glimpse, pushing aside colonial stories conducive to extraction and dispossession in favour of stories of strength and relationship. The book opens with a sensitive and fraught account of two meetings with turtle shell masks now in the British Museum. Picture Alick Tipoti, a Badu artist, dressed formally in a suit for the occasion but taken back, on arrival, to find that the masks were disconcertingly mixed and set out in a research lab. How to approach this jumble of masks of different kinds from different places? In the same room, Lui-Chivizhe had a different encounter, one mediated by her relationship with the masks as both Islander and research student. Following family advice, she introduced herself to the masks before studying them from all angles, examining them under light, measuring, sketching, noting, photographing. Then she thanked the masks and said goodbye.