Tiwi Islands - History

History

Indigenous Australians have occupied the Tiwi Islands for centuries, with creation stories suggesting they were present at least 7,000 years before present.

Tiwi islanders are believed to have had contact with Macassan traders, and the first historical record of contact between Indigenous islanders and western explorers was with the Dutch "under the command of Commander Maarten van Delft who took three ships into Shark Bay on Melville Island and landed on 30 April 1705". There were other visits by explorers and navigators in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including by Dutchman Pieter Pieterszoon, Frenchman Nicholas Baudin and Briton Philip Parker King.

The first European settlement on the Islands was at Fort Dundas, near present-day Pirlangimpi on Melville Island. Established in September 1824, this was the first British settlement in northern Australia, but owing in part to the hostility of the Indigenous population it lasted only five years, being abandoned in 1829. As "the first attempted European and military settlement anywhere in northern Australia", the site is on Australia's Register of the National Estate.

A Catholic mission was established by Francis Xavier Gsell in 1911, and the islands were proclaimed an Aboriginal Reserve in 1912. A timber church built in the 1930s is a prominent landmark in Wurrumiyanga. The Catholic mission thrived until 1972 and provided invaluable education to the Tiwi people. This including the provision of agricultural skills and the Tiwi people successfully sold crops such as bananas to the main land. With self-determination declared in 1972, the mission activities effectively ceased. However, a continuing Catholic presence of brothers, sisters and priests was requested by the Tiwi people of Nguiu to assist with education and health services.

Control of the islands was transferred to the Indigenous traditional owners through the Tiwi Aboriginal Land Trust, and the Tiwi Land Council that was founded in 1978. The Tiwi Islands Local Government Area was established in 2001, when the previous community government councils in the three main communities of Wurrumiyanga (Bathurst Island), Pirlangimpi and Milikapiti (Melville Island) were amalgamated with the Wurankuwu Aboriginal Corporation to form a single local government. The Tiwi Islands Local Government was replaced in 2008 by the Tiwi Islands Shire Council as part of a Northern Territory-wide restructuring of local government.