Ken Thaiday Snr

The sea, the feather and the dance machine

Filmed in North Queensland: Erub and Cairns

Brakes hard on – the engines of our little plane roar – brakes off, sling shot, we lift quickly off the short runway, the wind takes control. Then we are looking at the blue green sea below, with its coral cays and reefs. As we approach Erub we can see the joy in Ken Thaiday Snr, the joy of coming home. We bank and approach the very short and sloping hillside runway – bang, we are down, brakes on hard again, park the plane and greet the welcoming party.

A paradise of smiling faces, we are off to meet the Saltwater people of the Torres Strait.

Ken Thaiday Snr takes us on a remarkable and personal journey to Erub in the Torres Strait.

“I am so excited I am crying into my own heart”

Home to one of Queensland’s most remote communities, Erub or Darnley Island is on the edge of Australian territory in the eastern group of Torres Strait islands. Papua New Guinea is only a short journey away in a tinnie*.

Erub is a place where music and dance are important foundations to cultural practice and creativity, once more on the rise through a revival in artistic activity.

One Australia’s most senior and inventive Torres Strait islander artists, Ken constructs mobilised artefacts, which today are exhibited in major art galleries and museums around the world. For the people of the Torres Strait, and for Ken in particular, the sea is central to daily life and culture. Ken’s extraordinary dance machines (headdresses) reflect the importance of the sea and its various symbols and totems. Ken has chosen the Hammerhead Shark as his totem and his most famous works incorporate this shark as a symbol of law and order.

“The film gives a sense of the island environment which inspires the extraordinary art, costume and dance of the Torres Strait Islands”.

NATASHA McKINNEY, Curator Oceania, The British Museum

Bamboo Hammerhead Shark Headdress (courtesy Canopy Artspace, Cairns)

Ken has contemporised the culture of headdress making, mobilising his work with complex systems of strings and pulleys to make parts of his machines move in ingenious ways, adding to the excitement of the dance and ‘operating in tune with dance choreography such as the opening jaws of the shark headdress or the flapping wings of a large seabird, the sun moving across a landscape’.

The works are grand in scale but composed in the greatest detail with many small components.

For Ken his beliefs and his culture are the drivers that make him an important figure as a Torres Strait artist. As a senior man, he has a very important role in passing on cultural knowledge to younger generations of Torres Strait Islanders.

*Small boat, often made from aluminium, commonly used to travel between islands in the Torres Strait