Dangerous Passage (Alfred Press, 2024) is Ian Burnet’s seventh book, his fifth on the maritime history of Australia and Southeast Asia, and perhaps his most engaging yet.
A narrow stretch of limpid tropical sea separating Cape York, the northern tip of mainland Australia, from the south coast of Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait is one of the world’s most treacherous sea passages. Riddled with sandy shallows and coral reefs, dotted with low islands, and battered by seasonal monsoons, the strait is subject to wild currents as white-water tides surge over sand banks and rush through narrow gaps between the islands, the vast Pacific Ocean, funnelling through to the Indian Ocean in the west.
I was at my home in Battery Point, Hobart, when I opened Burnet’s new book and at my second home in Senggigi, Lombok, when I finished it – five thousand kilometres away. For me that involved a day’s flight transiting in Melbourne and Bali (a good time for reading). For the early European seafarers, it involved an arduous sail over many months up the east coast of Australia, taking either the inside or outside route past the Great Barrier Reef - either way, a risky journey through largely unchartered waters. Then there was the Torres Strait.
The passage, once discovered, offered a shortcut from the east coast of Australia and the Pacific to the Spice Islands, what is now Indonesia, and everything to the west of that. But that shortcut came at a cost: the strait is littered with the wrecks of European adventurers and explorers - over two hundred, Burnet tells us.
No less strategic today than in the past, the Torres Strait is the main passage between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans - and is the realm of people smugglers, fishers, and offshore oil and gas explorers. It is also home to a distinct group of people with a rich culture – descendants of Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, South Sea Islanders, Europeans, Malays, Papuans, Japanese pearlers and Australian Aboriginals.
On a busy day, up to thirty large commercial ships, including oil tankers, transit through the Prince of Wales Channel, linking the Arafura Sea with the Coral Sea, making it the only maritime chokepoint in Australian waters. The strait has obvious strategic importance to Australia, being our most active border. As an aside, a colleague once told me of his visit to Boigu Island and Australia’s northernmost primary school. From the grounds of the school, he could see the flag being raised in another school across the water in neighbouring Papua New Guinea. It was just six kilometres away.
In Dangerous Passage, Burnet takes us on a journey of discovery, beginning in 1606 with the first European encounters in the Torres Strait: the Spanish explorer, Luis van der Torres, came from the east on an expedition to find the fabled great southern land. In Burnet’s words, ‘The concept was magnificent - vast dominions to be discovered and added to the Spanish empire, millions of souls to be saved and brought into the Catholic faith and more riches of gold and silver.’ Torres just missed ‘Terra Australis’ to the south, but became the first to navigate the strait which later bore his name.
Having heard of Torres’ trip from the Spanish on Ternate Island, the Dutch knew that there must be a way through, but it was nearly forty years later when Abel Tasman set out to find it. By then, the Dutch were convinced that there was nothing much of value in the great southern land. Tasman made two attempts – first sailing from the Pacific along the north coast of Papua New Guinea in 1643, and then from the west in 1644, getting as far as Cape York – he mistook the strait for a ‘shallow bay’. It was the Englishman James Cook who first managed to follow Luis Vas de Torres and navigate from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean via the strait - a hundred-and-twenty-five years later in 1770.
Back in Hobart, I watched a replica of the Lady Nelson sail the Derwent estuary. The original vessel arrived in Sydney in 1800, the first to reach the east coast of Australia via Bass Strait. She subsequently accompanied Flinders on the first leg of his historic circumnavigation of Australia in 1801. However, the brig was sent back to Sydney before reaching the Torres Strait after suffering damage from several groundings. In 1803, she sailed with the Albion to establish the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. Matthew Flinders had previously identified a suitable spot on the banks of the Derwent. Eventually, after a long and checkered career, the doughty little ship sailed through the Torres Strait in 1824 in an expedition to establish a settlement on Melville Island near modern-day Darwin. She was scuttled by Malay pirates off the Babar Islands while carrying livestock and provisions from Kupang to the new settlement.
Burnet’s previous six books explore various aspects of the history of European exploration and colonisation of the region, along with its cultures and geography: Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map and Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages.
The writing is always engaging. Combining his scholarly attention to detail, his matter-of-fact prose, and a nose for a good story, Dangerous Passage moves at a pace. While serving up a rich history of the region, Burnet never allows that detail to slow the action. As Burnet warns us in his prologue, ‘Readers should be advised that this history will include stories of murder, mayhem, mutiny, disastrous shipwrecks, desperate voyages of survival in open boats, headhunting and hurricanes.’ Liberally illustrated with maps, artwork, and direct quotations from source material, the book gives us a first-hand look at the motives, trials, challenges, frustrations, tragedies and triumphs of those explorers and adventurers over a four-hundred-year period.
The modern-day sailor would do well to take note of Burnet’s warning and of the experiences and insights of those earlier seafarers as he or she sets out to sail the Torres Strait.
Ian Burnet
Ian Burnet is an author, voyager and explorer. He has spent thirty years living, working and travelling in Indonesia and is fascinated by the diverse history and culture of the archipelago. Dangerous Passage is available in paperback or ebook from the usual online retailers, on order from your favourite bookshop, or directly from www.ianburnetbooks.com
Mark Heyward
Mark Heyward is an Australian educator who has worked for over thirty-five years in Indonesia. He has published numerous articles for magazines and national papers in Indonesia and Australia on education, culture, literature, travel and the arts. His books, Crazy Little Heaven, an Indonesian Journey, and The Glass Islands, A Year in Lombok, are both best sellers in Indonesia.