Tales of the sea

The remote islands of Australia’s Torres Strait lie in one of the most hazardous stretches of water in the world, but those who make it there will find stories and wildlife well worth the effort

- Lizzie Pook

"Take a look. Go on. What do you think that island is made of?" asked my guide Dirk Laifoo, handing me a pair of binoculars and gesturing northward. I took them and squinted at a jagged mass of dark brown bobbing on the open sea. My mouth fell open.

"It's... metal," I said slowly, then peered closer. "Are they baskets or something?" This small island, scorched by the sun and cast adrift in one of the most remote stretches of water in northern Australia, looked like something left behind from a Mad Max film.

"They're the baskets that people used to hold pearl shells in," Dirk nodded. "The workers at the pearl farm piled them up here for decades, and eventually they became an island of their own. Ecologically, it's quite healthy now." I looked through the binoculars again and saw that bright corals clung to the darkest baskets at the bottom. Moving my eyes upwards, I spied tiny terns with fierce beaks perched atop the pile. It would not be the last occasion during my time in the Torres Strait Islands that my jaw was left hanging.

This clutch of some 274 tropical isles languishes between the northern tip of Australia's Cape York and Papua New Guinea, and just 17 of them are inhabited. Across these you'll find distinct cultures, languages and histories, yet the area is little explored by tourists, who only tend to venture as far north as Queensland's glitzy Great Barrier Reef or the lush Daintree rainforest. The Strait is a more rugged prospect. It is a place where seawater pumps through the veins of islanders and the practices of navigating by the stars, reading the tides or fishing for trochus shells and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber) still thrive.