Kirriri (Hammond Island)
Situated just under three kilometres northwest of Thursday Island and 806 kilometres north-northwest of Cairns in the Torres Strait Island Region's Inner Islands (Prince of Wales Group), Hammond Island (Kalaw Kawaw Ya: Keriri or Kiriri) is an unsubmerged remnant of Australia's Great Dividing Range. The island's terrain is hilly, with mounds of basaltic rocks, except for a narrow section of land along the southeastern coast where part of the island's residential community lives, and a plateau further inland, home to the remainder. The 1607-hectare island is approximately three kilometres wide and six kilometres long, with closed forest on the sheltered slopes and escarpment and grasslands, intertidal wetlands and mangroves on the coastal fringe.
Captain Edward Edwards named Hammond Island as he travelled through the Torres Strait after the frigate HMS Pandora was wrecked on the outer Great Barrier Reef in late August 1791. When Matthew Flinders sailed past the island in 1802, he noticed campfires on the island but did not encounter the Kaurareg people.
Reprisals against "the Korrorega (Kaurareg) natives" led by Somerset's Police Magistrate Henry Chester after the cutter Sperwer's crew were killed when their ship was anchored off Prince of Wales Island in April 1869 began a long period of decline for the island's traditional owners. Additional retaliatory attacks against the Kaurareg on and around Prince of Wales Island continued through the 1870s.
Although the Queensland government gazetted the island as an Aboriginal Reserve in 1881, a pearling station operated in the 1880s.. A brief rush followed the discovery of gold in September 1889, but the deposits were soon exhausted.
While most of the remaining Kaurareg people were moved to Hammond Island in the first decade of the 20th century, strenuous efforts to persuade them to relocate to a new settlement on Moa were unsuccessful. After an influenza epidemic swept through the island community, forced relocations eventually took them to Poid on Moa Island in 1921 and 1922. Hammond Island subsequently became the site of a Catholic Mission for the descendants of indentured Filipinos and Malay labourers who had married indigenous women.
Missing links:
Captain Edward Edwards
HMS Pandora
Somerset
Henry Chester
cutter Sperwer
Poid
