By Tom Hearn, Waibene (Thursday Island)
The sea lies glassy. Shade holds the heat back from the verandah. Uncle Gabriel Bani speaks first in Kala Lagaw Ya and the air shifts. You feel the truth of it before the pen touches paper.
“I’m Wagadagam, from Mabuyag,” he says. “Koedal is my totem, Kuki Guuba my wind. Kala Lagaw Ya is my first language. That’s the strength of my identity, that’s what allows me to be.”
Uncle Gabriel is working with Wakai Waian Healing on aftercare consultations, but his path in social and emotional wellbeing goes back decades. “In 1986 I remember first walking into Queensland Health.” Training followed at Brisbane’s Biala Centre. “Me and my wife worked with young people around alcohol and drug counselling.” By the early 90s the region was moving from hospital first care to primary health care, and the language moved with it. “We didn’t want to call it mental health or suicide, we called it family support.”
To sit with Uncle is to be corrected gently. Outsider labels bend toward Islander meanings until they make cultural sense. When I ask about aftercare, he does not dismiss it, he repairs it. “Aftercare is not our term. Aftercare takes place naturally within the Buway kinship system.” Then the line that frames everything that follows. “We don’t have immediate families. We only have the Buway structure.”
For generations, mainstream and colonial models have struggled to see this, often dismissing Zenadth Kes ways of being and knowing as informal or unproven, even though the Lores and languages have stood for many centuries. The ‘we know best’ colonial reflex has frustrated families for years, yet cultural sovereignty is not a switch, it is a journey, a slow and respectful alignment of services with Lore. And sometimes the most powerful intervention is the quietest one. Mainstream services underestimate human presence. Our presence in itself is very powerful.
He widens the lens. “I have watched Closing the Gap struggle because it was built on an us and them frame, top down. I have seen the goodwill and the budgets, but the power rarely moves back to the sovereign ones. People write culture into strategies, but too often it is empty inside, a logo not a law, a checkbox not a practice. Many policy makers and non Indigenous Australians still do not trust that culture is the key. The wisdom of thousands of generations is a living knowledge system, not a museum. Until that trust is real, the needle barely shifts. Hand the power back and the measures will follow.”
I can see clearly now that Language holds the key. I ask what a single word, Buway, can carry in Kala Lagaw Ya. Uncle Gabriel smiles. “It’s a concept. It’s like an encyclopedia.” Then he tips the encyclopedia into the room. “It’s written in songs, dances, fishing, hunting, constellations and the winds.” In this frame a word is not a label, it is a map for living. Say a kin term and you do not describe a relationship, you activate it. Call a totem and you do not name an animal, you awaken a law. Buway looks small in English. In Kala Lagaw Ya it is an entire way of being.
In some places, he says, Buway has gone quiet, crowded by grog, phones, busy lives, offices far away. “It’s like a sleeping crocodile.” Yet it is never gone. You see Koedal lift its eyes above the water when an Elder clears the throat, when a cousin knocks and just sits, when a dinghy lands with cray for a grieving house, when a hymn rises, when the drum starts. The crocodile remembers its job. We only need to wake it.”
What is missing in most of mainstream Australia is ritual weight. Grief is often private and fast. A text, a card, a short visit if time allows. Across the Torres Strait the ties are thick. They stretch across islands and years. When someone passes, the movement begins. Men and women cook. Aunties organise. Youth carry chairs and esky. People travel far by plane, ferry and dinghy to sit with the bereaved, to share a meal, to be present without many words. Feasting is how love becomes practical. The tombstone opening is not a single date, it is a promise kept, a return to speak a name with honour, to feed the community so the spirit sits right and the family can breathe again. Uncle Gabriel says it simply. “In our way, we do not leave people to grieve alone. Presence is our first medicine.”
When someone dies in Zenadth Kes, whether by suicide, heart disease, accident or at sea, Buway holds the family the same way. Under Buway, death and burial follow a clear protocol that steadies the house. In laws take leadership while the immediate family sits to mourn. Taboos guide respect between in-laws and family, no naming, no touching, no close sitting or eye contact except where health care requires it. In-laws break the news, call the wider clan across islands, sit on the mat and speak in the voice of the deceased to thank loved ones and say goodbye. They set times and places, organise finances, work with church and clinic and help prepare the body. After burial, the family hosts supper to honour the in-laws’ service. Months later at the tombstone opening, in-laws collect the materials and keepsakes placed at the grave as thanks, and the community feasts and dances. Then ordinary leadership returns to the family and everyday Buway resumes. The work is to balance the house, settle the spirit and keep the living close. Labels and programs change on forms. Under Buway the duty does not.
I ask Uncle Gabriel what he wants people beyond the Strait to understand about providing mental health services to the region. He keeps his eyes on the moving tide. His tone stays even. “We don’t need an outside program. We need partnership to bring our own aftercare, Buway, back to life.” He holds my eye. “Let us breathe life into our ancient kinship systems, our language, our Elders’ authority, our totems, our clan duties, and we will prevent these crises before they start.”
The invitation sits inside the story, not above it. Resource Elders and Community Connectors so those who carry Lore and Language and Country and Leadership can lead. Support island based ‘Buway navigators or Community Connectors’ who weave family, church, school and clinic so no one sits alone. Keep language alive in daily use, have mental health community education in Creole and Kala Lagaw Ya and Meriam Mir in workshops, recordings and classrooms, because every word in language is medicine. Back the ordinary business of belonging with small, regular health promotion grants for song, dance, prayer, cooking, vigil, reef trips. Fund a grassroots place-based community movement that makes communications work, presence possible, boats, fuel, airfares, safe spaces and phone credit. Build youth pathways to duty, net mending, mat making, reef to plate, yard crews, arts and music, identity made useful. And measure what matters to Islanders, belonging, continuity, return to school and work, fewer lonely nights. When Buway is awake, when the sleeping crocodile blinks at the waterline, the belonging is too strong to slip through. This is good pasin. The old way of kindness and sharing and connection.The data will tell the story in its own time – fewer emergency presentations, fewer readmissions, fewer crises.
We sit a little longer in the afternoon heat. The tide turns. Uncle Gabriel stands. He smiles to close the circle and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s not use the word aftercare anymore. How can we care for someone after they have gone? Let’s talk about prevention and waking up Buway together.” On Waibene, that sounds less like a slogan and more like a plan.