Transformed by tradition: The architectural traditions of Erub Island, Torres Straits

This paper is concerned with architectural traditions in the Torres Straits, Australia. Since the 1970s there have been repeated calls for culturally appropriate Indigenous housing in Australia and the literature repeatedly reports failure in the system of Indigenous housing provision. Yet, despite the fact that in some parts of Indigenous Australia western housing types have been occupied for 30 or even 50 years, not much has been done to understand the nature of this occupation. Little research has considered the ways that Indigenous people have successfully engaged with introduced house types by creatively transforming them into culturally specific living environments. This is particularly the case for the Torres Straits. This paper examines how the people of Erub (Darnley Island) of the eastern Torres Straits have engaged with other cultures and how they have engaged with government supplied housing and transformed it with architectural traditions. The paper reveals that Indigenous living environments are transformed by non-Indigenous influences including the introduction of alternative materials and government supplied housing. However such government supplied housing is in turn transformed by Indigenous traditions - the repertoire of spaces and structures that people build for themselves to support preferred ways of living. The paper illustrates that the production of traditional living environments embeds government supplied houses in culturally specific places