Tiwi Islands

The Tiwi Islands (Tiwi: Ratuati Irara meaning "two islands") are part of the Northern Territory, Australia, 80 km (50 mi) to the north of Darwin adjoining the Timor Sea.

The Tiwi Islands (Tiwi: Ratuati Irara meaning "two islands") are part of the Northern Territory, Australia, 80 km (50 mi) to the north of Darwin adjoining the Timor Sea. They comprise Melville Island, Bathurst Island, and nine smaller uninhabited islands, with a combined area of 8,320 square kilometres (3,212 sq mi).

Inhabited before European settlement by the Tiwi, an Aboriginal Australian people, the islands' population was 2,453 in the 2016 Australian census.

The Tiwi Land Council is one of four land councils in the Northern Territory. It is a representative body with statutory authority under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, and has responsibilities under the Native Title Act 1993 and the Pastoral Land Act 1992.

Aboriginal people have occupied the area that became the Tiwi Islands for at least 40,000 years, with creation stories relating their presence on the islands at least 7,000 years before present.Tiwi islanders are believed to have had contact with Macassan traders, and the first historical record of contact between Indigenous islanders and European explorers was with the Dutch "under the command of Commander Maarten van Delft who took three ships, the Nieuw Holland, the Waijer, and the Vosschenbosch, into Shark Bay on Melville Island and landed on 30 April 1705". There were other visits by explorers and navigators in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including by Dutchman Pieter Pieterszoon, Frenchman Nicholas Baudin and Briton Philip Parker King.

In February 1824 Captain Gordon Bremer was appointed by the Admiralty, upon instruction from the British Colonial Office, to take possession of Bathurst and Melville Islands, along with the Cobourg Peninsula (now part of Arnhem Land) on the mainland to the east, subject to the land being unoccupied by any people except "...the Natives of those or any of the other Eastern Islands". Bremer established the first European settlement on the Islands, which was also the first British settlement in northern Australia, at Fort Dundas on Melville Island, near present-day Pirlangimpi in September 1824. However, owing in part to the hostility of the Indigenous population, it lasted only five years, being abandoned in 1829. As "the first attempted European and military settlement anywhere in northern Australia", the site is on Australia's Register of the National Estate.Despite the failure of the settlement, Bremer had claimed the northern area of the continent and adjacent islands as part of New South Wales (then under Governor Thomas Brisbane). Jurisdiction of the Northern Territory, including the Tiwi Islands was taken over by the Government of the Colony of South Australia by instruction from the Colonial Office in 1863, but this was finally relinquished to the federal government, after years of negotiations, in 1911.Soon before the South Australian government handed over the Territory, it gave notice that up to 5,000 acres were available north of the 18th parallel south, which included land on Bathurst Island. In September 1910 the German Catholic missionary Francis Xavier Gsellapplied for a license to establish a Christian mission in similar way that land grants had been made in British New Guinea. In the same month the South Australian government declared the whole of Bathurst Island an Aboriginal reserve, and granted 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) for the mission.The mission was established by Gsell on Bathurst Island in 1911. A timber church built in the 1930s is a prominent landmark in Wurrumiyanga. The Catholic mission had positive impacts, through access to education and welfare services, but also negative effects through the suppression of Aboriginal language and culture. Nova Peris' mother, Joan, was raised in this mission after being taken from her mother; she was one of the Stolen Generations.The Tiwi artwork in the Catholic church, and the translation of Biblical stories into Tiwi, are both notable.

Control of the islands was transferred to the Indigenous traditional owners through the Tiwi Aboriginal Land Trust, and the Tiwi Land Council that was founded in 1978. The Tiwi Islands local government area was established in 2001, when the previous community government councils in the three main communities of Wurrumiyanga (Bathurst Island), Pirlangimpi and Milikapiti (Melville Island) were amalgamated with the Wurankuwu Aboriginal Corporation to form a single local government. The Tiwi Islands Local Government was replaced in 2008 by the Tiwi Islands Shire Council as part of a Northern Territory-wide restructuring of local government.