18th June 2026: we had a slow start to the day as it was raining! We had a coffee plus quiche/frittata at MA-KAi then headed for Island Stars where there was no info about the painting I was interested in, but we finally met Joey and we were able to join an Outback tour group to watch a cultural dance performance. Joey takes young boys, especially those who are a bit wayward and teaches them about their ancestry and to be proud of it and he teaches them traditional dances. They meet twice a week for instruction and he has put at least 40 dancers through his trainee programme. They have performed elsewhere in Australian and overseas.

They were great! They performed dances of welcome , dance representing their knowledge of winds and knowledge of the tides and dances according to which island they came from, and they taught the audience a simple dance.The rhythm and singing were wonderful!

We then decided to walk to Lions lookout (2 km) which had been the site of lookout and gun placements during the second WW. We walked on past Lions lookout and came to Sadie’s beach where there were extensive seagrass beds but no dugongs to be seen. We didn’t go onto the beach due to the crocodile risk. We then took a rough track back to the Lion’s lookout road, as advised by some policemen in their vehicle at Sadie’s beach. We returned to the Grand and took possession of our new room with sea view but no balcony! 

We then went for another walk to the cemetery to explore it a bit more. We went in search of ripe Wongai berries to eat , but, despite them supposedly ripening in May, they remained firm and full of white sticky sap and very firm to bite into, even though they were red in colour.  Legend stands that if you eat Wongai berry fruit you will return to the Islands, so perhaps we won’t be back.

Most of the people in the cemetery died at an age younger than we are now. There were many elaborate headstones-Japanese Chinese,  Islander, European and we were struck by how many simple unmarked graves there were to Japanese Pearl fishermen.

We went to the Torres for dinner - Spanish Mackerel- with chips and salad with an on tap ginger beer.

Head dress art at MA-KAi
Joey


The youngest dancer, dancing since age 4


Star performer
Sadie’s beach-seagrass bed in foreground 
Unidentified graves of Japanese Pearl Divers
Rainbow bee- eater
Bar-shouldered dove
Nic outside the Torres with net floats










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