Masked Histories by Leah Lui-Chivizhe review - The stories of unique and haunting artefacts

The meat was caught by hunters off the islands or on the beaches in season, cooked in traditional hangi-style feasting accompanied by the whole clan, and its shell and skulls used in stirring ritual to continue the success of the hunt.

The "carapace" or shell of a mature female green turtle came to be prized in traditional culture as material for the making of sacred masks, among other ceremonial objects, and ranks along with the feather headdresses of these peoples, now commemorated on the Torres Strait Flag.

The masks are a unique and haunting form of sculpture, often depicted as personalities in their own right, and festooned with ornaments of shell and feathers cut into their thick surface.

They were collected by colonial explorers and anthropologists, and are held in museum collections across the world.

In Masked Histories, Leah Lui-Chivizhe tells the stories of the Torres Strait Indigenous culture through these artefacts that the turtle contributed to their way of life.

A historian with links to the Torres Strait communities, she recounts not only the traditional practices surrounding these turtle masks from the point of view of early anthropologists, and more recent retellings of these as Indigenous oral histories, but also links these to the present-day concerns for the conservation of the species.

After early essays on the traditional methods of hunting and consuming the turtle, and on the profound disruption to the Indigenous ways of life in the Torres Strait following from colonial encroachment, Lui-Chivizhe adopts a vital and original style of retelling, involving the biographies of six such masks now held in the world's collections.

She describes a compatriot going down on all fours in "crocodile" fashion to introduce himself to the mask in the store room at the British Museum, as an important moment in her study of these artifacts.

In that moment, a colonial place "in the heart of London became an Islander cultural space".

Contemporary Indigenous artists from the Torres Strait, like Ken Thaiday (Snr) and Ricardo Idagi, produce remarkable sculpture extending this tradition.

Their work, collected now in major art museums, rescues a form of cultural expression that was suppressed but not extinguished in the colonising of Australia.