Taylor Mitchell (TM):       First of all, I want to acknowledge that a lot of this project is taking place on Wurundjeri Woi-wurung land and that sovereignty was never ceded. For readers who might not be aware, are you able to describe the Torres Strait environment and some of the main issues affecting the community?

Rhett Loban (RL):   So if we’re talking about the environment and geography, the Torres Straits is located in Far North Queensland, in Australia, between Cape York Peninsula and Papua New Guinea. It’s a collection of islands—there are about five major island groups, the Western Island group, Northwestern, Central, Eastern, and Inner Islands, all the Torres Straits. If you go to, say, the Eastern Islands, a lot of them are volcanic so they known for their agriculture. In the central island group, some of the islands are coral cays. If you go to the Northern Island, say if you went to Saiba, there are swamps there. And obviously, it’s all surrounded by sea, and then the ocean. And that works a lot into the culture as well. In terms of main issues, and talking about the environment, climate change is a big issue. Things like king tides affect the communities there, wiping out houses or villages. In some cases, I’ve heard people interviewed say that a king tide has brought up their family’s graves. So they see bones and things like that. Pretty unpleasant. And as a result, you actually typically find people from some of those islands move down to Cape York Peninsula. So there are specific communities there that, even though they’re on the mainland, they’re predominantly Torres Strait Islander communities. So if we’re talking about the environment, one of the main issues is climate change there.

Not many people know about the Torres Strait, and I see that as an issue. Through my own work, I try to make the general public more aware of it. I have tried to do it through Torres Strait Virtual Reality. It’s important because Torres Strait Culture forms part of Indigenous history and, of course, wider Australian history as well.

TM:       Can you please introduce your project Torres Strait Virtual Reality (TSVR) and tell us about how it came about?

RL:   Yeah, so Torres Strait Virtual Reality started in 2016. I was teaching a unit on games, and I was using Unreal Engine Four to build digital environments. And at that point, virtual reality was just kind of coming out, and Torres Strait Islander media wasn’t really reflected, or there wasn’t, there isn’t necessarily a lot out there. Even Indigenous media, more generally, there’s not as much out there as other sorts of digital media, especially if we’re talking about things like games. So I thought that would be a really great way to teach Torres Strait culture because I play games a lot myself. So I talked to some people. And I had to put in an application to the office of the Vice Chancellor of Education and I was lucky enough to get support for it. So I went ahead and built it. And that’s kind of how it started off. So the project, it’s, it’s primarily a game, to kind of teach about Torres Strait Islander culture and knowledge.

The premise is you’re collecting different items and different objects for a Tombstone Opening Ceremony you’re going to. A Tombstone Opening is held at the end of a mourning period after someone passes away. Unveiling the tombstone, it’s an event. There’s singing, dancing, and feasting. The nature of the game is that certain preparations for the ceremony are your responsibility. Because when we have these events, we’re allocated different duties—there are different protocols you have to follow. So you get these responsibilities, and the premise of the games is collecting the things you’ve been charged to collect and that way, you’re fulfilling your protocol. And amongst this, I tried to reflect other elements of Torres Strait knowledge and culture and different Story characters as well.

TM:       The game incorporates ‘colonial’ elements such as motorboats while also foregrounding pre-colonial knowledges. Can you tell us about the world you’ve built within the game?

AH:   Yeah, so I see it as set today, or when I built it at that time. They have motor boats there and constructed houses. They’re different in the communities because of climate, obviously, so the houses in Sydney aren't going to be the same as in Queensland. But there are also cultural understandings that are long-standing, ingrained in the culture that are part of community and a part of life. So I suppose we do have those motorboats and those things there, but that’s part of the culture, being on boats. If you look back at the pearling industry, there were luggers there. You know, they’re solid boats. And if you look at Torres Strait art, there are lino prints about the pearling industry. Even though some of those industries were introduced to some extent, they become a part of the culture in itself. While they’re colonial, they’re also part of the culture. Every culture has had stuff introduced to it to some extent, and there has always been cultural exchange and intermixing. But these things are still distinctly Torres Strait.

TM:       You’ve spoken a little about how the game engages the player in a Tombstone Opening ceremony. Can you talk about how the process depicts Torres Strait Islander stories as grounded in the landscape and seascape?

AH:   Throughout the game, you travel through different islands to collect objects like drums, mats and spears, and then you’re also getting dugong and turtle for the feast. So you're going around the landscape itself, walking through it, and being immersed in it. And as you’re going through, you’re observing, and you’re engaging with all these different things that you might see on that journey. So you start off on Mabuiag Island, and then you go over to Boigu. When you’re going through the sea, say if you jump off into the water, you might see things like crayfish; there’s a migration that happens from Papua New Guinea or happens from the Torres Strait up to Papua New Guinea. So there are these bits of environmental knowledge about the animals that you discover as you’re kind of going through the game. If you don’t even stay on the path, if you just wander off into other sections, you’ll find these kinds of different elements within the environment. You find manta rays, stingrays, sharks, and all sorts of animals there. In some places, the narrator will talk about the fruits that come from the trees. So the Malay apples, or the bell fruit. In terms of relating it to stories, you’ll encounter Story characters throughout the game. If you wander off onto different islands where you stray off the path, you’ll notice that there are different levels. So you’ve got the ocean that you can go into to progress the game, you’ve got the land where you’re walking around, but there’s also the sky as well. And if you look up to the sky, especially at night, you’ll see kind of abstracted versions of constellations that are representative of different stories as well. While they’re abstracted, we tried to kind of place them in the right place where we could. So Baidam the shark is in the north and Tagai in the south. And because there’s little light at night when you’re in the game, these can be useful navigational tools for the player as well, which the narrator prompts you to think about. So when we’re talking about stories grounded in the landscape of the seascape, there are those in the sky, but there are also those in the land as well. So if you were to go off to, say, Dauan Island, you’ll encounter the Dogai Giz—a shapeshifting female spirit. So within the stories, but also within real life, if you were to go to some of these places like Dauan, there’s a lot of rocks, and there’s like bonfires and things like that. While I’ve tied in some depictions of the islands into the game, these are also reflected in the stories as well. So I guess that’s how I’ve tried to interlink different parts of the seascape, sky, or ocean with some of the stories.

TM:       How does the work engage with the notion of interfaces (such as the lens or the screen) as spaces through which to critique or contest settler-colonial visuality?

AH:   I suppose I’ve tried to link that through the stories that I depict. So the Story characters in the sky, if you look up to the sky, you’ll see those constellations. I’ve tried to depict the unique scape, the unique kind of connection, and how the world is visualised in that way. You have those story constellations in the sky, in those depictions of the landscape, that are connected to those stories in the land itself, and maybe part of the environment as well. Like the premise and the story itself, it requires you to interact and engage with the land and the sea in ways that would be harder to do otherwise, or that wouldn’t be thought of otherwise. You have to go trade with New Guineans in the north, and they come down from New Guinea. That’s not interaction with the land per se, but it is specific to that region. There are specific cultural practices [that] happen over that kind of space—it’s more that space as opposed to the physical geography. If you look at things like traditional hunting as well, those are ways that you interact with the environment and the animal community there. And that forms a part of the feast, as well. For very special occasions, you have turtle and dugong. There are different takes on the tombstone opening, some people may not do all of these things.

TM:       Can you speak to how the project engages with the idea of endurance—of  Torres Strait knowledges, environments and stories—through VR? How does the interactive POV shape this?

AH:   Yeah, well, I really like the idea of VR because it puts you in a first-person perspective. And I think a lot of the ways that you think and learn about culture is through your way of life and through those experiences. Books and movies are good as well. But I think of it as a way of life, that’s how my dad saw it. And I really liked learning through those kinds of experiential ways. When you’re learning in a classroom, or if you’re just reading from a book, it’s theoretical, you’re not actually experiencing it, you’re kind of doing it through your own lens and your process, maybe in a different way. And you know, this VR game is definitely my take on the Torres Strait Islander Tomb Ceremony, but I just really liked the idea because it puts you in that perspective in that place, and you walk through it, and you fulfil those duties that you need to do and those protocols. And for me that's something that might be closer than if it’s just being written about because there’s this kind of experience that you go through. It’s more immersive than reading about it in a book or something like that. It’s a simulation, obviously—a quasi-version of reality—but I feel it’s a shift towards it.

TM:       It feels important that you have embedded a sense of responsibility into the game.

AH:   Yeah, that’s, that's it, isn’t it? That’s the premise of the game. And, you know, my game design was informed by thinking about how we can embed culture into the game. You know, I think there's when we think about culture if you think of it as a way of life, there are things like what happens in life; there’s birth, there’s maybe a coming of age or those sorts of things. And then there’s this death. That’s what culture revolves around.

TM:       Could you speak a little bit about how you worked with your father on TSVR?

AH:   Yeah, absolutely. So in Torres Strait Islander culture, we try to arrive at things through consensus, and I wanted to really bring that home.  I would go out and playtest with the community, but I really wanted to have an Elder on board as well. And my dad has a lot of knowledge. He was born in the 1950s, he grew up there. He’s gone and done lots of kinds of different things. He was a good cultural guide. And he contributed a lot as well in that way. So I think that kind of forms a part of my design process—seeking his guidance and knowledge.

We started off thinking about a shaving ceremony, to begin with, because that’s an important thing in the Torres Straits. Still, we ended up settling with the tombstone opening because it’s easier to depict. My father was the cultural expert in depicting this process, but he was integral to game design in many other ways. He was a teacher. So he’s a very good speaker. Well, I think he’s a good speaker, and he’s the narrator, walking you through the game. And I’ve heard from other people who’ve played the game as well that they liked the narrator. He’s also okay at drawing as well. A lot of the sketches and things that you’ll find in games are his, like his sketches of the constellations and his take on that, I turned them into 3D assets. He really strongly influenced and guided the project. But not only that, he contributed in these other really, really important ways that you need in a game product. So you need a narrator, or you need this audio or voices. And then you’ll need these game assets within the game. And these all feed into the process of the game coming from family and community and the culture itself, as opposed to being kind of someone else thinking in their own mind, ‘What was this culture?’

I could pick up a book, but maybe it’s not by someone from the actual culture. People outside the culture come out with a jangled version of understanding of the culture, and it’s kind of passed off as gamified truth. And you know, that might not be their fault because they’re trying to be inclusive; they might have very good intentions. But they still come up with this false version of what the culture is or a warped version of it. With my dad involved, we had an Elder going out and engaging in different classes that have an Indigenous cohort or a focus on Indigenous content and getting their feedback. I would take it to summer and winter schools and get their feedback, as well. And, you know, there are things that I can’t do and things I could. I actually didn’t depict Torres Strait Islander people because I didn’t have the assets to depict Torres Strait Islanders in the kind of way I felt comfortable. They were like models for African American people, Asian people and white people. But having those people as models in the game wouldn’t fit and would be kind of awkward, so I’d made the decision not to include them. But I would depict culture through other means and in other ways, and I’d try to integrate different comments based on the lack of people in the game. They would say, ‘Okay, well, can we get animals?’ and it dawned on me,  that’s a really important thing as well because, in the Torres Straits, we have totems, and these are representative of animals within the environment, so I can bring these in.

So that’s how my dad was very important as an Elder involved in the project. But also engaging the wider community and other kinds of, you know, other Torres Strait Islanders and the wider Indigenous community was critical and fed into how I approach game design.

TM:       Can you talk a little bit about the game design and your notion of the Torres Strait Islander Cultural Tree?

AH:   In the Torres Straits, a lot of people view culture through a tree. Everyone kind of has different takes on it. My family and my take on it is that we show it as a culture but also how it evolves as well. So if you think of a tree in the Torres Strait, it’s depicted as a coconut palm. When we’re thinking about culture, we can see the roots as long-standing deep customs, histories and stories. Now, the trunk, my take on it, is the personal expression of the artists or whoever it might be; they’re mediating those kinds of deep understandings and deep culture through themselves. And then there are the branches. And these are new cultural outputs, new takes on songs or dance, different kinds of artwork, or in my case, it just happened to be a piece of digital media.

There is deep culture at the bottom, and there are these different interpretations. If we think of things like storytelling, it’s not just a recount, there’s like new elements to it as well, retold in a different way or with different aspects. And then when you come out at the top, the culture is there. It’s not an exact replication of what the roots are at the bottom, but it draws from those aspects. Culture is not a static thing; it changes over time. And it’s represented in new ways—culture is always kind of taking from something and doing it in different ways, right? And that’s how it’s visualised in the Torres Strait. But the key thing here is that it’s drawing from those deeper understandings of what culture is, and it's reinterpreting it in different ways. That’s why things like say, for example, people who are outside of the culture, who are coming up with their own understanding of it, don’t quite get it right. Their work might take on the aesthetic appearance of what the culture is, or their own interpretation or where it is, but they haven’t lived it. They’re not drawing from that experience in itself, which is why the cultural tree is important, because we're taking it from there.