“Thursday Island, it's easy to find - it's between Wednesday and Friday Islands.” The skipper isn't joking as Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Islands are part of the group at the top of Australia near Cape York.
Our ferry leaves from Seisia, on the Cape York Peninsula taking an hour to get to Thursday Island, known locally as TI.
The Green Hill Fort above the town makes a good starting point and from the gun emplacements we overlook the islands, sandbars and reefs that dot Torres Strait.
The guns were set up to ward off a possible Russian invasion back in the 1890s but they didn't really need them as the reefs and sandbanks would have done the job just as well.
TI's first inhabitants were Torres Strait Islanders. Dutch explorers from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) explored the coast but many ships came to grief on the reefs. A replica of one of these ships cruises the inner straits giving tourists another view of the island from a fully-rigged sailing ship.
