The Kaurareg are lower Western Islanders, part of a network of five distinct ethno-cultural groups that made up the traditional world of the Torres Strait. Though conflict between groups was common, it never disrupted the intricate trading system that linked all the island peoples and extended to both New Guinea and Cape York Peninsula. The Kaurareg and their neighbors on Mua Island traded bu -- trumpet shells -- and alup -- bailer shells -- along with turtle and dugong harpoon shafts, exchanging them for Papuan canoe hulls, cassowary bone-tipped arrows, and bamboo used for carrying water and fashioning knives. Their outrigger canoes were impressive vessels, capable of crossing the dangerous strait waters. The Kaurareg maintained ceremonial, marriage, and trading alliances with several Aboriginal groups on the Cape York mainland, including the Gudang, Gumakudin, Unduyamo, and Yadhaigana.

In 1844, a woman named Barbara Thompson survived the wreck of a ship off Nurupai -- Horn Island. The Kaurareg took her in, treating her as the markai, or ancestral spirit, of an elder's deceased daughter. She lived among them for five years before being found by the crew of HMS Rattlesnake in 1849. The artist Oswald Brierly, traveling with the Rattlesnake expedition, documented the Kaurareg extensively, estimating their population on Muralag alone at around 100, with more spread across ten additional islands. Decades later, the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon studied the Kaurareg in 1888 and returned in 1898 to lead the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait, producing some of the most detailed ethnographic records of any Indigenous Australian group.

In April 1869, the schooner Sperwer was attacked off Muralag, and its captain, James Gascoyne, along with his crew of seven, were killed. Three Kaurareg men were captured and executed. But the violence did not stop there. Frank Jardine, the local pastoralist and government administrator, launched a punitive expedition with armed men who, by his own son's account, ran amok. A massacre of Kaurareg on Muralag followed, though the full scale remains disputed. Jardine continued attacks throughout the 1870s. His successor, Henry Chester, compounded the injustice -- kidnapping a Kaurareg elder on false intelligence, then leading a force of Royal Marines and native police, some of whom were recently released convicts, in further raids. When Cape York Gudang men finally identified three Kulkalaig men from Nagir as the actual perpetrators of the Sperwer attack, Chester had them summarily executed. It is now widely accepted that the Kaurareg were uninvolved. The reprisals visited on them for a crime they did not commit devastated their population.

By the 1880s, Kaurareg survivors numbered perhaps a hundred. Over the following decades, they were forcibly relocated -- first to Hammond Island, then to Moa Island in the 1920s, and to Coconut Island. An Anglican missionary, Canon John Done, noted their desperate condition in 1919, calling it the worst of all the Islander groups. By 1920, influenza had reduced their numbers to 67. In 1922, they were moved at gunpoint to Moa Island, where they remained for 25 years. In 1947, elder Elikiam Tom insisted on returning to his homeland. Denied residence on Hammond Island by the Catholic Mission because he refused to convert, he went to Horn Island and, with other Kaurareg elders, built Wasaga village. The government tried to move them again to the mainland. They refused. In 2001, a federal court returned seven islands to Kaurareg control, and in 2002, the Kaurareg declared the United Isles of Kaiwalagal. Their fight for connection to their remaining homelands continues.