Melburnian return to family’s mission

When Roslyn Jago embarked on a family history quest, she did not expect to find herself at sea, navigating the jade eddies and sheer, ages-old rock atolls of the Buccaneer Archipelago.

Nor did the Melbourne native expect to have blanks in her lineage filled in by a senior Bardi Jawi man from the remote Kimberley, Bruce Wiggan.

Ms Jago was striking out for Sunday Island, 15 km from Cygnet Bay at the head of King Sound, to trace the steps of her adoptive grandparents, Jim and Gladys Jago, who were 1923 missionaries to the hidden island.

Such is the innate pull of family, Ms Jago felt like she was heading home as the boat she was travelling on brushed through mangroves which fringed a secluded entrance to the island.

She was not the only visitor tied to this little known island off the rugged Kimberley coast.

Guiding Ms Jago alongside Mr Wiggan, who spent his childhood on the island, was James Brown a third-generation pearler whose family business first began at Sunday Island, before moving to Cygnet Bay in the 1960s around the time the mission closed.

Now uninhabited, Sunday mission was established on the Jawi island of Iwanyi in 1899 by Sydney Hadley.

Amid the rubble once her grandparent’s home, Ms Jago said she fought back tears.

Mr Wiggan lives at One Arm Point, and told Ms Jago of regular ploys to avoid school with the missionaries as a boy, to fish off the stone jetty.