Parama Island (formerly Bampton Island) is an island close off the south coast of

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. It is located 17 km east of

Daru Daru is the capital of the Western Province of Papua New Guinea and a former Catholic bishopric. Daru town falls under the jurisdiction of Daru Urban LLG. The township is entirely located on an island that goes by the same name, which is lo ...

, the provincial capital of

Western Province (Papua New Guinea) Western Province is a coastal province in southwestern Papua New Guinea, bordering the Indonesian provinces of Highland Papua and South Papua. The provincial capital is Daru. The largest town in the province is Tabubil. Other major settlements ...

, at the southernmost extreme of the

Fly River The Fly River is the third longest river on the island of New Guinea, after the Sepik and Mamberamo, with a total length of . It is the largest by volume of discharge in Oceania, the largest in the world without a single dam in its catchment, an ...

delta, and at the northeastern corner of the

Torres Strait The Torres Strait (), also known as Zenadh Kes ( Kalaw Lagaw Ya#Phonology 2, �zen̪ad̪ kes, is a strait between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, ...

. It is the northernmost of the

Torres Strait Islands The Torres Strait Islands are an archipelago of at least 274 small islands in the Torres Strait, a waterway separating far northern continental Australia's Cape York Peninsula and the island of New Guinea. They span an area of , but their tot ...

, and at the same time the southernmost of the Fly River delta. Bampton Point, its southernmost point, marks the southwestern corner of the

Gulf of Papua The Gulf of Papua is located in the southern coast region of New Guinea. It has a total surface area of . Geography Some of New Guinea's largest rivers, such as the Fly River, Turama River, Kikori River, Purari River, and Wawoi River flow ...

. The

Coral Sea The Coral Sea () is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean, South Pacific off the northeast coast of Australia, and classified as an Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia, interim Australian bioregion. The Coral Sea extends down t ...

is southeast. Torres Strait is south and southwest, specifically the Great Northeast Channel, which separates Parama Island from the closest

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

n (

Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...

) island,

Bramble Cay Bramble Cay, also known as Maizab Kaur (also spelt Maizub Kaur) and Massaramcoer, is a small cay located at the northeastern edge of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands of Queensland and at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Lying ...

, 48 km ESE. Parama is roughly rectangular in shape, 9.6 km long and up to 5.7 km wide, with a shore length of 27.7 km and an area of 37 km². It is a low, flat, muddy and

mangrove A mangrove is a shrub or tree that grows mainly in coastal saline water, saline or brackish water. Mangroves grow in an equatorial climate, typically along coastlines and tidal rivers. They have particular adaptations to take in extra oxygen a ...

covered island. It is separated from the mainland by Toro Passage, which is 400 to 700 meters wide and seven kilometers long, and 1.8 to 5.5 meters deep. All of the population of 441 (as of the Census 2000) live in Parama village on the eastern side, facing the Gulf of Papua. The figure for 1991 was 240. Only the area around the village is cultivated. The village is divided into six clan divisions. The clans, which have names of animals, are listed, from north to south (1991): #Doriomu (Shark, formerly Tebere) (school west outside of clan division) #Maruadai (Marowadai) (Cassowary) (with church:

United Church A united church, also called a uniting church, is a denomination formed from the merger or other form of church union of two or more different Protestantism, Protestant Christian denominations, a number of which come from separate and distinc ...

) #Hegeredai (Dingo) #Oromorubi (Dog) #Miaridai (Crocodile) (with hospital) #Gaidai (Eagle) A later list (1995) mentions only five clans, thereby replacing Hegeredai and Oromorubi with ''Sobogu''. In the southwest of the island is Gaziro (Gasiri), a temporary fishing camp also used by mainlanders. The fringing reef on the eastern shore in front of the village, the "home reef", is called ''Podomaza''. Worimo Reef, a drying reef of rocks and sand, over which the sea breaks heavily during the southeast trades, extends eight kilometers SSE from Bampton Point. It further extends to Merrie England Shoals, with depths of less than two meters. The area of the reef, mostly submerged, is 18.8 km². Ellengowan Rock, a submerged rock with a depth of only 1.1 meters, is located 11 km east of Parama Island. First recorded sighting by Europeans of Parama Island was by the Spanish expedition of

Luís Vaez de Torres Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archai ...

, that landed on it on 5 September 1606.Hilder, Brett ''The voyage of Torres'', Brisbane, 1980, pp.67,68

References

Pub. 164, New Guinea, Sector 6, South Coast of Papua New Guinea-Bensbach River to South Cape, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 2003The Geography of Border Landscapes, ed. Dennis Rumley and Julian V. Minghi, Routledge, 1991

Lower Fly Area Study, 1995

{{authority control Islands of Papua New Guinea Torres Strait Islands Western Province (Papua New Guinea)