Eded Mer (My LIfe)
- Thomas Lowah with illustrations by Ray Crooke
This is the story of Thomas Lowah, a Torres Strait Islander born in 1914. His story tells of how he worked as a diver on a pearling lugger, sailing the waters of the Torres Strait and working down the Great Barrier Reef. Conditions were so hard that the skipper would not let the divers out of the water to eat their lunch of damper and syrup, but would hand it down to them to eat in the water.
When the war came Thomas joined the army, and at the end of the war went back to the luggers. After a time he moved to North Queensland and worked at a number of jobs, as a rock driller, laying railway lines in the west and on an Aboriginal mission in the Gulf country. Finally he retired to live in Cairns where he wrote this story of his life.
This is one of the first autobiographies of a Torres Strait Islander and a unique document of his life and the life of his people.