"Australia's Melanesia" a Thursday Island Travel Page by cochinjew

It is the outpost, the last of the escapes, kind of guam for americans who keep on moving west, this one you keep on going north.. no further place to go.

Also in this group of islands is the spot where Capt Cook took posession of Australia for the Crown.

The native population is Melanesian, in fact with relatives in the Papua New Guinea , one of the islands in the group is no more than 3 km from the PNG coast.

There are flights from Cairns, where there is a large TI community and it is the big smoke for those in the Torres Straits Islands.

Torres, pronounced not as in the name of the spanish explorer who must have been dumbfounded to know that he passed within 15 to 20 km off the largest piece of land in the south. Torres never knew the existence of Australia.
Dutch were not interested, French arrived a few days late and Spanish blissfully sailed and Australia became an English speaking country.
Prince of Wales Island, uninhabited, is 2/3 size of the island of Barbados. There is a spring which you can reach after an easy hike: there had been only 50 people before me who had gotten to this spot...
You can work in TI and take the boat and relax for the evening in the POW island...