Joel Sam was born in 1977 on Thursday Island, Torres Strait, Queensland. He is a Saibai artist of the Sui Baidam clan. His solo exhibition at the Gallery in 2023 explored the history of the evacuation of the island of Saibai in the 1940s.

This exhibition forms part of the Cairns Art Gallery online First Nations Research Archive developed as part of the Gallery’s online Legacy Archive produced to celebrate the Gallery’s 30th anniversary.

Exodus was a personal account by Sam, of the mass movement of people in the 1940s from the island of Saibai in the Torres Strait to Mutee Heads on Cape York Peninsula.

Saibai is a large low-lying island, five kilometres south of Papua New Guinea and is a northwestern island of the Zenadh Kes archipelago. While on active duty during World War Two, a group of young Saibai soldiers identified the tip of Cape York as a place for future settlement because the island of Saibai was facing increasing hardship due to monsoonal flooding, a scarcity of good drinking water and firewood, and limited accommodation. After a series of meetings between the young men and their Elders, it was decided that the people of Saibai should relocate to the Australian mainland where a new settlement would be established at the tip of Cape York Peninsula.

In 1946, several luggers were purchased to facilitate the move some 164 kilometres away. The vessel, MV Millard carried the Samu clan, Macoy carried the Umay clan, and S.S. Donna carried the Dhoeybaw clan. By 1949 almost 300 Saibai Islanders had been moved to the Peninsula, first to Mutee Heads, then to Bamaga and later to Seisia.

In 2018, the Gallery presented an exhibition of works by four artists, including Sam, entitled North by East West. The exhibition, staged during the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, explored how pearl shell carving traditions have been exchanged between the communities of Horn and Thursday Island in the Torres Strait and Broome and Lombadina in Western Australia. Revealed through an artistic collaboration of four artists, Garry and Darrell Sibosado (Western Australia) and Samuel Savage and Joel Sam (Torres Strait), the exhibition led to Sam receiving a Cairns RSL Club Artist Fellowship to enable him to develop new works for a solo exhibition at the Gallery.

The new work produced by Sam included linocuts, etchings, dhibal (feathered headdresses), dibi dibi (pearl shell pendants), and an outrigger canoe. Together these works represented songs, dance and ceremonies which the families had taken with them to their new mudth, their new home on mainland Australia.