Broome's pearling industry tour, Western Australia: The Aussie spot for lovers of pearls

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This was published 7 years ago

Broome's pearling industry tour, Western Australia: The Aussie spot for lovers of pearls

By David Whitley
Pearl lugger at sunset off Cable Beach, Broome.

Pearl lugger at sunset off Cable Beach, Broome.Credit: Tourism Western Australia

The old master pearler's home dates back to 1910, around the peak of Broome's pearling industry. The billowing gardens add the tropical taste, the town's ubiquitous corrugated iron walls providing the taste of the outback.

This is the setting for both breakfast and a spectacular bout of ignorance-smashing. I knew that one hundred years ago, in 1916, Mikimoto Kōkichi was awarded a patent for producing cultivated round pearls. Making pearls via artificial insemination, I presumed, must have killed off Broome's pearling fleets.

"But," Marilynne corrects me as she brings over the granola and yoghurt, "they weren't looking for pearls".

A broome pearl.

A broome pearl.Credit: Tourism Western Australia

Broome, it seems, was built on pearl shell rather than pearls. "You were lucky to find one pearl in every 10,000 shells," says Marilynne. The shell was used for watch faces and, in particular, buttons. It was the advent of plastic buttons, plus World War II, which saw Broome essentially abandoned and the Japanese diving crews interned, that eviscerated Broome's pearling industry. And cultured pearls – which were only made legal in Australia in 1949 – were a massive pivot that saw focus shift but the value of the pinctada maxima oysters retained.

Marilynne, of course, should know her stuff on this. Her father founded the Paspaley pearl dynasty, which has pearl farms along the Kimberley coast.

But for a more in-depth education, a trip to the Pearl Luggers is required. Near Broome's historic Chinatown area, the Sam Male and the rather more dilapidated DMcD are the last two remnants of a once 400-strong fleet of luggers that once worked out of Broome. And the old shack next to them has plenty of the equipment the crews used.

Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm.

Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm.Credit: Tourism Western Australia

Rahim, who leads the tour, leaves guests under no illusions about how dark the pearling industry's past is. Things kicked off in the mid-1800s, with oyster shells picked off the beaches. Then the pearlers had to go further into the waters, and the "blackbirding" era started, with captured Aboriginal men and boys essentially used as slaves.

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Rahim holds up the innovation that brought in the next era – the diving suit. It's a ridiculously huge, one-size-dwarfs-all rubber monstrosity, accompanied by clunkingly massive lead-lined boots and helmets that look like something from a horror film. Once those helmets were screwed on, the only way the diver could communicate was by Morse Code-like tugging on the rope that connected him to the ship.

The diver would be far too heavily weighed down to be able to swim back to the surface. He was reliant of attentive crews hauling him up, and pumping down air when requested. It wasn't uncommon for divers to die as a result of crews slacking off. And it wasn't always an accident, if personalities clashed strongly enough.

Entrance to the Pearl Luggers attraction, located in Chinatown, Broome.

Entrance to the Pearl Luggers attraction, located in Chinatown, Broome.Credit: Tourism Western Australia

Almost all of the divers, and a large percentage of the lugger crews, were Asian. The big Japanese and Chinese cemeteries on the edge of town testify to this, and Broome has a distinctly Asian tinge to its character as a result. When the diving suits came in, it was impossible to force unwilling Aboriginal slaves into them, so the pearling masters looked elsewhere – and Asia provided a ready supply of volunteers eyeing up enough money to retire on for a few years of incredibly dangerous work.

They would be underwater for seven or eight hours a day, facing threats from crocs, sharks, sea snakes, jellyfish, cyclones and migrating humpback whales that could blunder in and cut off the air hose. And when you've got that sort of list before you even start considering the dreaded "bends", it's no wonder the cemeteries are so full.

Every now and then, the crews would find a pearl in oyster. They were supposed to be the property of the company, but some would be pocketed and fenced off.

The natural pearls were so rare, though, that they could never be a reliable source of income. Cultivation changed all this though, taking pearls from the sole domain of the stinkingly rich to within the reach of the common man.

At the Willie Creek pearl farm just outside Broome, there are plenty of pearls that will make a gigantic dent in the wallet. There's a necklace on sale for $100,000, for example. But as the guide explains, the price drops if you're prepared to compromise on some of the five key characteristics – size, colour, lustre, surface smoothness and roundness.

Willie Creek's tour boat heads out onto the turquoise waters to show how the pearls are farmed. A toasting grill-like panel of oysters is pulled out of the water. The colossal ten metre tides of the Kimberley will flip these panels every day, while flushing in and out a prodigious food supply of plankton.

This ensures that the pinctada maxima oysters that make the South Sea pearls can grow big, and the rotation means the pearls growing inside them stay as close to spherical as possible.

On dry land, the cultivation process is explained. A chunk of shell is inserted into the oyster's gonad, which irritates it into producing nacre (also known as mother of pearl). Over a couple of years, that becomes a pearl.

But the younger the oyster, the smaller it is, and smaller the oyster, the smaller the pearl. And while it's possible to reseed new irritants another three times, producing progressively larger pearls as the oysters get older, the success rate drops dramatically with each seeding. The big pearls are not just expensive because they're big – they're much harder to create too.

The big boys take pride of place in the showroom, while oysters that will hopefully produce the next generation of pearls enjoy the tides in remote Kimberley bays. Those sinister looking diving helmets, however, are now strictly museum pieces.

TRIP NOTES

MORE INFORMATION

www.australiasnorthwest.com

www.westernaustralia.com

GETTING THERE

Qantas has seasonal direct flights to Broome from Sydney and Melbourne; see www.qantas.com.au

STAYING THERE

Pinctada McAlpine House has rooms for from $125 per night; see www.mcalpinehouse.com.au

TOURING THERE

Tours of the Pearl Luggers (www.pearlluggers.com.au) cost $25. The four hour tour to the Willie Creek Pearl Farm (www.thebroomeexperience.com.au) costs $105 by coach or $295 by helicopter.

David Whitley was a guest of Tourism Western Australia.

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