Broome & Pearling History

Big Kevs last day, and it’s too cold to laze around on Cable beach so we use tickets to the Pearl Luggers Tour originally given to Angela’ daughter Phillipa or ‘Flip’ as she goes by when writing for “the West”. The tour is a commentary by a local historian and a short film, it culminates in the fondling of a 21 millimetre pearl worth $100,000 and then even better yet, eating some pearl meat.

The history of pearling is interesting; only one in 15,000 oysters naturally have quality pearls so they were taken only for their shells until the advent of polymers in the 1950’s which caused the industry to collapse. Oysters as a pearl industry only started in the 1980’s. The local ‘pintata’ shells are the biggest in the world making the biggest pearls and the short 150 year local history is full of murder and intrigue set against a background of racial extremes. For example, initially aboriginal families were enslaved and worked to death, fearless feudal Japanese divers ruled Broome for a while during the time of the ‘white Australia policy’ at the turn of the twentieth century, the second world war saw them interned and the fleet burned, then scuba proved cheaper than Japanese ‘Bushido’ courage in dive suits so work went to the lowest paid worker and industrialization now rules.

It took Kev a matter of seconds to pack his overnight bag and only minutes to travel the two hundred metres to the airport, then the departure lounge made up for the suddenness of it all by being as uninspired as any other departure lounge, but it at least gave us fair time to say our goodbyes.