One of the experiences we always inflict on our visitors is the tour at the Willie Creek Pearl Farm. It’s really interesting, I love it. Our current visitor took a pass on the tour but had heard it was a great place to fish. Intelligence was, low tide. So we headed out first thing this morning. He caught nothing … should have taken the tour.
I went for a wander and soon had the perfect view of a crocodile hauled out on the beach. Not, perhaps perfect for a photo, but perfect for an encounter. The best place for closer encounters is the Malcolm Douglas Wildlife Park. We were there recently. A top priority for a croc farm is ensuring the visitors are not eaten by the residents. Photography is not a high priority at our croc farm, too many fences … but you can hold little crocodiles (adorable). So, compare and contrast crocodile photography wild versus captive (you shouldn’t have any trouble working out which is which) …
I took my dearly beloved to the Willie Creek Pearl Farm on her birthday once. You’ll never guess what I bought her. It was a hot day and she really appreciated it. The ice cream that is.
According to Pliny the Elder Cleopatra was keen to impress Mark Antony …
“At this moment she was wearing in her ears those choicest and most rare and unique productions of Nature; and while Antony was waiting to see what she was going to do, taking one of them from out of her ear, she threw it into the vinegar, and directly it was melted, swallowed it
In other versions it is wine. Vinegar is sufficiently acid to dissolve a pearl (eventually) wine is not, Coke would certainly have tasted better. The story is probably untrue but there are two things we can say for certain … Cleopatra was cultured, the pearls of the time were not. Nor were the pearls from prewar Australia. Indeed the WA Pearling Act of 1912 prohibited the production, sale and possession of cultured pearls. That section of the Act remained in force until 1947.
It was buttons and pearl shell inlays that sustained the industry. Pearls were a welcome bonus but a master pearler of the time could not have put together a finely matched necklace in an entire career. The war stopped the industry in its tracks. The ports and airports of Northern Australia were of stategic importance pearl shell was not. The fleet was dispersed.
National WW2 Museum New Orleans
The map, filched shamelessly from The National WW2 Museum New Orleans, to which I’ve added Broome, shows the maximum extent of Japanese expansion and how close the war came to Australia.
Pearling resumed in 1946. The work force was about a quarter the prewar figure. There were no Japanese represented, nor would there be until 1953. A shortage of Luggers hindered production but the fishery had been rested for four years and buttons were in short supply. The industry picked up quickly in a world that was changing rapidly.
As a kid, if I lost a button, my mother would sort through her sewing box to find a matching replacement. Would it be a pearl one or one of the new and cheaper plastic ones?
Hard hat diving gave way to hookah diving, air was still delivered by hose from the surface but to a mouthpiece giving the diver greater freedom of movement. He was now looking for small specimens of the same species of oyster to take home live for cultivated pearl production.
The end product was no longer high volumes of low value shell. Pearling was now truly about the pearl, little balls of calcium carbonate but with a lustre and size that would have so shamed Cleopatra she’d have shoved a snake down her cleavage.
The shore of Dampier Creek offered a place where boats could be hauled out and there were fresh water soaks close at hand. It was a useful base for the pearlers. Streeter and Male founded a store nearby, a passage was cut through the mangroves and a jetty was built. It seems that the exact date is unknown but it was in existence prior to 1897. Streeters Jetty is still there and has recently been given a major facelift. It is as fine an example of a plain wooden jetty that you will find anywhere in Broome.
It had its limitations being useful only for small boats at high tide. It was underwater at very high tides and a long way from water at low tides. In 1897 a government jetty was constructed at Mangrove Point now called Town Beach. This served until the 1960’s. It was an improvement but ships still had to take the bottom between high tides.
Between Streeter’s and Town Beach there is a spot that gives a good view over the mangroves to what was then the port. There is a monument here to the womenfolk who waited here for the return of the luggers and schooners. If that gives the impression that life was a picnic spent sitting on the grass waiting for their men to turn up forget it. Think instead of the anxiety that would follow a storm. Who will return and who will not?
Northern waters on the opposite side of the continent but the same oyster, Pinctada maxima, and the same hazards. This is a more realistic look at pearling …
Men of iron in ships of wood. The survivors aren’t wearing black armbands …
but also knife handles, watch faces, jewelry boxes, in the beginning it was all about the shell.
The first pearling fleet arrived in Roebuck Bay in the 1870’s. Shark Bay and Thursday Island had been fished for Mother-of-pearl but the North West had a superior oyster, Pinctada maxima. The site that became Broome offered a suitable place to haul out boats for repair and a source of fresh(ish) water. Broome was proclaimed in 1883. Named after Frederick Napier Broome, Governor of the colony of Western Australia, it didn’t get off to a roaring start. No lots were sold until 1886. The Governor was so disappointed to have his name associated with so miserable a place he was considering cancelling the proclamation.
Mother-of pearl was in big demand, pearling was profitable Broome grew. There were some major obstacles, essential supplies had to come a significant distance – Perth is more than 2000km away, the markets for shell were on the other side of the globe. Labour was hard to find, heat, humidity, cyclones and sickness had to be overcome. Nonetheless, by the end of the 19th century there were wealthy folk living in fine bungalows in Old Broome with a plethora of servants to wash and starch their white outfits and bleach their white suede shoes.
Meanwhile in Japtown indentured workers from Asia were enjoying life of a different style and largely banned from town the displaced Aborigines were not enjoying life all that much at all. If you wish to explore the social history further let me commend Beyond the Lattice by Susan Sickert (available online from Kimberley Bookshop). A popular song dating from that era that survives today (in various forms) puts it this way…
But, forget for the moment Beri Beri, the Bends, hardship and injustice and take the time machine to the days of hard hat diving …
I have always been a sucker for books. Sadly, good bookshops are a dying breed but here in Broome we have one. A shout out to the Kimberley Bookshop where the lovely Gayle and I were shopping for local history and natural history books. In the bird section we know many of the authors personally, the world of truly obsessed birdos is relatively small. There’s probably not enough of us to keep more than a couple of psychiatrists in business. I turned to remark on this when I saw a name on a different shelf that came as a complete surprise.
Let me take you back 50 years. I was a junior House Officer employed by the United Sheffield Hospitals. The ink was still wet on my degree certificate, my job entailed no executive authority what ever, I was there to do as I was told, mostly by the nursing staff. Towering high above me were the gods in my pantheon, Professor Sir Paul Bramley, scholar, gentleman and an inspiration; the irascible Ronnie Rastall, exceedingly skillful hands but a devil if you were on the end of a bollocking and John Edgar deBurgh Norman, brilliant, aloof and eccentric – black cloaks with scarlet linings were not fashionable even in those remote times.
J E deB was Australian and subsequently returned home and practised as an Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeon in Sydney whilst I did likewise in Melbourne. Subsequently our paths crossed only once, at a conference at which I was in the chair. Even though I was dry behind the ears by then I couldn’t summon up the confidence to remind him that we had once worked together (or that he had once resuscitated a patient who had collapsed whilst in my tender care).
Back to the present and there on the shelf …
They just don’t make names like that any more. In fact, where I come from they never did. It had to be. And indeed it was. Not only is the man distinguished in his own right he is pearling nobility, a scion of one of Broome’s founding families. G V Norman is Verity, his wife now, sadly, dead.
bobmcgee 