'It’s not for everyone': the hot, dangerous work behind the lustre of the world's best pearls
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Version 0 of 1. Three metres below the ocean surface, about 10 nautical miles offshore from Broome, Western Australia, a team of divers is turning plastic racks. Hanging from the racks, sorted by size, are the calcified forms of oysters. In the dragging tidal currents of Australia’s northwest coast, pearls are being grown. It starts with a surgical procedure. The oyster crates are hauled aboard a shallow-bottomed tin runabout used as the cleaning boat, chipped clean of barnacles and blasted with a high-pressure hose before being shunted across to the seeding table where a second team is standing by, waiting to make the incision. “What you do is you insert a small part of a nucleus into the gonad of a live oyster,” says Paul Birch, general manager of Willie Creek Pearl Farm. “Over the course of about two years that gets turned and turned and coated in nacre [the secretion known as mother-of-pearl] and in the end you have a beautiful pearl.” It all sounds fairly unpleasant, a statement with which Birch apologetically agrees. But he says the end product – an Australian south sea cultured pearl, the heart of a $60m industry – is worth the rather fishy beginnings. “It’s hot, smelly, hard work,” he says. “You could be started as early as 4am in the morning, and you might be taking shells out of panels and putting them into crates for cleaning and reseeding. “It’s not for everyone. You’d be working pretty hard.” Or, as one English backpacker described it, “going to bed at about 9pm, getting up at 5am, starting work dead on 6am, sweating and being covered in seaweed, sea water, sea shit and sea lice by 6.30am and for the next 10 and a half hours after”. Birch says many of those doing the sweaty, smelly business above deck are backpackers, who hole up behind the palm trees at the Kimberley Klub youth hostel in the weeks not spent aboard one of the motherships that service the area’s five main pearl farms. Clipper Pearls, which recently entered a formal partnership with Willie Creek, requires potential deckhands, cooks and kitchen hands to front up in person to its Broome office. “For a lot of people, mainly on 457 visas, it fulfils the requirements of rural work so they can get their second year clearance,” Birch says. “Broome is a hard place to find work.” Only the divers, who need a minimum qualification as a rescue diver, command the luxury of applying for a job remotely. Birch joined the industry in 2013 after working as a winemaker. He says it’s just animal management, although with prettier scenery and a shinier product. In its 10-year lifespan, each oyster produces up to four pearls, which get bigger with each seeding to a maximum of 18 millimetres. The 9m tides, which entice tourists to walk hundreds of metres out through the knee-high waves of Broome’s Cable Beach, provide a constant supply of fresh seawater for the bivalves to sift for food, and low pollution levels mean more luminous pearls. “These are the best pearls in the world,” Mark Majzner, general manager of Kalis Jewellery, says. “WA produces the best, most valuable diamonds in the world [from the Argyle diamond mine, about 1,000km away in the East Kimberley] and the most valuable pearls in the world.” Broome has been the centre of Australia’s pearl industry since before colonisation, when pearl shell collected in the shallows by Yawuru people was traded throughout the Kimberley. When white settlers arrived the industry became a slave trade. Aboriginal women were captured and sold as divers to pearl luggers, in a practice known as blackbirding, and indentured workers were brought in from Indonesia and other parts of Asia. They dived to depths of 10 metres with nothing but a gulp of air in their lungs. Many drowned to fuel the British Empire’s demand for mother-of-pearl combs and cutlery handles. Kevin Lawton, a Broome-based American journalist and popular historian, wrote that Broome was a place where “pearl shell mattered more than human life”. Although the industry now has a good safety record, it is still hazardous. In 2012 Jarrod Hampton, a 22-year-old qualified diver from Melbourne, drowned while drift-diving for Paspaley, WA’s largest pearl company, about 160km south of Broome. It was his second day on the job. Drift-diving involves working at the end of a long oxygen line behind a moving boat. It is used to harvest the wild Pinctada maxima oysters which are used in the commercial pearl farms. A Worksafe investigation into Hampton’s death found that Paspaley did not have a written procedure for retrieving an incapacitated diver and the crew had not practised an emergency drill for the situation. The company pleaded guilty to failing to provide a safe working environment and was fined $60,000. The tragedy has not stopped people from wanting to work in the industry. Drift divers are frequently paid by the shell during the wild pearl harvest and it is too lucrative a venture to be given up. Tourists are also attracted to the industry, as much for its chequered past as its luxury product. Willie Creek runs a tidal estuary pearl farm about 38km from Broome, also managed by Birch, which showcases the process without the potential seasickness of an open-ocean voyage, although there are other differences. “We don’t do any diving because there’s a couple of large crocodiles, which is a bit of a concern,” he says. “But they do provide fantastic security.” |