Day 45: 20231107 Tuesday, November 7, 2023- Broome, Western Australia
The mother of pearl and cultured pearl industry seems to be what kept people around in the northwestern corner of Australia. Broome is a town that was born of and sustained by the mother of pearl industry early on, and after depletion of that resource, cultured pearls kept it alive. There is a species of natural oyster that grows in these waters that can produce very thick shells of mother of pearl. The translucent layer can be up to an inch thick in some specimens.
Aboriginals simply picked the shells off the beach at low tide and used them for ceremonial and artistic items.
When the British arrived they saw a rich source of mother of pearl for manufacturing buttons and watch faces. The European Imperialists rapidly depleted the supply in the intertidal zone. It wasn’t long before the aboriginals were enslaved and forced to dive for the shells in shallow to moderate depth water. When those supplies dried up, the aboriginals refused to don the divining helmets, so the Imperialists began recruiting from all around its empire, promising Australian citizenship in exchange for indentured servitude.
Well, when WWII happened, these Japanese, Malaysian and Chinese laborers got thrown into prisoner camps, and then deported without so much as a thanks for all the years of slave labor they provided. There are cemeteries in Broome filled with the graves of drowned Chinese and Japanese divers. This coincided with the invention of plastics which had a devastating effect on the mother of pearl market.
This nearly spelled doom for the entire region, that is until Mikimoto developed and perfected a method of culturing pearls in oysters. This lead to new partnerships with the Aussies providing access to land and water in conjunction with aboriginal communities, Americans to provide capital investment, and the Japanese for their pearl culturing and diving skills.
The native oysters which were so well suited for mass production of mother of pearl are also extraordinarily capable of producing the finest and largest pearls in the world. This remains the heart of the local economy to this day.
Our day started with a relaxed breakfast and morning trivia since our Best of Broome excursion didn’t start until 12:30PM. It was a general trivia which we missed winning by a half point. A lot of the Australians were staying on board to focus on the Melbourne Cup, which is a championship horse race that nearly causes the entire country of Australia to hit the pause button. It's like the Kentucky Derby and Super Bowl rolled into one. One of our trivia partners and his wife dressed up for the Melbourne Cup day, including a fancy hat for the lady.
The temperature in Broome was in the mid to upper 80’s and there was a light breeze. The humidity was still about 75%, so it was still like being in a sauna, but not as bad as in Kuri Bay. It really helped that our tours involved bus rides in a comfortable air conditioned coach so we were never out in the heat and humidity for too long between driving stretches where we could recover in the air conditioning.
The first stop in the tour was the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park. Salt water crocodiles are extremely dangerous and they were troublesome to the pearling industry when large crocodiles would harass fishermen and divers. So Malcolm Douglas made a business of rounding up rogue crocodiles and showing them to tourists. Eventually, he also got into crocodile farming for meat and leather.
The Park had several enclosures with other reptiles, crocodiles and alligators. There were also several cages with birds including one Cassowary, but they didn’t really have much else (no mammals of any sort). But the entrance to the park is hard to beat- A jurassic sized crocodile head that everyone walks through to enter the lobby. Ice cream sales were brisk in the lobby. We did get to hold baby crocodiles that had their mouths taped shut.
Our next stop was a museum of Pearl Luggers, which were the sailing ships that pearl divers operated off. There are a pair of platforms that extend out to each side of the boats, which would drag an anchor to drift slowly with the current or wind while a pair of divers wearing up to 250# of lead and gear walked on the bottom of the sea collecting oysters.
Air was pumped by a hand crank on deck through tubes to the hard dive helmets and suits. It was very dangerous and hard work. If you stumbled or tripped, you could be dragged across the bottom and have your dive suit ripped to shreds by coral.
They also didn’t have any idea about decompression sickness or the bends that causes crippling pain and can have lethal consequences when nitrogen bubbles form in the blood stream when a diver ascends after having been at depth for a while.
The last stop of the museum tour was a pearl retail shop, of course. There, they showed us a $60,000 pearl. We left empty handed.
The bus took us across the peninsula to Cable Beach, so named because a telegraph cable from Australia to Indonesia originates on the beach. It is a nice white sand beach but you have to be careful when the water gets to be over 84˚F because highly poisonous box and irukandji jelly fish can swarm close to shore. There have been several confirmed Irukandji deaths in recent years, and these are nearly invisible jellyfish. Surfers are covered from head to toe in “stinger suits” so there is no exposed skin. The toxins in these jellyfish can cause cardiac arrest, internal hemorrhage, seizures and worse. Needless to say, nobody felt compelled to take a stroll in the water.
The last stop was scenic Gantheaume Point, a rocky outcrop of decomposing limestone and basalt in striking orange, red, and white colors. If it weren’t for the vegetation, you could imagine yourself to be walking on Mars.
There are also some famous dinosaur foot prints in one of the formations, but the site is a closely held secret, and it can only be reached on the lowest tide of the year. One set of footprints had actually been cut out of the rocks with a concrete saw and stolen. They ended up on the black market and found in China. They were eventually returned.
A cast was made of these, and a concrete copy of the foot prints now resides in a readily accessible location on the point. A lot of tourist guide books say the dinosaur footprints are visible at low tides, but according to the locals they are all but impossible to find unless you know someone who knows exactly where and when to get to them. A whole lot of people are drawn to see the dinosaur footprints but there’s little chance anyone will actually see them. But the rocks are striking and it’s worth the effort to get out to the point to see the alien landscape.
It’s a good thing our tour was booked through the cruise line because they promise to hold the boat for us, and they did. We were some of the last people to reboard the ship just at the 5:30PM deadline.
We had dinner in the buffet since we missed our regular dining room time. The Princess Theater had a new comedian do a show. Bella Hull is a comic from London who is also a comedy writer.
Unfortunately, her style of show is conversational, which doesn’t work in a 600 seat theater. She was interacting with only the first 6 rows of the theater, which is all she could see with the stage lighting, and she never repeated any of the responses she was eliciting from those audience members. It was like trying to get something from only one side of a conversation. Nobody could hear what any of the responses were unless you were sitting next to the person being questioned. It might have worked in a small lounge with an audience of 30-50 people, but this was a disaster. People were leaving in droves like a stampede after the first 20 minutes made it clear she was going to spend the entire show that way. But we were fine to head up to the room for showers and an early night.
Tomorrow is the first of two sea days before we arrive at our next port of call, Geraldton. We’re looking forward to the sea days now.
