Pearling Today
Less than 100 years ago, commercial pearling in the north west of Western Australia was a wild, unregulated industry, filled with larger than life characters and peppered with high adventure, fabulous wealth and ferocious weather. Massive tides, crocodiles, strong currents and unheralded tropical cyclones made it a tough way to make a living.
However all things come to an end, and the introduction of synthetic buttons before the Second World War effectively spelled the end of an era for NW pearling.
Technology ended one facet of the industry, but it was also technology and modern scientific practices that opened the door to another, hopefully more enduring, aspect of the business - pearl farming.
Today's modern pearling industry, with its high-tech labs, boats and safety efficient farming regimes, is a fairly young creature.
Fierce and dangerous competition have been replaced by an industry which is regulated, professional in its cooperation, safe, efficient and profitable - but not boring.
Bill Reed has been involved in pearling for nearly 40 years, as a marine biologist, pearl farmer and retailer. Much of that time has been spent in Western Australia, although he has worked in the Middle East and the South Seas as well.
During his involvement with the local industry, Bill has seen some dramatic changes.
"When I first came here in the mid-1970s, I couldn't believe how moribund the industry was, it was extraordinary," he said.
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"It was largely indentured labourers, with Malays from Singapore paid $30-40 a week and locked up in camps like the Foreign Legion. It wasn't until Australian divers came onto the scene that pay rates improved."
"We weren't allowed echo sounders on the boats, or automatic pilots, because the crew might learn where the shell beds were and set up in opposition to the boss."
"We still threw a lead with tallow on it to find the bottom where the shell might be.'
"It was partly through my involvement that we put the first echo-sounder, auto-pilot and radar on a lugger."
During the 1970s and 80s, there was a shakeout in the industry; demand for pearls see-sawed with the value of the yen and dollar and some small farms sold their quotas and facilities to bigger concerns.
In 1986 the Department of Fisheries commissioned the Pearl Industry Review to set out management guidelines for the industry, establish a legislative process and move toward the upgrading of the antique Pearling Act.
Pearling licences are administered by the Department of Fisheries and these days a quota of wild shell is allocated to each licensed company. In 1994-95 a total of 572,000 pearl shells were collected from WA waters. However the tight controls that exist today are relatively recent.
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"I was probably partly responsible for having pearl quotas imposed about 15 years ago" said Bill. "As a biologist I couldn't believe there was no restriction, it was just open slather, as much as could be caught."
"We were totally raping the environment, so we began to keep logbooks and tried to get a picture of what was happening. At that stage you could kill as much shell as you wanted if you had a mother of pearl farm and one company killed 100 tonne of the most beautiful shell."
Oyster stocks have since recovered to the point where divers no longer need to descend to dangerous depths to find shell and take hours to surface safely.
Today's divers use wetsuits and hookah breathing apparatus; the hookah hoses are attached to booms which project out from the accompanying diving vessels. The divers make their way across the seabed and periodically send up bags filled with shells to the waiting deckies.
Although the process is much improved from the industry's early days, there is still some danger for the divers. A fatal shark attack last year reminded everyone that not all risk can be reduced by human cleverness.
Divers are not the only ones to benefit from improved working and living conditions. In particular, food and accommodation for all workers in the industry are pretty impressive and help make up for the hard work and isolated sites involved.
Satellite television channels in camps or "hotel boats" provide the latest entertainment, and the dramatic beauty of the Kimberley keeps many people in the industry.
The manager of Maxima Pearls, Peter Newman, speaks for a lot of people when he says the surrounding environment is one of the bonuses of working in the Kimberleys:
"I love this job," he said, "It's great being this close to nature all the time and I've become really interested in conservation."
The Maxima camp is on a comfortably-equipped island (dubbed 'Alcatraz' by the crews) in Cone Bay and staff are visited by plenty of bird life, enormous green praying mantises and an unwanted but unharmed crocodile.
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The industry is remarkable for its complement of cheerful longtimers, and it now offers a definite career path to newcomers - a vital necessity if the industry is to attract good staff and continue to develop into the future. And, according to Broome Pearls administrator, John Wheadley, pearling is no longer seen as a "man's game" only.
"Families in Broome have been involved in pearling for perhaps 60 or 80 years and are still here making a living out of it," John said.
"But it's a growing industry and our employee numbers have gone from 40 to 120 in five years."
"There's a mixture of people on our top farm which has a permanent crew of about 28 on a rotation basis (two weeks on, one week off). There are some older experienced people, young new starters, and even some women - we are an equal opportunity employer - involved in the operations which include shell-cleaning, driving boats and so on."
"We encourage the young ones to get their sea-time up, get their coxswain's certificates so they can drive the boats, and then they might progress to the larger boats or wherever they have talent."
"Good training makes for a stable long-term industry."
With pearling getting its act together, activity has exploded in recent years.
"When I first got here five years ago, boats were working about nine months of the year and crews were under contract so they'd go out and fish for shell, seed it, look after it, X-ray it and that would be it," John said.
"Now they are battling to get holidays and the boats are working 12 months of the year flat out trying to get everything done."
"The increase is due to the volume of production, handling and tending the shell, and the travel time to pearl farms, which are usually quite a distance away from the grounds."
"We have two major large vessels operating from Broome, which stay at sea as multi-use vessels - operating rooms, X-raying, transporting and fishing all from the same boats."
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"There is a smaller fishing vessel for Exmouth and an accommodation vessel in Yampi Sound."
Add to this basic fleet the many little boats which carry cleaning machines and six to eight crew, plying their way up and down the rows of shell panels at the farms, and you begin to understand the size of some of these operations.
The Paspaley Pearling company pioneered the development of the purpose-built boats which revolutionised the industry, transporting live shell, allowing seeding at the farms and making life far more comfortable for the many workers.
The company differs from other Broome pearlers because its grow-out farms are near Darwin, so shell transport is a critical issue.
Paspaley's Broome manager, Russell Hanigan, said the company had based its first purpose-built vessel on a tuna boat.
"In 1974, Nick Paspaley (jnr, following his father into the industry) went to Japan and built Paspaley 1, the first fibreglass state-of-the-art fishing vessel that went away from a lugger design," Russell said.
"It was based on a tuna boat but was still a radical design and our competitors used to call it Òthe gumbootÓ because it was plastic, but it was the biggest fibreglass boat in the southern hemisphere at the time."
The company now has seven boats in its fleet and every new Paspaley is state-of-the-art.
Most of the basic techniques for pearl growing are established, but research and development continues, either within company laboratories, funded by the Pearl Producer's Association (PPA), or at the Department of Fisheries.
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"In the 1970s, we all suffered problems with shell mortality,' said Russell Hanigan. "It was thought to be a disease, and shells died during all stages through the process - in the holding tanks during transport and at the pearl farm."
"We were losing 50 per cent of the oysters and sometimes more and of course the industry couldn't sustain that, so a lot of the smaller operators suffered badly.
"We tried different ways of getting the shell to Darwin and one winter we even hired an F-28 (Fokker jet) and took the shells to Darwin sitting on the seats!"
"We found out that the reason oysters were dying was that there was a bacteria build-up in the shell due to being kept in the tanks too long without filtering, so a combination of antiseptic conditions, making sure everything is scrupulously clean when handling and fishing the pearl shell, and not keeping them in tanks too long, fixed the problem."
"Now we fish them, then dump them back on the bottom and don't give the bacteria a chance to build up. It's a very staccato process."
The Department of Fisheries research concentrates on continuous monitoring of the oyster stocks (using logbooks kept by fishers, as well as surveys), but a recent survey by Dr Lindsay Joll into the efficiency of pearl divers concluded that the human diver, equipped as he is now, is working at maximum efficiency.
"As far as new technology goes, it goes hand in hand with improved methods of pearl farming, though you can't go far off the beaten track as to how you get your shell, treat your shell, seed it, look after it and harvest," John Wheadley said.
"We have an R&D section in Fremantle, and release a lot of information through the PPA, and this is where the organisation helps all its members by sharing information."
Today, the Pearl Producer's Association represents all 16 pearling companies in negotiations with bodies such as the Fisheries and Immigration Departments and local authorities.
While the two biggest players are Paspaley Pearls and Broome Pearls (the Kailis group), smaller producers benefit from the facilities, research and negotiations of the large companies through membership of the PPA.
The PPA is currently investing in the aquaculture park planned for Broome, which will involve hatchery facilities and research.
"It was very difficult in the early days, when quotas were imposed, because everyone was sitting down together and licking their wounds," said Russell Hanigan, who is also the current chairman of the PPA.
"We had to work very carefully through that because they divided pearling into zones and some people were allowed to fish in different zones and that meant you needed either an A or B Class licence, but those problems are being solved."
The production of hatchery spat (baby oysters) will present the next challenge for the industry. There is considerable debate about whether there should be quotas - at present each company is licensed to use 20,000 spat.
"In this industry you are pitted against other pearl farmers, but we co-operate in the management of the natural resources and everything else," John Wheadley said.
"It's up to each company to get the best out of that and sell its product on the market, but we all love the highest price and that's what it comes down to, the profits."
Bill Reed believes the production of South Sea Pearls will treble over the next 10, certainly 20, years and that there shouldn't be hatchery quotas.
"There's certainly no way you are going to limit production in every country in the world where P. Maxima occurs, no way, " he said.
The oyster is found in such places as Tahiti, the Cook Islands, and Indonesia.
"The question is, will that result in a reduction of prices? Probably a bit, but that takes pearls into another income level able to buy them," Bill continued.
"I think we'll only have big hatchery production for about ten years, because with less predation stocks will build up in the wild, then it will be easier and more economical to collect wild shell instead of breeding them and round it goes."
"Some producers may fall by the wayside, but generally our knowledge of the industry and pearl-growing and our expertise is very good, good enough to sustain us."
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