pearling

In the mid-1800s, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace traveled for eight years through the archipelago that now forms Indonesia. It was Aru that dazzled him most. He wrote in his journal, “I think how many besides myself have longed to reach these almost fairy realms, and to see with their own eyes the many wonderful and beautiful things which I am daily encountering.” His six-month stay in Aru inspired his revolutionary ideas about how life evolved on Earth. He was co-credited with the theory of evolution by his more famous contemporary, Charles Darwin, who had a similar revelatory experience in the Galápagos Islands. In 1857, when Wallace arrived in Aru’s main town of Dobo, he found a bustling port connected to the world by ancient trade routes that gave it a distinctly global feel. Fine pearls and tortoiseshell made their way to Europe, while delicacies such as shark fins, birds’ nests and sea cucumbers went to China. Aru also exported greater bird-of-paradise feathers, silky yellow plumes that adorned the crowns of rulers in distant lands, from Spain to Nepal. Dobo was peopled by Buginese and Chinese merchants sailing in on wooden ships; traders from elsewhere in the Moluccas, as the region was then known; and Aruese bringing out exotic goods from the interior. “I dare say there are now near five hundred people in [Dobo] of various races,” Wallace wrote, “all met in this remote corner of the East, as they express it, ‘to look for their fortune’; to get money any way they can.” In the second half of the 20th century, the Indonesian government sought to settle the nomadic foragers living in Aru’s forests into permanent villages along rivers and coasts. Like indigenous peoples across the country, the Aruese were forced to convert to one of the six state-sanctioned religions; they mostly picked Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. But while the government made some incursions into their lives — in the early 1990s, the navy angered villagers in southern Aru when it commandeered their lands for an air base — the Aruese were generally left alone. Numbering more than 60,000 people at the turn of the century, speaking 14 different indigenous languages and organized into clans spread across 117 villages, they governed themselves based on complex systems of traditional law. Even as they transitioned to a more settled lifestyle, they relied largely on nature, hunting deer, boar and wallabies and harvesting crabs, tree gum and other natural goods. They maintained a spiritual connection to the forest, believed to be inhabited by the souls of their ancestors. Source: news.mongabay.com/2019/10/saving-aru-the-epic-battle-to-s...

The popular image of master pearlers is of Anglo-Celts in ‘pearling whites’ and pith helmets overseeing their ‘coolie’ labour. But, in reality, they came from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, and some were women. They exerted power and influence at all levels of government. Some of the early master pearlers – the McRae brothers, for example – were settlers and pastoralists; others were merchant seaman. Many were opportunists keen to exploit a lucrative trade for profit, even if this meant engaging in slaving. Some Asian pearlers owned pearling operations until their ownership was banned; others formed ‘dummying’ partnerships with white pearlers. Other Asian and European pearlers operated from East Indian ports, such as Dobu (Aru Islands). Under foreign flags of convenience, they exploited pearlshell outside the three-nautical-mile exclusion zone around Australia’s coast, thereby evading the fees, duties and regulations imposed on those based in Australia. In the Torres Strait, the London Missionary Society set up Papuan Industries, which allowed communities to build and own their own luggers. Each with its own colours, these ‘company boats’ were a source of pride and income for the Islander communities. Some pearlers founded pearling dynasties, but only the Paspaley family has survived into the twenty-first century. Source: museum.wa.gov.au/explore/lustre-online-text-panels/master...

Before the beginning of the 20th century, the only means of obtaining pearls was by manually gathering very large numbers of pearl oysters or mussels from the ocean floor or lake or river bottom. The bivalves were then brought to the surface, opened, and the tissues searched. More than a ton were searched in order to find at least 3-4 quality beads.[citation needed] In order to find enough pearl oysters, free-divers were often forced to descend to depths of over 100 feet on a single breath, exposing them to the dangers of hostile creatures, waves, eye damage, and drowning, often as a result of shallow water blackout on resurfacing.[2] Because of the difficulty of diving and the unpredictable nature of natural pearl growth in pearl oysters, pearls of the time were extremely rare and of varying quality. Although harvesting of shells had long been practiced by Aboriginal Australians, pearl diving only began in the 1850s off the coast of Western Australia and the pearling industry remained strong until the advent of World War I, when the price of mother-of-pearl plummeted with the invention and expanded use of plastics for buttons and other articles previously been made of shell. In the 1870s pearling began in the Torres Strait, off Far North Queensland. By the 1890s, pearling was the largest industry in the region, and had a huge impact on coastal Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Because of the dangers of diving, almost no white people participated, and Asian, Pacific, and Indigenous Australians were used as cheap labor for the industry. Shells were the main aim for collection, and the whole industry was essentially a colonial one geared to procuring mother-of-pearl for sale to overseas markets for the making of buttons. As time went on and sources were depleted, divers were encouraged to dive deeper, making the enterprise even more dangerous. Divers experimented with the heavy diving suit, discarding the full diving suit and using the helmet and corselet only, which became standard practice until 1960. "Hookah" gear, tested to 48 fathoms (87 meters) in 1922, was considered unsuitable for the strong tides in these waters, and the later Scuba equipment did not supply enough air to spend the time required underwater and for decompression, while surfacing [10] Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_hunting