‘It was too dangerous for white men’: the racist history of pearl diving in Australia

A pearling lugger in the waters of Thursday Island, Queensland. Photograph: State Library of Queensland

In a park in Broome, a pregnant Indigenous woman emerges from the water offering up a pearl shell.

At three metres high, the Women of Pearling monument overlooking Western Australia’s Roebuck Bay acknowledges the exploitation of Indigenous women during Australia’s blackbirding era, when they were kidnapped and coerced into free diving for white-owned pearl luggers along the north-west coastline.