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.
In an age before diving apparatus was introduced, pregnant women became the most highly prized by their white masters, under the misguided belief that their lung capacity was greater; that they could survive longer and dive deeper.
They couldn’t. For many, those pearl shell beds – as deep as 25 fathoms, or 45 metres underwater – became a deathbed.
The Broome-based Indigenous intercultural dance theatre company Marrugeku has taken this history as its starting point for a piece of choreographic truth-telling, in a new work titled Mutiara, meaning pearl in Malay, which is heading to Sydney and Perth festivals next year after premiering in Broome in September.
The work is a co-creation between artists of Indigenous and Malay heritage, as the pearl shell industry in the Kimberley itself became, after an 1871 moratorium on the use of Indigenous women on pearl luggers by Western Australian authorities.
An influx of indentured male workers from south-east Asia became divers over subsequent decades to ensure the continued supply to factories across Europe of pearl shell as the chief material for button making.
The migrant workers and the Yawuru people lived, worked and suffered together – and found myriad ways to defy a White Australia policy that ensured roots in communities were not planted by the visitors, who were permitted only to work on three-year contracts before being sent home.
“No [Malay] man’s life is valued in the economising of that life,” the Inquirer and Commercial News editorialised about the pearl shell industry on 28 April 1875. “But the utmost amount of diving must be sucked out of the man, kill him or not; for who knows who will be his owner next season!”
By the 1870s, deep sea diving technology consisted of canvas and steel suits, bolted copper helmets and a rubber hose through which a crew member on the surface hand pumped air to the diver. Little was known medically about the bends – diver’s paralysis – caused by bubbles of nitrogen getting into bodily tissues when a diver rose to the surface too quickly. Sharks and other underwater hazards claimed lives and tropical cyclones wiped out dozens of pearl luggers and their crews.
It is believed up to one-third of all indentured divers died, says Sarah Yu, a curator and cultural heritage specialist with Broome’s Nyamba Buru Yawuru centre.
“It was horrendous, really,” she says. “They didn’t really know how diving worked … and it was considered too dangerous for white man to do the work, so there were exemptions made to the White Australia policy to keep the pearl luggers going.”
In 1916 a royal commission into WA’s pearling industry concluded that the use of indentured Malay, Singaporean and Japanese divers must continue, because although their presence compromised the Australian ideal of racial homogeneity, “the life is not a desirable one, and the risks are great, as proved by the abnormal death rate amongst divers”.
The life of a pearl shell diver was “incompatible with that a European worker is entitled to live,” parliament was told.
Through dance and music, Mutiara explores the concepts of colonialism, racism, exploitation, slavery, and stolen children, like “buried truths washed up and left along the shores of time” according to Marrugeku’s statement. But it is also a celebration of First Nations people and Malay immigrants, who built deep interracial relationships, in defiance of the country’s White Australia policy.
One of the creators and performers in Mutiara is Singaporean-born Broome resident Ahmat Bin Fadal, now in his 80s, who worked as an indentured diver in the 1960s.
He describes how he felt the fear of death each day the helmet was bolted to his shoulders, and the day that led to him leaving the industry.
Preparing to resurface, Fadal’s oxygen supply was accidentally cut off by a crewman on the lugger above.
“I saw my mother’s face, I saw the name of Allah and then I passed out,” he says.
The day Fadal cheated death is re-enacted in Mutiara.
The Marrugeku collaborators’ choreographic statement says the undersea world inhabited by First Nations Yawuru people and migrant divers paralleled a wider Australian story of migration and not belonging. “We are in solidarity to reclaim these stories: to remember, to celebrate and to honour.”
Of the Indigenous women who were blackbirded into free diving for pearl shell prior to the introduction of diving apparatus and indentured labour, records do exist, says Yu, but there is scant visual documentation. In 2019, the remains of 14 Yawuru and Karajarri people were returned to Broome from the Grassi Museum in Leipzig.
“They were male and female, and some had evidence of trauma like damaged eardrums, consistent with diving injuries,” Yu says.
“The remains were all taken from Roebuck Bay and sold in the 1890s by a pearler to the museum in Germany. We know these were our ancestors who experienced the brutal life of pearl shell diving.”
As part of Naidoc week this year, Broome staged Wanggajarli Burugun, an exhibition marking the repatriation of ancestral remains taken from Yawuru Country. Among those recognised and placed to rest were the pearl divers of Roebuck Bay.
Mutiara by Marrugeku will be performed at Sydney festival, 19-21 January; then at Perth festival, 9-12 February
