The humidity is continuing to increase as we visited Broome. Our guide told us the “wet season” ended last week and the humidity had dropped more than 15%. I cannot imagine it.
Broome is a small town that exists due to the pearl industry. But not the way I expected. We visited Pearl Luggers (a “lugger” is the ship used for oyster harvesting) for some education followed by touring the shop. This kind of thing happens everywhere. However, this time they put in some real effort for the education part. Seems originally the town did not sell pearls but mother of pearl. Before the invention of plastic, mother of pearl was the source for things like buttons, furniture inlay, small utensils and such. The oysters around Broome were very large, thus a good source of lots of mother of pearl.
The large oyster to the right is 50% larger than my hand.
Broome was supplying 85% of the world’s mother of pearl. Therefore, they needed divers. The easier-to-get oysters were quickly retrieved, thus more deep-sea diving methods were needed. They rapidly moved to surface-supplied hard-hat diving.
Gasoline-powered compressors did not yet exist, so people on each boat had to manually pump the air used by the diver, usually with a diver on each side of the boat. Such a system inflates the suit, so around 100 kg (220 lbs) of weights were needed to keep the divers on the seafloor.
Scuba diving took over, but by then plastic buried the mother of pearl industry. New research is underway to use mother of pearl as a scaffold for human bone grafts.
Of course, they now produce cultured pearls – as their shop shows. This poster is one of the better ones I’ve seen describing the differences.
The highlight was this giant white pearl. It was a serious 2-inches across. The sticker lists the cost at $100,000 AUD, but he said he’d let is go for $55,000 USD. Maybe next visit.
Next was the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park. You read that correctly. Years ago it was a farm where they harvested crocodile meat and leather. Nowadays it is for the tourists.
The park hosts saltwater crocodiles, freshwater crocodiles and American alligators. The latter were smuggled into Australia on a passenger aircraft. The guy taped them onto his legs beneath his trousers…
Unsurprisingly the crocs responded to feeding. The guide threw chickens to them. Oddly, if they do not catch the chicken in flight our guide needed to show each croc where the food was and the croc had to tilt their head to bite. Tough not having usable arms.
Many of the crocs have been separated from the groups and are named. Some are famous.
I never got a good photograph, but I’ve seen trucks here with as many as four trailers. I’ve never seen more than two in the USA and seldom that many. Are the roads made differently?