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By Root 669 0

dangerous was the bends, or decompression sickness. The solution, to come up slowly from the depths, was worked out only in 1905, and even after this it took time to educate the mostly illiterate divers: in 1914 alone thirty-three divers operating out of Broome died from the bends. Pearls were found in few of the oyster shells. The valuable product was mother of pearl. Around 1900 Broome produced 80 per cent of the world's supply of this preciosity. The trade declined in the 1920s and 1930s, and was dealt a fatal blow by the development in the 1950s of plastic for buttons, cutlery handles, walking stick grips and a host of other items where mother of pearl had previously been used.

However, today Broome is again the centre of the pearl industry, this time focusing on cultured pearls. This all began in the 1960s, and is now a multi-million dollar export earner. The luggers, now very modern fibreglass air-conditioned craft, again go out to Eighty Mile Beach, south of Broome. Mother of pearl has regained some market share, so the larger oysters are taken for their shells. Smaller oysters are collected and taken in special ships, where they are in fresh sea water all the time, north to King Sound. Many die of stress on the way. Natural pearls are a result of the oyster building up encrustations, called nacre, around a foreign body such as a grain of sand, or a small parasite. This occurs on the outer mantle inside the shell. Cultured pearls are produced rather differently. Once the oysters have reached the oyster farming area, there comes the technical task of inserting a tiny nucleus into the oyster's gonads. Fragments taken from Mississippi mussel or clam shells have been found to work best. Once the nucleus has been inserted, the oysters are placed in metal frames, and left in suitable locations around King Sound. Over two years the oyster covers the nucleus with nacre, forming layers like an onion. The pearl is then extracted. As the oyster is now bigger, a larger nucleus can be inserted, and a larger pearl produced. This process can be done, on rare occasions, four times using the same oyster. Parts of this technique were learnt from Japanese pearl farmers. However, the pinctada maxima is much bigger than any others available elsewhere. Japanese cultured pearls reach a maximum diameter of 11 mm, while Australian ones can be monsters of 18 or even 21 mm. Since the 1970s about 70 per cent of the world's cultured pearls have come from Broome.

Cultured pearls provide a fine example of change and commercialisation. Natural pearls have always been valued by elites, in for example imperial Rome, and the Muslim and Hindu worlds. Many portraits of past potentates show them with necklaces of huge pearls. They were produced in the hazardous and chancy manner that we described earlier. Indeed, some purists, especially in the Arab world, despise cultured pearls and still consider only natural ones are worthy of being bought. Today it is a highly scientific branch of aquaculture, or marine farming. The animals, the oysters, are cosseted to avoid their being stressed. Increasingly they are bred in captivity, rather than being harvested from the wild. Every few weeks the metal frames in which they are trapped are brought to the surface, and their shells scrubbed clean of encrustations. Once the nucleus has been implanted, the panels containing the oysters have to be turned over every two days for forty days. Oysters are valuable livestock, like cattle or sheep. The divers who do most of the work are really farmers, tending their livestock. Indeed, in recent years pirates have taken to raiding the oyster farms and stealing the shells, the exact equivalent then of cattle rustling.65

The tourism industry around the Indian Ocean today betrays many of the benefits and costs which we have just found to characterise fishing. Again globalisation has had mixed results. Certainly tourism has expanded in geometric fashion in the last few decades. Total numbers worldwide have roughly doubled each decade: from 25 million in 1950 to 69 million