Octopus Crowd: Maritime History and the Business of Australian Pearling in Its Schooner Age

By Stephen Mullins

A detailed study of the origins and demise of schooner-based pearling in Australia

For most of its history, Australian pearling was a shore-based activity. But from the mid-1880s until the World War I era, the industry was dominated by highly mobile, heavily capitalized, schooner-based fleets of pearling luggers, known as floating stations, that exploited Australia’s northern continental shelf and the nearby waters of the Netherlands Indies. Octopus Crowd: Maritime History and the Business  of Australian Pearling in Its Schooner Age is the first book-length study of schooner-based pearling and explores the floating station system and the men who developed and employed it.

Steve Mullins focuses on the Clark Combination, a syndicate led by James Clark, Australia’s most influential pearler. The combination honed the floating station system to the point where it was accused of exhausting pearling grounds, elbowing out small-time operators, strangling the economies of pearling ports, and bringing the industry to the brink of disaster. Combination partners were vilified as  monopolists—they were referred to as an “octopus crowd”—and their schooners were stigmatized as hell ships and floating sweatshops.

Schooner-based floating stations crossed maritime frontiers with  impunity, testing colonial and national territorial jurisdictions. The Clark Combination passed through four fisheries management regimes, triggering significant change and causing governments to alter laws and extend maritime boundaries. It drew labor from ports across the Asia-Pacific, and its product competed in a volatile world market. Octopus Crowd takes all of these factors into account to explain Australian pearling during its schooner age. It argues that  the demise of the floating station system was not caused by resource depletion, as was often predicted, but by ideology and Australia’s shifting sociopolitical landscape

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780817392383

Book preview

OCTOPUS CROWD

MARITIME CURRENTS: HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

SERIES EDITOR

Gene Allen Smith

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

John F. Beeler

Alicia Caporaso

Annalies Corbin

Ben Ford

Ingo K. Heidbrink

Susan B. M. Langley

Nancy Shoemaker

Joshua M. Smith

William H. Thiesen

OCTOPUS CROWD

MARITIME HISTORY and the BUSINESS of AUSTRALIAN PEARLING in Its SCHOONER AGE

STEVE MULLINS

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion

Cover image: The schooners Ariel (left) and Alice (right), Aru Islands, NEI, 1908; James Milne Southern Collection, used by permission of Jill Brown

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mullins, Steve, 1952– author.

Title: Octopus crowd : maritime history and the business of Australian pearling in its schooner age / Steve Mullins.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2019] |

Series: Maritime currents : history and archaeology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059616| ISBN 9780817320249 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817392383 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Pearl fisheries—Australia—History. | Mother-of-pearl—Australia—History. | Pearl divers—Australia—History. | Schooners—Australia—History. | Australia—Commerce—History.

Classification: LCC SH377.A8 M85 2019 | DDC 338.3/714120994—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059616

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Losing Alice

1. Origins of Pearling on the East Coast

2. The Lure of the North

3. From Torres Strait to the North West: 1881–1886

4. In the North West: 1886–1890

5. The Aru Islands: There and Back

6. Consolidating the Combination: 1891–1897

7. Days of Plenty, Days of Pain: 1897–1899

8. Federation: The Specter of White Australia

9. In the Netherlands Indies

10. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: 1908–1917

Conclusion: The Passing of the Schooner Age

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. The schooner Alice, Aru Islands, NEI, 1908

2. The Timor, Arafura, and Coral Seas

3. Floating station based on the Schooner Flowerdale, Darwin Harbour, 1896

4. Oswald W. B. Brierly: Studies for Kai Marrina (Big Shadow) 1848

5. Torres Strait

6. Moreton Bay oyster cutter, ca. 1894

7. James Clark, commodore of the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron

8. Frank, Sana, and Elizabeth (Jaki) Jardine entertaining men of the Thursday Island Royal Australian Artillery Garrison, Somerset, 1912

9. Thursday Island, ca. 1898

10. Pearling lugger Topsy, built in 1883 for James Burns

11. Opening pearl oysters aboard Sree Pas Sair

12. Japanese full-dress diver and diver’s tender, 1910

13. The 1889 extension of Western Australian maritime jurisdiction

14. Pearling lugger Alaska (built on Thursday Island, 1904) in the Aru Islands, NEI

15. The Aru Islands, NEI

16. Aruese pearl shell divers, 1908

17. Sjech Said bin Abdullah Baädilla seated at center with flowers, Bandaneira, 1911

18. Simon Edwin Munro, ca. 1892

19. Brown Campbell & Co. office, Thursday Island, ca. 1898

20. The schooner Wanetta, Aru Islands, NEI, 1908

21. Maggie and William Field Porter holding twins William and Doris, with Alice standing between, 1902

22. Pearl shell auction rooms, Bull Wharf, City of London

23. Rock Davis Boatyard at Blackwall, NSW, ca. 1903

24. Pretoria and Sketty Belle, Aru Islands, NEI, 1908

25. Jim Mackenzie and James Clark, Dobo, NEI, 1908

26. Dine, Frances, Frances Pearl, George, and George Clark Smith, ca. 1905

27. Celebes Trading Co. offices, Dobo, NEI, 1908

28. James Clark’s Alice fleet careened, Maikoor, Aru Islands, NEI, 1908

29. Celebes Trading Co. pearling luggers flying the flag of Japan to celebrate the emperor’s birthday, 1908

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a research program that extended over two decades, so there are many people and institutions to thank. In 1992 Peter Elder gave me access to his collection of professionally translated Dutch documents relative to the Aru Islands, and soon afterward, in 1993, Jim and Mona Clark generously invited me into their home to do research in the Clark Family Papers. These two rare opportunities allowed me to think that a book was possible, and later in 1993 I made my first research trip to Provinsi Maluku in Indonesia. Much later still, John G. Butcher sent me an envelope of copied files relating to the 1905 Ambon pearling lease that he had identified in the Nederlands Nationaal Archief at The Hague. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Peter Elder, Jim and Mona Clark, and John G. Butcher. Also, to Gene A. Smith, and Dan Waterman and the folks at the University of Alabama Press, for bringing the book to fruition.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of others who have helped in various ways: Alex Brown, Jill and Ian Brown, Joe Christensen, Helen and Gordon Darlington, Elaine Davis, Cathy Denis, Gwen Dundon, Carol Gistitin, Ian Hemphill, Richard Hemphill, Dieuwke Hoodcamp, Tony Hunt, Pam Ivey, Grahame and Judy Jardine-Vidgen, Hans Kraal, Garry and Miranda Laws, Clive Moore, Karl Neuenfeldt, David Payne, Jack Reijven, Patricia Spyer, Kelli Stidiford, Julian Tyne, and Barbara Webster.

Thanks also to staff at the Central Queensland University Library (Rockhampton); the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library, James Cook University (Townsville); the Fryer Library, University of Queensland (Brisbane); the John Oxley Library (Brisbane); the National Archives of Australia (Canberra); the Menzies Library, Australian National University (Canberra); the Mitchell Library (Sydney); the National Library of Australia (Canberra); the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University (Canberra); the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron (Brisbane); the State Library of South Australia (Adelaide); the State Library of Western Australia (Perth); the State Records Office of Western Australia; the Queensland Maritime Museum (Brisbane); and the Queensland State Archives (Brisbane).

Central Queensland University made research trips possible, including two to Indonesia, and colleagues in the university’s School of Education and the Arts provided unstinting moral support. In particular, I would like to thank Wally Woods, John Fitzsimmons, Sue Court, and Bill Blayney for granting me time to pursue the project. Australia Research Council Discovery Project DP150103124 (Pearls, People, and Power: The Transformation of the Indian Ocean World) funded the final stages of the research and writing.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the editors and editorial boards of the academic journals that published key elements of this research as it progressed: Great Circle, Journal of Pacific History, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Mariner’s Mirror, Mains’l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History, and the Journal for Maritime Research.

Most of all, I would like to thank to my family for their support over many years of research and writing.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Losing Alice

On June 14, 1915, just on dark, the 132-ton schooner Alice with forty souls aboard plowed on to Brue Reef, about twenty-five miles off Cape Leveque on Australia’s remote northwest coast. Jim Mackenzie had been taking the schooner wide, skirting the maze of the Buccaneer Archipelago to make a run into Broome after a trying nineteen-day passage from the Aru Islands in the Netherlands Indies. Among other problems, a persistent following swell had set off a rhythmic yawing motion that put so much stress on the schooner’s main gaff that it split at the jaw, and the mainsail had to be lowered. The danger, about six square miles of barely submerged coral, was clearly laid out in the charts, but a faulty chronometer had confused the schooner’s officers. The mate raised the alarm when he went on deck after dinner, and men scrambled into the rigging for a better look. They soon were staring hard at a long, dark line about a hundred yards off the port bow. Mackenzie ordered the helm down, but with no mainsail set, Alice refused to tack. He then tried to wear around the other way, but just as the sails thrashed across, the schooner crunched in on its starboard bow. Deep with stores and diving gear for a fleet of pearling luggers being relocated to Western Australia, and cramped for living space, Alice was soon hopelessly caught in a heaving surf.

Frantic sailors quickly lowered the portside motor launch to set a kedge anchor, but in the pandemonium the bungs were left out, and it swamped and sank. The starboard launch dangled uselessly from its davits over dry reef, and the stern dinghy was swept away by a huge swell before it could be secured. Mackenzie knew Alice was lost when she started to open up forward by the stem and the cold sea poured in. He sent men below to gather essential provisions, but the schooner made a sudden frightening lurch and rolled back on its port side. The crew scrambled over the bulwarks to cling to the starboard topsides; then Alice groaned and slipped off, taking with it three sick men helplessly laid up in the forward hold. The rest took to the dark water and swam for the reef, which was dry but looked likely to submerge entirely on the next high tide. The dinghy was recovered in one piece, and after a tense discussion it was decided everyone should go back to the mainmast that stood above the water, its spreaders and rigging silhouetted dramatically against a brilliant starlit night.

Twenty-seven men were ferried out, but ten slipped away in the dark, preferring instead to take their chances on the reef—not surprisingly perhaps, the helmsman and last lookout among them. Next day, a Tuesday, Mackenzie sent the dinghy to the mainland for help while he and the rest of the crew remained behind in the rigging. It started out at noon with two paddles and a following breeze, picked up the Cape Leveque light, and made the lighthouse just before dawn the following day. The lighthouse keeper immediately sent to the Catholic mission at Thomas Bay for its lugger, Salvador, and finally, on Friday, the eighteen men in the rigging, by now in a state of near collapse, were taken off to safety. The men on the reef were never seen again (figure 1).¹

The loss of Alice was, above all, a human tragedy; thirteen now nameless Malay sailors, hailing from across the scattered islands of what was then the Moluccas, now the east Indonesian province of Maluku, would never see Tual, Bandaneira, or Ambon again.² We know from the lighthouse keeper’s report that the schooner’s Malay sailmaker suffered serious internal trauma, but there is no complete record of injuries sustained; surely, some were severe, and not only physical. Four days marooned out of sight of land clinging desperately to a mast must have taken its toll on the mind. Mackenzie, who was not only master of the vessel but managing partner of the pearling fleet for which it was the mother ship, took a long time to recover from the shock. Three years later at Broome, he was sacked by his senior partner, James Clark; and Clark, struggling to comprehend his former partner’s ineptitude after years of trusted service, could conclude only that he had been broken up by the wreck.³ The slow breaking up of the once graceful fore-and-aft schooner Alice suggests other endings as well.

Newspaper reports of the wreck were brief: a few columns crowded out by dramatic cables from Egypt and the Dardanelles less than two months after the largest amphibious landing in history to that time, at Gallipoli. By June 1915 the Great War was being fought with terrible ferocity, and it was becoming apparent that it marked a turning point in western history. While it was of little consequence to the men at the front, the outbreak of war disrupted international markets, setting in train long-term shifts in the global economy. Amid all the other dismal news, the world market for high-quality mother-of-pearl collapsed, presaging the end of the schooner age of Australian pearling, the era that is the subject of this book. For most of its history, Australian pearling was a shore-based activity undertaken in small vessels sailing from ports adjacent to known pearling grounds. Then, from about the mid-1880s, schooner-based fleets of pearling luggers known as floating stations began to scour Australia’s continental shelf, from Cooktown in the east to Cossack in the west and north to maritime Southeast Asia. For these highly mobile, blue water pearlers, war came at just the worst moment, and the relocation of the Alice fleet from the Netherlands Indies back to Australia was a response to the crisis, one that had to be negotiated at the very highest level of government, causing a political furor that reverberated all the way to the office of the Australian prime minister, Andrew Fisher.⁴

Pearling and the Floating Station

Gathering pearl oysters from the seabed entered the industrial age on the Australian coast. It’s an ancient business, but for much of its history and in most places, its principal object was to find, process, and market the lustrous gems the oyster occasionally produces, which have been prized since classical times.⁵ The collection of pearl shell primarily for the commercial product mother-of-pearl is perhaps more recent. Oyster species from the traditional pearling grounds of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Mannar near Sri Lanka (Ceylon) were mostly small, odd shaped, or brittle and, in Sri Lanka, not much use for anything but burning for lime. In the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, there were larger species, Akoya pearl oysters and Pinctada margaritifera, which by the nineteenth century had entered the world mother-of-pearl trade and were being collected for that purpose.⁶ Yet as a commercial product both were inferior to Pinctada maxima, which is large, thick, flat, durable, and white. That species is mainly found in the Mergui Archipelago off Myanmar (Burma), the Sulu Archipelago between Kalimantan (Borneo) and Mindanao in the Philippines, and eastern Indonesia (especially the Aru Islands), but it is most abundant in tropical north Australia. At the end of the nineteenth century, Australia dominated world production of high-quality mother-of-pearl, by then worth about £500,000 ($1,000,000) annually.⁷

Australian pearling began in the 1860s, almost simultaneously in Torres Strait, Queensland, and in the North West of Western Australia, more than 1,500 miles apart. For nearly two decades there was scant communication between these remote arcs of activity, leaving their maritime cultures to be shaped by the traditions of the seas in which they sailed. In Torres Strait pearling was an extension of the southwest Pacific trade that had developed mainly around the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (trepang) industries. Sailing mostly out of Sydney, it had its own distinctive mix of capital, management, labor, and work practices, and even a lingua franca, bislamar, the western Pacific trade language.⁸ In the North West, on the other hand, the early white pearlers were mostly coastal traders and pastoralists who had to learn the business of collecting marine produce almost from scratch.⁹

Many cultures have used mother-of-pearl for personal adornment and in their decorative arts, but in the era under consideration here, about 85 percent of Australian pearl shell went to the making of buttons. Mother-of-pearl buttons have always featured on exclusive handmade garments, but with the manufacture of ready-made clothes from the 1830s, and the more sophisticated industrial sewing machines of the 1850s, Europe and North America began to mass-produce high-quality clothes. The 1854 invention of a sewing machine capable of stitching buttonholes ensured that demand for mother-of-pearl buttons kept pace with this expansion, which coincided with the discovery of Australia’s pearling grounds.¹⁰ As a consequence of these international forces, Australian pearl shell came on the market at high prices, around £200 a ton in London, easily $8,000 a ton in current values.¹¹ Pinctada maxima makes beautiful pearls; indeed, it’s the species upon which the modern South Sea cultured pearl industry is based. But in the schooner age, pearls, although always welcome, made up on average only about 12 percent of the value of an Australian pearler’s produce.¹² Nevertheless, while the industry is often quite rightly referred to as pearl-shelling,¹³ the term pearling is preferred here because securing pearls for owners, rather than conceding them to divers, was key to the logic of the schooner way of working. At the Mackay Royal Commission (1908), Reg Hockings, a schooner-based fleet owner, described himself as a pearl-sheller—not a pearler but testified, I never fish for shell without some idea of getting pearls. That is my sole temptation. Take that away, and I have no wish to work (figure 2).¹⁴

To begin with, pearling in Australia was carried on much as it had been for centuries in other places, using skin divers working from a nondescript variety of vessels. But high prices and intense competition encouraged innovation, most notably the adoption in the mid-1870s of the deep-diving technology perfected by Augustus Siebe, a German-born London instrument maker who manufactured the first practical deep-diving suit, in 1839. The helmet already existed, but he added a closed, full-dress system supplied with air by an on-deck, hand-operated compressor.¹⁵ Like earlier diving bells and helmets, which had been around since the eighteenth century, it was designed with salvage, dock, and bridge work in mind, yet its potential for the collection of sedentary undersea products was appreciated from the beginning. To be practical, the use of a heavy, expensive diving apparatus required a high-value marine product that clustered thickly in deep water. In the old Indian Ocean pearl fisheries, the technology was next to useless, because much of what pearl divers collected ended up as piles of waste. But on the Pinctada maxima beds of north Australia, every full net-bag hauled to the surface contained valuable mother-of-pearl and the fair chance of a welcome bonus in the shape of a quality pearl. While the copper helmets and diving suits of Siebe, Gorman & Co., and its successful rival C. E. Heinke & Co., also of London, were rarely seen on the old pearling grounds, they became standard kit in the Australian industry right through to the 1960s.

The introduction of deep diving technology, cutting edge at the time, influenced the design of the boats used in the industry until they eventually resembled the pearling lugger, a uniquely Australian type of vessel now emblematic not only of pearling but of all the old multicultural communities that grew up in the ramshackle timber and corrugated iron ports of Australia’s tropical north. The first pearling boats were not purpose-built but a motley assortment transferred from other maritime industries, mainly the bêche-de-mer (trepang) fishery. These usually were undecked whaleboats or cutters carrying one or two stepped masts and were necessarily small, up to about thirty feet, because they had to be transported to the working grounds on davits or strapped to the decks of barques, brigs, and schooners. They usually were lug-rigged, a simple and light configuration suitable for small boats of shallow draft.¹⁶ In Torres Strait, after full-dress helmet diving was successfully adopted in 1875, boats became somewhat larger (five to eight tons), were semidecked, but open amidships to accommodate a bulky air pump.¹⁷ By the early 1880s, most were fully decked with the pump housed in a hold amidships, and by then they were mainly gaff-rigged ketches, although they continued to be called luggers.¹⁸ They were now about forty feet long, but the type was still not fully formed. For instance, many were double-ended, rather than having the yacht-like bow and overhanging counter stern of the pearling lugger. And they would grow larger, as shore-based luggers sailed farther and stayed longer at sea to make the business pay, and two, and then three, divers at a time began to work from one boat. As we shall see, the classic pearling lugger type did not fully emerge until the early 1890s, well into the schooner age.

By the mid-1880s, resource depletion and fluctuating prices were the principal innovation drivers. One of the most significant changes was the recruitment of growing numbers of Asian indentured pearling workers. Asian sailors had always been in the industry, reflecting the global mobility of maritime labor, but now men, not necessarily sailors, were being systematically contracted and trained specifically for pearling. In Western Australia, the initial workforce comprised local Aborigines, wading on reefs and later skin diving for pearl shell in relatively shallow water. However, ill treatment, appalling working conditions, and long absences from country discouraged them from joining boat crews. The consequent labor shortage persuaded pearlers to look to the nearby islands of the Netherlands Indies. In 1871 Indonesians, usually referred to as Malays, began to arrive in the North West under contract from Makassar, Kupang, and other ports, and 134 were at work by 1873. The number increased to a peak of nearly a thousand in 1875. However, in that year the Indies government, responding to reports of worker abuse, imposed a head tax on departing laborers that saw the number drop dramatically, until after a few years it was insignificant.¹⁹ Asian workers would not be seen again in numbers in Western Australian pearling until it adopted deep-diving technology in the mid-1880s.

On the other side of the continent in Torres Strait, initially the workforce was South Sea Islander, by 1872 about five hundred of them, supplemented by indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, a Melanesian and thoroughly maritime people who quickly adapted to wage-based deck work and skin diving. But experienced South Sea Islander lugger skippers and full-dress helmet divers were alert to the value of their labor and often independent-minded and difficult to manage, and pearlers began to look elsewhere for a less expensive and more tractable workforce. The regular mail-steamer service through Torres Strait to Indian Ocean ports, which commenced in 1874, provided the opportunity. Shipping companies began to recruit Malays in Singapore under three-year agreements, transferring them to employers in Torres Strait for a commission. By 1883 the newly formed Australian trading firm Burns Philp & Co. dominated this business, and from then the majority of new workers arriving in Torres Strait came via Singapore, rather than from the Pacific via Sydney.²⁰ By 1885, of about a thousand pearling workers in Torres Strait, 257 were Malays, 147 were Filipinos (usually referred to as Manilamen), 175 were South Sea Islanders, and 132 were Japanese. The rest of the workforce was composed of Torres Strait Islanders (48), Sri Lankans (Sinhalese) (75), West Indians (30), various European nationalities (30), Arabs (23), and a few score from other places.²¹ Throughout the schooner age the Australian pearling workforce was conspicuous for its extraordinary ethnic diversity.

Importantly for this study, pearling also responded with more efficient management on the water. In the early years, once the reliability of the resource had been established (at least in the medium term), pearling was shore-based. Stations housing men, stores, and produce were established adjacent to reasonably protected anchorages within close range of known pearling grounds. Pearling luggers went to sea for two or three weeks at a time, returning when their holds were full or provisions were running short. State-subsidized mail-steamer services facilitated the shore-based system, allowing for the transhipment of produce, the importation of labor, and the victualing of boats. Later, an alternate arrangement emerged: the floating station system. In this, larger vessels, usually schooners of about one hundred tons, served as mother ships for fleets of pearling luggers, about a dozen to make the system viable, from which full-dress helmet divers worked. Floating stations could range widely and remain at sea for months at a time, offering owners and managers significant advantages in the supervision of men and minimizing cost.

The shift to floating stations came out of necessity, when in the mid-1880s a number of Torres Strait pearlers relocated to newly discovered grounds in the remote North West, looking to apply their deep-water technology to places still being exploited with methods not much different from those used on the ancient Indian Ocean pearling grounds. From the North West, beginning in the mid-1890s, they extended their operations to the Netherlands Indies, which ultimately had the effect of creating a pearling zone that encompassed the Coral, Arafura, and Timor Seas.²² By then the floating-station system was acknowledged in Australia as the most efficient way of working, and it transformed pearling, arguably taking the industry to its zenith. But while floating stations were undoubtedly profitable, they also set pearling on trajectories of internal division, conflict, and political controversy.

Octopus Crowd and the Small Man

This is the story of Australian pearling’s floating stations, and of the men who developed and remained resolutely committed to that way of working through to the Great War. In particular, it’s about the Clark Combination, a syndicate initiated and led by James Clark, Australia’s most influential pearler. The combination honed the effectiveness of schooner-based pearling to the point where it was accused of exhausting pearling grounds wherever its fleets went, of elbowing out small-time operators, and of strangling the economies of pearling ports—indeed, bringing the industry itself to the very brink of disaster. Combination partners were publicly vilified and their schooners were stigmatized as hell ships and floating sweat shops.²³ Opponents branded them an octopus crowd, invoking the dreaded creature that political cartoonists of the day used to caricature money-grubbing, grasping monopolists. Public feeling against them grew so strong that in 1905, when they relocated their fleets to the Netherlands Indies, Australian governments, both state and federal, imposed regulations and restrictions that were calculated to emphatically slam the door behind them (figure 3).

James Clark, the entrepreneurial mind and public face of the combination, was born on October 2, 1857, at Spit Island in the estuary of the Hunter River, not far from the modern port of Newcastle, New South Wales.²⁴ Despite losing both parents before he was three, by the time of his death in Brisbane, Queensland, on July 9, 1933, this orphaned son of an illiterate fisherman was wealthy beyond his parents’ imagining. A man well known in business, sporting, and philanthropic circles, his funeral was one of the largest the city had ever seen. He had acquired half a dozen of the finest sheep stations in the land: Barcaldine Downs in Central Queensland alone carried 140,000 sheep. He had long been prominent in the wool industry, playing a significant role in the reorganization of marketing after the disruptions of the Great War. Nevertheless, twenty-five years after he quit pearling in 1919, probably never again setting foot on a pearling schooner, his stature in the industry was such that the press still referred to him as the pearl king.²⁵ Indeed, the Brisbane Courier obituary focused almost exclusively on that aspect of his life, likening him to Tom Lingard, the sea captain who featured in Joseph Conrad’s early novels set in the Netherlands Indies. Lingard was one of those bold spirits who, fitting out schooners on the Australian coast, invaded the Malay Archipelago in search of money and adventure. A legend in his own time, he was the ‘Rajah Laut’—King of the Sea.²⁶ While the comparison might have been a bit rich, it flirted with historical reality. Clark’s schooners did scour the waters of the Netherlands Indies, and within the timeframe of Conrad’s own career as a ship’s officer in Southeast Asia.²⁷ Even so, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that the press resorted to these romantic allusions to avoid trawling through the less palatable realities of a true pearling life.

Readers today might gather from Clark’s obituaries that pearling was universally regarded as a worthy enterprise, carried on by respectable businessmen and tough but fair-minded sailing masters. But the industry’s reputation has always been ambivalent, to say the least. Pearling is almost entirely absent from the celebratory nationalist artistic expressions that shaped Australia’s frontier tradition, even though the Heidelberg School artist Tom Roberts, who painted two of its most iconic images, Shearing of the Rams (1890) and The Golden Fleece (1894), had sailed on a pearling lugger from Sydney to Cooktown and spent time with the pearling fleets.²⁸ Pearling is also hard to find in popular Australian adventure fiction of the late 1800s, which often portrayed frontier situations, usually with the optimistic message that the decaying British Empire was being vigorously rejuvenated at its outskirts.²⁹ It had to wait until 1926 for the type of exposure that might have made a deep impression on the national consciousness, Frank Hurley’s silent film Pearl of the South Seas (1926). Most of that was shot in Torres Strait, and it features rare and fascinating actuality footage of a pearling port, Thursday Island, in the early 1920s. But the plot was a rehash of the old rejuvenating-the-empire theme, and two subsequent movies set in Torres Strait—Ken Hall’s dreadful Luggers and Lovers (1937) and Chips Rafferty’s more likable matinee-style King of the Coral Sea (1954)—were in much the same vein.³⁰

Given the allegorical power of the pearl and its usefulness as a narrative device, it’s hardly surprising that plots turned on the discovery of a fabulous gem, rather than on the daily grind of gathering pearl shell from the bottom of the sea. It’s more telling that in both literature and cinema, the heroes invariably were white divers, owner-operators with one or two boats. In reality, very few white men went out in pearling luggers, and those who did even more rarely went as divers. The simple truth is, pearling is largely absent from the pageant of Australian myth making because it was the wrong color. Federation in 1901 was predicated on a white Australia, one of the most powerful ideas propelling the six colonies toward nationhood within the British Empire. There was not much room for stories about an industry totally reliant on nonwhite labor in which nonwhite skippers and divers appeared to have such a free hand. As the popular poet A. B. Banjo Paterson versified in 1902 about a Japanese diver: Kanzo was king of his lugger, master and diver in one, / Diving wherever it pleased him, taking instructions from none.³¹ The poem was a rare literary excursion into pearling and became popular because, in a strangely perverse way, its key observations characterizing Japanese people as talented, ambitious, and wily appealed to the prejudices of the time.

True, a few Australian writers in the 1930s and 1940s, in particular Xavier Herbert and Ion Idriess,³² both of whom had lived and worked in the far north, portrayed a more realistic and complex industry, one dependent on a deeply embedded, well-understood racial hierarchy, but their heroes too were small-time operators. In his 1933 short story Sounding Brass, Herbert cast the taciturn and stereotypically fatalistic Japanese diver Yukio Tarawa as hero. His fearlessness saved Captain Peter Mott and his pearling lugger crew from a fierce cyclone that was driving them toward a reef, an act of courage that by a curious twist of the plot also relieved the character of old man Piper of his crippling debt to Mott. Piper was a small man with two luggers, while Mott was the biggest pearler in town. The selfless bravery of the small-timers so affected Mott that he was transformed from mean and grasping into a humane and charitable man.³³ Only a triumphant small man, it seems, could win for pearling a laudable role in the national story.

The academic history of Australian pearling is, as it should be, grounded in reality and reflects the concerns of its protagonists. Pearlers, and the politicians and public servants charged with regulating the industry, argued about a range of management issues, but the racial composition of the workforce and the sustainability of the resource were always central concerns. By the late 1890s they worried especially that one nationality in particular, the Japanese, who by then dominated full-dress helmet diving, were wresting the industry away from British Australians. With Federation in 1901, the Commonwealth intervened vigorously in pearling to implement its White Australia policy. Pearlers responded by lobbying hard to preserve their traditional sources of labor, and there were internal ructions as well, as arguments over the Japanese Question, that is, if—and if so, in what role—Japanese people should participate in the industry, exacerbated bitter divisions that had opened between shore-based and schooner-based operators. Australian pearling, especially in the schooner age, is enmeshed in the politics of ethnicity’s intersections with national identity. This was the theme that dominated academic histories, starting in the late 1950s when John Bach first described the industry’s role in the ideological formulation and practical operation of the White Australia policy.³⁴ Much later it gave way to an emphasis on seeing identity from the other side, shifting the focus to the experience of Japanese, Indigenous, Filipino, and more recently, Indonesian (Malay) pearling workers.³⁵

The other perennial concern was how to avoid exhausting the resource. To an extent, histories of Australian pearling, like those of most fisheries, have been shaped by a paradigm of decline, decades of recurrent resource crises leading almost inevitably to total collapse. Indeed, one of the most influential works takes this approach as a guiding principle and arrives at the conclusion that pearling’s fundamental problem was a failure to adapt—it was trapped in colonial grooves.³⁶ This is a fair assessment of the industry in its final phase, but as Chris Reid reminds us in his reassessment of Jeremy Tunstall’s influential (in the world of fisheries history) 1968 pamphlet Fish: An Antiquated Industry, one seldom finds an industry in total decline without competitively viable parts.³⁷ We should be cautious, therefore, about allowing the specter of resource depletion to determine how we see the schooner age. Certainly it influenced events, but ultimately it was not the cause of pearling’s demise. Nor could the Clark Combination be accused of failing to innovate.

The combination tenaciously defended its positions on the public controversies that racked pearling, but it had to struggle against a powerful undertow, the tenor of the times. Global sociopolitical landscapes shifted markedly in the course of the schooner age, and this was especially obvious in Queensland. When Clark commenced pearling in 1881, Thomas McIlwraith was in his first term as premier. He was a conservative populist politician whose heroes were the American railway robber barons Gould and Vanderbilt. The 1870s had been prosperous, and McIlwraith, a great walrus of a man who, as a biographer put it, knew greed on a baronial scale, was a staunch supporter of large-scale capitalist development and the colony’s sugar plantation economy.³⁸ Against this were the nascent liberals. They stood for individual freedom, social reform, and small-scale capitalism and were opposed to imported, indentured, nonwhite labor, big business, and monopoly. Under Samuel Griffith they won the 1884 election and moved to put their program into effect. However, despite the popular appeal of liberal ideals, economic recession saw McIlwraith swept back into power in May 1888. Through the political swings and roundabouts of the next decade, antimonopoly sentiment continued to simmer and erupted even more stridently in the platform of the burgeoning Labor Party, formed in 1891. Labor won twenty seats in the 1896 Queensland election, was the official opposition in 1898, and gained power for seven days in 1899. It had its origins in trade unionism, opposed imported, indentured labor, championed the small man, and was vehemently antimonopolist. It ruled Queensland in coalition with the Liberals from 1903 to 1907, and with T. J. Ryan as leader won office in its own right in 1915, holding power, apart from two years in the 1930s, until 1957. The Labor Party took national office in 1910, South Australia in 1910, and Western Australia in 1911.

Almost from the moment the Clark Combination came into being, antimonopoly rhetoric was directed against it, even though there was little chance of a genuine monopoly ever being formed in Australian pearling. Nevertheless, in the decade before the Great War, to be called a monopolist was a nasty insult indeed: it was almost to be un-Australian. On the other hand, the small man had made his way to the very core of the Australian democratic, egalitarian tradition. Floating stations might deplete pearling grounds and defy the White Australia principle, but these were not the only reasons governments eventually took such a set against them. Pearling continued to employ imported, indentured, nonwhite labor into the 1960s, well after the demise of floating stations, and effective ways of reducing pressure on the resource were often considered and rejected. The cold political reality was that there were few votes in schooner-based fleets, with their foreign workers, and if politicians had to choose between the interests of wealthy floating-station owners and small-time operators, it was no choice at all; federal and state policy rushed toward the electoral advantage.

Clark Combination fleets were wind-powered enterprises carried on almost entirely under sail, and it behooves a maritime history to pay due respect to the boats themselves and the shipwrights and boatyards that gave them shape. This is woven through what follows, from the cross-fertilization that occurred in the design and construction of recreational racing and working boats, to the adaptations that became necessary as pearling became more industrialized. The pearling lugger has become something of an Australian cultural icon, with five major museums displaying examples, but the pearling schooner is almost lost to historical memory. Rare photographs from the era reveal that vessels like Alice were a sublime blend of maritime efficiency, speed, and grace—awe-inspiring, especially on a broad reach under full sail. But once the schooner age had passed, nearly eighty years ago now, most were neglected to the point of unseaworthiness, and few people today can recall anything about them. It is still just possible, at Broome or Thursday Island, to talk with old sailors and divers who worked on pearling luggers, but there are no voices for the pearling schooner. Even the ship’s articles and indenture papers, those meager traces of sailors’ lives, are mostly gone to dust. What we know emanates largely from the octopus crowd itself—the owners, managers, and sailing masters of the Clark Combination, and their critics.

To be meaningful, a history of Australian pearling has to be set against the backdrop of national ideology and doctrine, but maritime history also is intrinsically transnational. Floating stations crossed maritime frontiers, their owners only too ready to test the limits of colonial and national territorial jurisdictions. To follow them through time, one has to grapple with four fisheries management regimes: in Queensland and in Western Australia, which before Federation in 1901 were self-governing colonies, in the Netherlands Indies, and in the Commonwealth of Australia. To do so reveals the floating stations triggering significant change, causing laws to be altered and maritime boundaries firmed up or adjusted. Their expansion into Southeast Asia is a textbook case of the application of advanced technologies to old grounds, a key process driving nineteenth-century fishing into new territory and ecological strata.³⁹ They drew labor from ports right across the Asia-Pacific, and their product competed in a volatile world market; a flood of inferior pearl shell from, say, the Red Sea, the production of cheaper Japanese mother-of-pearl buttons, or the emergence of a freshwater mother-of-pearl button industry in the United States could threaten their viability. The financial bases of the mother-of-pearl market meant that pearling was also vulnerable to international shocks and shifts in trade policy, the US McKinley Act of 1890 being only the most extreme example.

Schooner-based floating stations were a product of continuity as well as innovation. It was a mode of production that grew out of shore-based pearling and other earlier maritime activities, such as shelling for lime-burners, table oyster farming, and the gathering of bêche-de-mer (trepang). Like most fisheries toward the end of the nineteenth century,⁴⁰ it was abetted by the restructuring and expansion of coastal shipping, which provided not only a source of well-trained and thoroughly experienced mariners but also crucial logistical support and capital. Internationally, business history has long been regarded as integral to maritime history,⁴¹ but not so much in Australia, where the management of maritime business and its political machinations have been neglected.⁴² The floating-station system was more than a mode of production; it was a business model, operationalized by dynamic maritime entrepreneurs whose personalities, talents, and foibles were fashioned in