The pearl divers

When I was a kid here in Brisbane, I used to visit the "Ekka" - our nickname for the Royal National Association Exhibition. The Ekka was an annual festival that showed rural Australia to city folk. In its early years, it was all about farm produce, livestock and ring events like showjumping and woodchopping, but over time creeping commercialism provided show bags, Tasmanian potato chips and Sideshow Alley.

Sideshow Alley is an amalgam of gaudy rides, gross fast food (giant fairy floss and Dagwood Dogs to name a couple) and tent shows featuring the likes of the Bearded Lady and Jimmy Sharman's boxing troupe. One tent show that bobbed up every year was the Cultured Pearl Exhibition, where for a few bob, you could see actual Japanese women setting cultured pearls into jewellery.

Years later, I visited an area in Japan where they demonstrated the old methods of diving for pearls and the modern methods of making jewellery. Traditionally, it was females who did the diving, wearing a very practical and modest full-length white suit and goggles. The used a floating wooden tub which they towed around behind them to hold the recovered mussels they brought up from below the surface, only to then dive back underwater to search for more (above, top).

The mussels were then brought ashore to be shucked and cleaned, and examined for pearls, which were sorted and graded for quality (above right). This woman was even wearing the same uniform as I used to see at the Ekka as a kid.

TFF