AUSTRALIA WILL MAKE ITS OWN. PEARLS

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28080, 22 September 1956, Page 13

AUSTRALIA WILL MAKE ITS OWN. PEARLS

JACK PERCIVAL]

[By

America Expected To Be Rich Market

SYDNEY, September 16. A USTRALIA has begun bidding for a share of the 16-niillion-a-year cultured-pearl industry. The project got under way last week at Augustus Island, about 200 miles north of Broome. Representatives of Australian, Japanese and American companies started bedding-down 40,000 oysters, selected from the ocean floor by divers, to bear pearls which will be marketed in opposition to Japanese pearls principally in America.

The oysters will be “operated” on by experts from Japan, and then, with a bit of luck, the industry will be in the big money. It all began iri Japan in 1946, when Australia was getting little iri the way of reparations from the Japanese. While the British negotiated with General Douglas MacArthur’s Military Government to get back the Hong Kong fire engines in Hirohito’s palace grounds, and Dutch officials were in the Mitsui vaults trying to identify diamonds stolen from the Indies, Australia sent representatives to the pearl farms at Ago, in Japan. The Japanese were instructed by MacArthur’s Scientific and Economic Division to show Australia all the secrets. They were co-operative, and even offered to send experts to Torres Strait and our north-west coast to start subsidiary pearl farms. During the occupation I vipited Ago several times and talked with Kokichi Mikimoto, the fantastically rich old man who had founded the culturedpearl industry and still held it as a monopoly. He told me that he believed even better pearls could be grown in Australian waters. He said: “I expect

my pearls to earn £BO million in Japan in the next five years.” Mikimoto died two years ago at the age of 96. Now joint Australian-American-Japanese interests have brought a specialist vessel from Japan with 15 Japanese, all of whom, excepting a cook and an interpreter-cleric, are technicians. Special permission had to be obtained from the Commonwealth Government to bring the Japanese to The site of the cultured-pearl farm is on the south-east coast of Augustus Island, where the Western Australian

Government has given a lease of waters and land. The Nippo Pearl Company, Tokyo, is supplying about halt the funds plus technicians and the vessel which is carrying live shell from Australian luggers to the culture farm. The Australian company is Pearls Pty., Ltd. Interested in this company are Male and Company, Broome Pearlers; the Otto Gerdau Company, New York, and Brown and Bureau, Ltd., well-known Australian importers and exporters. The profits will be shared by the Australian and Japanese companies. Mr Keith Bureau, chairman and managing-director of Pearls Pty., Ltd., told me: “It amounts to this —the Japanese are providing the know-how. This is a gamble for big stakes. It is planned to sell most of any production in the United States.’’ The oyster shell used for pearl production in Japan is Pinctada martensi; the Australian shell is Pinctada maxima. , , a ' The Japanese produced the first spherical pearl from an Australian shell at boeton (Celebes), in 1928. Later, Australian shells were transported from the Arafura Sea to Palao and Okinawa. In appearance the best Japanese cultured pearls are identical with natural pearls. No difference can be told by touch, colour or exacting chemical analysis. The only difference is that of weight. The specific gravity of cultured pearls is less than that of natural pearls. And only the most accurate set of scales can detect the difference. It takes about five years to train the experts who insert the nucleus in the

ligaments of a pearl oyster. This ‘‘irritation” causes the secretion of a nacreous deposit which forms the cultured pekrl. Mikimoto's Method Mikimoto developed the system whereby the irritant, which is spherical in shape, is covered with a mambrane from the oyster. The nucleus, usually a small globule of mother of pearl, is held oy an instrument resembling a dentist’s pick. It is dipped in a membrane and then embedded inside the oyster’s body. After their “operations” the oysters are lowered into the water In wire baskets suspended from rafts. The life of an oyster producing a cultured pearl is about eight years. Strings of cultured pearls vary in price from £5 to £lOOO. Mikimoto. who declared the largest income in Japan when Macarthur decreed a new income-tax system, had a profitable sideline to his cultured pearls sales. Pearls which did not pass grading tests were crushed ’to a fine powder and sold as a medicine which the Japanese prize, Associated Newspapers Feature Services.