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Australian South Sea Pearls
By Deborah A. Yonick
It is an epic saga worthy of the silver screen: An adventure that takes us from the rust red outback of Australia to the plush red carpet of the Academy Awards. Its cast of characters runs the gamut from daring divers combing shark-infested waters to celebrated women shopping the finest jewelry stores on Fifth Avenue, both searching for the most magnificent pearls in the world.
The journey begins on the opposite end of the earth where the sun shimmers on turquoise waters and the rising moon casts a stairway of light to the horizon. The terrain is rocky and speckled with broccoli stalk trees and bouncing kangaroos. The beaches are vast and empty with crocodiles lurking the shoreline. And, the sky is endless. Here, in remote water farms in the tropical seas of Western Australia giant silver-lipped oysters, known as Pinctada Maxima, are cultivated to grow the world's largest most lustrous pearls.
No longer solely a game of chance that a grain of sand lodged into a wild oyster and hopefully produces a prismatic calcium crystal-coated pearl, skilled technicians implant a round mother-of-pearl bead in live shells collected from the sea floor to help activate this natural process. Just as they did 100 years ago, divers gather by hand these young shells for cultivation. Operating from fishing vessels along the coastline of Eighty Mile Beach, southwest of Broome, divers work during neap (low) tides from April through June.
Once deemed a hazardous profession, today's shell divers wear wet suits and breathe from surface-air compressors and modern regulators: Unlike the early days of copper helmet and canvas suit diving when the effects of the deep water pressure were not understood and death tolls were high. However, despite better equipage and safety regulations, casualties still occur from equipment failure, the bends and shark attacks.
Like trolling fish bait, divers are towed with the water current on the end of a rope trailing behind a weight kept just above the sea floor. They dive as deep as 100 feet and perform up to 10 tows a day, each about 40 to 60 minutes long. Experienced divers collect between 250 to 300 shells a day over an eight to 10 day period for as many as seven to eight neaps a season. To preserve and maintain a consistent supply of wild stock, the government controls the number of shells collected per company. About 600,000 oysters are taken annually by some 16 pearl producers, several of which also grow oysters for cultivation in hatcheries.
Collected shells are cleaned and placed into nets that are kept at underwater storage sites adjacent to the fishing grounds until they are transported to nearby operation vessels a month or two later.
The seeding operation is simple in principle but requires considerable skill on the part of the technician, who lives aboard for up to 10 days at a time between June and September. If you can imagine a surgeon performing 500 minor operations a day, each requiring the precision, cleanliness and efficiency you'd expect in a hospital operating room, and all aboard a boat rolling in the swell, you have some idea of the concentration required of these technicians.
Shells are opened with special pliers and a small wooden wedge is inserted between its valves to keep it ajar until the technician is ready to insert both a round shell bead and a piece of mantle tissue. The bead is normally made from a Mississippi River freshwater mussel.
Once seeded the shells are soon transported to farms primarily located off the northwest coast of Kuri Bay and the tip of Cape York. Some sites have substantial crew quarters ashore, while others provide for staff in prefabricated dwellings on pontoons in the middle of nowhere and accessible only by seaplane. Although the pristine environment is protected by strict government regulations, acts of Mother Nature, like cyclones, could reek havoc on a pearl farm overnight. Poaching is sometimes a problem as well.
It takes about two years for the oyster to secrete its mother-of-pearl nacre around the implanted bead. During that time shells are constantly cleaned of marine foul and monitored to aid in their survival and pearl-production success. In fact, six months after seeding, shells are X-rayed to check for the presence of a pearl. It is unlikely that even a highly skilled technician would have more than a 70% success rate. Many oysters will either reject the implant or die. Although improved farming techniques help to ensure that better quality pearls prevail, it is virtually impossible to guarantee the outcome.
After two years, shells containing pearls are brought to harvesting vessels where technicians carefully remove the hidden treasures and decide, based on their quality, whether to re-operate. Young wild oysters are likely to produce three pearls within seven years. Re-operated shells are returned to the farms where they are treated the same way that they were the first time around.
Shells not worthy of a second operation are set aside for the production of mabes, or half-pearls, and returned to the water for about a year.
Shells not suitable for re-seeding or mabe production are broken apart to be sold for mother-of-pearl products and the oyster meat dried for the Asian market. Pearls are then counted and weighed before traveling to the company's operational headquarters for sorting and commercial grading. There they are polished in a tumbler first filled with table salt then with bamboo chips. Australian pearls are not bleached, colored, or processed.
Harvested pearls range in size from 10mm to 20mm (the diameter of a quarter), with 11mm to 15mm the average. Less than 5% are likely to be the perfectly round ones most sought after for strands. In fact, it may take several years to match enough round pearls to form a perfect necklace. The bulk of the harvest consists of off round, button, drop, oval, and the irregular shaped baroque. Australian pearls display subtle rainbow hues in body colors from white to silver-pink to gold.
Twenty times rarer than diamonds, Australian cultured pearls are considered to be the Queen of Pearls not just for their thick lustrous nacre but also because they are produced in much smaller numbers and at greater expense than other pearl types.
As a testimony to their rarity, magnificent South Sea cultured pearls have commanded high prices at auction. Sotheby's New York set the world record in October 1992 when it sold a graduated single strand of 23 white South Sea cultured pearls, in sizes from 16mm-20mm, for $2.3 million. Revered by the finest jewelers the world over and even today's leading fashion designers, including of Karl Largerfeld for Chanel, Australian pearls have adorned the skin of such celebrated women as Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts, Katherine Zeta Jones, Isabella Rossellini and Madonna.
It's really not hard to believe that such an amazing paradise would produce the world's most treasured pearls. Although best known for its kangaroos, crocodiles, koala bears, shrimp on the barbie, and Fosters beer, Australia's most prized possession is the jewel of the South Seas!
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Australian South Sea Pearls