THE LUSTRE OF PEARLS

The current Bangarra Dance work, called Illume, is a collaboration between choreography Frances Rings and pearl carver and visual artist Darrel Sibosado. It's a powerful impressive work which both tells the story of the Bard people of the Dampier Peninsular in the north west of WA, their creation stories, their connection to country but also the impact of colonisation and the Lombania Mission. To start with, I wasn't sure about the piece but as each stage occured, the interconnection between body and light was extraodinary and it's an utterly absorbing piece of art. 

Mother-of-pearl is at the heart of Bard spiritual life and as I watched I reflected on the carved mother-of-pearl shell that I should have been brave enough to buy in Broome a few years back. 

These days, Broome, this Western Australian town which is beloved of many, seems to me to be a slightly weird combination between a Disney town, a resort village and a retirement get away for people from the cold south. I’m sure that’s not a fair comment from the perspective of the people who have lived there for years but it reminded me, strangely, of some European towns such as Dubrovnik where the history is fascinating but the reality is tourism.

Although the story of Broome with its pearling industry and its multiracial community is uniquely interesting and although many of the old buildings like the famous Sun Picture Theatre still exist, “Chinatown” as it is called is full of tourists with not many locals to be seen. There’s a whole street of pearl shops but only a couple of them are actually selling cultured pearls grown in the Kimberley region. However, there were two pearl related elements that appealed to me: shells carved and/or painted by both the indigenous people and the luggers who worked on the pearling ships. 

There’s a wonderful song written by Irish-Australian folk singer Enda Kenny called Master’s Buttons about the pearling masters, the men who owned the luggers, in Broome:

See the Master Pearler as he strolls out in the night

The lantern in the window isn’t shining half as bright

As the coat that he is wearing or the smile upon his face

They say that he’s richest man that lives around this place

With his fancy sovereign buttons when the trade is going well

Shillings when the price is going down

But when the Master’s buttons are fashioned out of shell

You know the arse has fallen out of town.