30days30years

June – Broome

Lets go build ourselves some biceps with a lil brawn action.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labour by taking up another ~ Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard.

The Plan: To spend a month pearl farming off the coast of Broome, Western Australia. Working as part of the fleet to clean spat (baby pearl shells) and putting them into the ocean to be harvested.

I spend much of my life in front of some kind of plasma device. From the minute I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, I am pretty much glued to a TV or a computer connecting with the world. But as my eyesight can attest, the time has come to find a balance between checking Facebook or Twitter at 4am just in case someone has messaged and actually getting out there and interacting with the real world, in person. I often wonder how someone can spend an entire day digging holes or putting tiles on a roof. How do they cope not knowing exactly what’s going on in the world the second that it happens? I guess the benefit of a manual labour job is that your time is your own. There are no distractions. That’s why the thought of coming home completely exhausted physically, instead of mentally, at the end of a hard day’s work has huge appeal. I might live to regret it after slogging it out on a fishing trawler for 30 days, but what the heck, if I come off the boat with bigger guns (biceps) than when I started, that’s time well spent, right?

 

Fast Facts:

-Aquaculture is Australia’s fastest growing primary industry.

-Cultured South Sea pearls are produced with one of the largest pearl-bearing oysters the Pinctada Maxima.

-Since the mid 1950s the industry has focused on the production of cultured pearls.

-The first stage of culturing pearls requires fishing for wildstock pearl oysters, which are then used to manufacture cultured pearls through an aquaculture process.

-South Sea Pearls are prized for their large size, high lustre and colors ranging from white and cream, to silver, pink, lavender and gold

-Nearly 60 per cent of the world’s South-Sea cultured pearls are from the Broome region.