PEARL SHELL CONNECTS OUR PEOPLE TO THE LAND AND SEA
Terry is the fourth generation of his family to live and work at Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm. His great grandfather, James Hunter (pictured above) was a diver and skipper for founder Dean Brown.
As a Bardi man, Terry’s ancestral connection to this country goes much deeper and dates back more than 40,000 years. The Bardi (land) and Jawi (island) people of the Dampier Peninsula retain a strong relationship with their land and sea, encompassing an in-depth cultural knowledge of bush food, medicine plants and traditional hunting and fishing practices.
For the Bardi and Jawi people, pearl shell holds a special connection to the land and the sea. Remnants of pearl shells from this part of Australia have been found in distant regions like western Queensland and coastal South Australia, and is known to have been traded from tribe to tribe for ochre, spearheads and boomerangs for at least 22,000 years, making it one of the earliest forms of currency.
BROOME’S PEARLING HISTORY
Terry tells the complete story of Broome’s pearling past through his family history and their connection to the pearling industry.
Terry is also a descendent of Harry Hunter, one of the most notorious and brutal blackbirders or slavers from the region’s early pearling days. Although not officially legal in Australia, slave traders known as blackbirders would abduct Aboriginal people from their country at gunpoint and march them, often in neck chains, to work as pearl divers in Broome in the mid 1800s, many were forced to dive with no breathing equipment or goggles.