ëWith the new moon come the offshore ocean winds that will bring rains to the desert later in the year. A sharing of gifts of the land and the sea. This has been the way for millenia.í
Patrick Dodson, Yawuru man, Vincent Lingari Memorial Lecture, Darwin, 1999.
Indigenous people exploited the marine resources of the Western Australian coast for thousands of years. Asian fishermen also visited northern Australia and sometimes exchanged goods with Aboriginal groups.
Shipwrecks and onshore debris are proof that many European seafarers reached the west coast before colonisation. Later, colonists fished the seas and used coastal shipping for transport and communications. In the 20th century, large fisheries developed to serve domestic and export markets.
Maureen Angus waiting for the tide to recede at stone-wall fish trap, known as a mayoorr, at Nangoona (Admiral Bay), in the West Kimberley, 1996.
Photographer Moya Smith.
Satellite the Western Australian coast at Shark Bay.
Courtesy of the Department of Land Administration.
The 12,500km‚long west coast fringes tropical and temperate seas. Due to the influence of the Leeuwin Current, this coast supports a stunning diversity of marine species. Shark Bay is renowned for the rich fish and mammal species that live in its waters.
Eight species of rock lobster are found along the Western Australian coast. Yet almost the entire catch is of the western rock lobster, Panulirus cygnus, caught between Augusta and Shark Bay. Rock lobsters, also known as crayfish and spiny lobsters, are exported to North America and south-east Asia.
Migrant men working on the deck of a lobster fishing boat, 1950s.
Courtesy of Fisheries WA.
Courtesy of The West Australian.
The Blessing of the Fleet was introduced at Fremantle by Italian migrant fishers in 1948. By the early 20th century, people from Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, Austria, Germany, Japan and Greece were working in the Stateís fishing industry.
Giant deepwater crab, Pseudocarcinus gigas
WAM collection, donated by Mulataga Aquaculture
The giant deepwater crab is the largest crab in Australia and is among the largest in the world.
Aboriginal, Malay, Japanese and Filipino divers searched for pearl shell off the northern coast from the 1860s.
Fifty years later, Broome was a world centre of the mother-of-pearl industry, with 400 luggers and more than 3,500 workers. However, the industry collapsed when plastics replaced pearl shell in the making of buttons in the 1930s.
The State Government lifted its ban on pearl cultivation in 1949 and a new industry was born. Today, the Broome coast produces silver-white South Sea pearls worth more than $200 million a year, making it Australiaís most valuable aquaculture industry.
E. Kino, chief diver of Captain Gregory's fleet,
Broome, 1938.
Battye Library, 816B/B5650.
CH919 Donated by Mr A.S. Male & Co.
Image of Silver-lip or golden pearlshell, Pinctada maxima
This is the most popular pearl-shell species for culturing pearls because of its large size and fine mother-of-pearl.
This pearlshell replica of the badge of the Australian Commonwealth Military Forces was made during World War I in Broome.
CH839 Donated by Mrs A. Richards
Whales are increasing in numbers along the Western Australian coast after being hunted almost to extinction. Ships from the United States, Britain and Europe hunted whales on this coast before European colonisation. By 1850, stocks of southern right whales, Eubalaena australis, were depleted and whalers moved elsewhere.
Two other species were hunted by the 1960s - sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus, off the continental shelf 30km from Albany, and humpbacks, Megaptera novaeangliae, between feeding grounds in Antarctica and north-west breeding grounds. Humpback whaling was uneconomic by 1963 and sperm whaling at Albany ceased in 1978.
Lining up a whale, c.1950s.
Battye Library, 3363B/18
Scrimshaw is the name given to the wide variety of objects made or decorated by sailors and whalers, who were at sea for long periods. Ivory from teeth and tusks, baleen (whalebone) and skeletal bone were all engraved and decorated. Most scrimshaw engravings were done with a very fine sharp blade and the design enhanced by rubbing in pigment. The lower jawbone of a sperm whale was used for engraving this three-masted whaling ship. The scrimshaw was acquired by the donorís father between 1900 and 1910.
CH78.139 Donated by Mr G.T. Pretyman