42 Australian GeographicBut Ian and Rose were in the process of selling their busi-
ness. “I wrote back and said that I might be an interested party...
I got a phone call almost instantly,” James says. They formed a
new umbrella company, Pearls of Australia, and the Crisps
became shareholders. Their years of hard work had paid off.
W hen it ca me to the busi ness of pea rls a nd m a rket i ng, Ja mes
had ideas. During the economic slowdown in WA, he success-
fully introduced tourism to his Kimberley operations, and he
set about employing the same tactic to the east coast operations.I
’M EXCITED TO be among a throng of tourists boarding a
boat at Woy Woy Wharf, on Brisbane Water. Sydney rock
oyster farmer Steve Williamson is at the helm, operating the
tour on behalf of Broken Bay Pearls. He motors our catamaran
to the middle of the estuary and slows. We stare at a line of
black buoys while he talks about the pearling process. We are
mostly uninspired. He motors away and kills the throttle again, this
time close to the little shed where Rose and Celeste had been
seeding oysters. Like a magician, he pulls out a tray spread with
surgical instruments. Now he has our attention.
From a sludge-covered bag, he pulls out a tightly closed
oyster. Waving a knife, he explains how Broken Bay Pearls
grows tens of thousands of oysters each year, but only 30 per
cent yield a pearl, and fewer still a good one. He levers the
oyster’s shells apart and 40 tourists erupt from their seats, hardly
believing their eyes. There, nestled among the oyster’s squishy
organs, is a jewel – rare and beautiful as only nature can create.
Broken Bay Pea rls is the on ly pea rl fa r m operat ing in NSW,
and it produces some of the best cultured akoya pearls in theworld. In 2017 German PhD student Laura Otter, who is based
at Macquarie University, in Sydney, visited the Brisbane Water
farm with her supervisor. They noticed that the pearls featured
an unusual colour palette. “We were sitting there collecting the
shells and thinking, ‘Well, this is weird; these pearls look super
special,’” Laura says. Upon opening some of the oysters, she
noted that they occurred in a wide variety of colours, ranging
from classic white and silver to more unconventional colours
such as yellow, orange, pink and blue. “I got this golden yellow
pearl and it was just amazing to see because the akoya pearl
usually is white...not yellow or golden, or even blue, which
these were,” she says.
To confirm that these pearls differed from those grown
elsewhere, Laura used a high-powered Raman spectrometer to
distinguish the components of the nacre. No-one expected the
result: the pearls were so unusual that Laura’s findings were
disputed when she submitted her article to the scientific com-
munity for peer review. “I actually had to convince the review-
ers that these are really the natural colour palettes available and
that they’re not enhanced afterwards,” Laura says. “No-one had
ever seen this before.”Tourists are surprised to see
an oyster, plucked from waters
off the seemingly ordinary NSW
Central Coast district of Woy Woy,
opened before their eyes
by James Brown to reveal a
fresh new pearl.There, nestled among the oyster’s
squishy organs, is a jewel – rare and
beautiful as only nature can create.