Why Britain rebuffed Australia’s effort to recruit Indian labour for its pearl fishing industry

In 2024, it’s hard to imagine that Broome in Western Australia, with a population of under 15,000, was a major boomtown a century ago. Located over 2,000 kilometres north of Perth, it is now mainly a place for tourists to take in some spectacular vistas, but in the 1920s, it was one of the world’s biggest pearl fishing centres.

“At the outbreak of the [First World] War, there were about 100 luggers at Broome,” the Daily Examiner, a newspaper published in Grafton, New South Wales, reported in January 1918. “They were manned mostly by young men in the prime of life, who when the call to arms came, beached their boats and practically enlisted to the man.”

What this report failed to mention was that British-origin Australians mainly took up white collar jobs in the pearling industry, while the dangerous work such as diving was left to Japanese labourers, who toiled under near-inhuman conditions.

Towards the end of the 1910s, while Australia was in the grip of the racist “Yellow Peril” hysteria, these Japanese became a favoured target. Xenophobic media reports began to emerge of illegal Japanese immigrants having made their way into the industry. Although Japan’s Foreign Office denied these reports, clarifying that Japanese citizens were courted...

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