Asians were once the majority populations in Northern Australian towns like Broome and Darwin, as Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers show in their award-winning book The Pearl Frontier. Traces of this remain today in the multiracial populations of these towns and in the rich histories of families formed from the late nineteenth century onwards across the racial divide of Asians and Aborigines. In this book, the two historians analyse Australia’s importation of workers from Indonesia (known until 1949 as the Dutch East Indies). Over a period of a hundred years, from the 1870s to the 1970s, Indonesians were employed as indentured labourers in the northern Australian pearling industry. Thursday Island, Broome and Darwin were the centres of this industry, service hubs for the trade and business activities occurring in the maritime zones to their north. In 1925 as many as one in four people living in Broome (population 2,000) was Indonesian. The story of the ‘pearl frontier’ is one of labour mobility, of the undermining of colonial boundaries, usually by necessity due to shortages of labour and employment, and of the construction of interracial communities in Northern Australia (and to a lesser extent, in Eastern Indonesia), where the pearling operations were located. The first ‘commercial event’ in the industry occurred in 1861 in the Broome-Roebuck Bay area, when explorer Francis Gregory collected 300 pounds sterling worth of pearl shells. This elicited interest in the large-scale collection of pearl shells, valuable for their lining of mother of pearl (nacre), which was used for buttons and other decoration. This led to ‘a virtual slave trade in Aboriginal labour’ (p. 31). The pearl masters demanded that Aboriginal men, with no protective clothing or breathing apparatus, dive down repeatedly for pearl shells. If they did not pick up any shells on a dive, then they were required to bring back handfuls of sand to show that they had at least been to the bottom of the ocean. The regulation of Aboriginal labour in Western Australia and the expansion of the industry from the 1870s onwards led to the search for new cheap labour. Asian men then took up the worst and most dangerous

中文翻译：

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珍珠渔民

朱莉亚·马丁内斯（Julia Martinez）和阿德里安·维克斯（Adrian Vickers）在屡获殊荣的《珍珠边境》一书中指出，亚洲人曾经是布鲁姆和达尔文等北澳大利亚城镇的主要人口。这些痕迹今天仍然存在于这些城镇的多种族人口中，以及从19世纪后期开始跨越亚洲人和原住民种族鸿沟形成的丰富家庭历史中。在这本书中，两位历史学家分析了澳大利亚从印度尼西亚的工人进口（直到1949年以前被称为荷兰东印度群岛）。从1870年代到1970年代的一百多年中，印度尼西亚人在北澳大利亚的珍珠业中被雇用为契约劳工。星期四岛，布鲁姆和达尔文是该产业的中心，是北部海域发生的贸易和商业活动的服务枢纽。1925年，居住在布鲁姆的四分之一人口（2,000人口）是印度尼西亚人。“珍珠疆界”的故事之一是劳动力流动，殖民地边界的破坏（通常是由于劳动力和就业的短缺导致的必要性）以及北澳大利亚州（在较小程度上，在澳大利亚，印度尼西亚东部），在那里进行了珍珠开采业务。该行业中的第一个“商业事件”发生在1861年的布鲁姆-罗巴克湾地区，当时探险家弗朗西斯·格雷戈里（Francis Gregory）收集了价值300英镑的珍珠贝壳。这引起了人们对大规模收集珍珠贝壳的兴趣，这些珍珠贝壳对其珍珠母（珍珠层）的衬里很有价值，这些珍珠被用于纽扣和其他装饰。这导致了“原住民劳动力的虚拟奴隶贸易”（第31页）。珍珠大师要求没有防护服或呼吸器的原住民反复潜入珍珠壳。如果他们在潜水中没有捡到任何贝壳，那么他们将被带回少量沙子以表明他们至少已经到了海底。从1870年代开始，西澳大利亚州对原住民劳工的管制以及该行业的发展导致人们寻找新的廉价劳动力。然后，亚洲男人承担了最严重和最危险的 从1870年代开始，西澳大利亚州对原住民劳工的管制以及该行业的发展导致人们寻找新的廉价劳动力。然后，亚洲男人承担了最严重和最危险的 从1870年代开始，西澳大利亚州对原住民劳工的管制以及该行业的发展导致人们寻找新的廉价劳动力。然后，亚洲男人承担了最严重和最危险的