Indentured Indigenous and Asian workers were forced by white bosses to dive in deadly conditions for decades. Now a dance troupe – including one former diver – hopes to tell the stories of those lost
In a park in Broome, a pregnant Indigenous woman emerges from the water offering up a pearl shell.
At three metres high, the Women of Pearling monument overlooking Western Australia’s Roebuck Bay acknowledges the exploitation of Indigenous women during Australia’s blackbirding era, when they were kidnapped and coerced into free diving for white-owned pearl luggers along the north-west coastline.
