Japanese Will Produce Australian

The Mikimoto Recipe

Pearls For International Company

Without fuss and with no advance publicity, a joint Australian- Japanese-Amencan venture has gone into operation in North Australia and will produce culture pearls, primarly for export. A party of 15 Japanese, mostly technicians, is already on the job. P y

Surprisingly, no howls of outrage have yet come from the Australian groups which usually give tongue on these occasions.

The company, called Pearls Pty.

Ltd., has been formed by Broome pearlers, Male and Co.; Brown and Bureau Ltd., well-known Australian firm of importers with HQ in Melbourne; Otto Gerdau Co., of New York, buyers of Torres Strait pearl-shell: and Nippo Pearl Co.

Ltd., of Tokio. With this inter national commercial talent, the company is scarcely likely to fail in its enterprise.

The pearl farm is on Augustus Island, 200 miles NE of Broome —the West Australian Government has granted a lease of certain waters and the land.

The methods used in producing the pearls will be those of the late Kokochi Mikimoto, the Japanese pedlar of noodles who after about 30 years’ effort discovered, in 1913, how to make oysters grow pearls at will. He died a millionaire a couple of years ago, aged 96.

Nuclei up to one tenth of an inch in diameter are inserted in selected pearl oysters along with a graft of mantle tissue. Nacre secreted by the “mother” oyster builds up around the nucleus and produces the pearl. A Japanese “specialist ship” Otama Maru will collect live shell from Australian luggers and transport it to the farm at Augustus Island.

This is not the first time that culture pearls have been produced from Australian oysters. Before the war the Japs transported shells from the Arafura Sea to the Caroline Islands and Okinawa and successfully produced pearls from them.

Csiro Will Show You How

After the Pacific War, Australia obtained Mr. Mikimoto’s secret — apparently as part of war repara tions and the CSIRO was entrusted with the task of seeing if anything could be done with it.

In Sydney on August 1, Dr.

George Humphrey, of the CSIRO’s Fisheries and Oceanography Division at Cronulla, NSW, admitted that they had carried out successful experiments at Thursday Island, following the Mikimoto method.

“We have produced pearls experi

mentally,” he said.

While not expansive on the subject of culture-pearls, or the CSIRO’s part in producing them, the Doctor promised that if anyone wants to know how to make a culture pearl, they can go along to the CSIRO and the Organisation will show them how.

Which seems a very fair offer.