Jap Know-How

Dinkum Aussie Pearls—But Jap Know-How

Australia has finally hit the

jack-pot in producing cultured

pearls but it took the intro

duction of Japanese know-how

to do the trick.

ONE of Australia’s most valued war prizes from Japan was the recipe for making pearls which were genuine and indistinguishable from pearls found in nature. The whole business was written there on paper, down to the finest detail—or was it?

What was available was rushed back to Australia and the CSIRO Fisheries Division set up an experi mental station at Thursday Island in 1948. Buckets of pearls were ex pected by some people though probably not by the CSIRO boys— to come rolling in very soon there after.

Well they did produce at least three pearls, and there were some others that seemed to be coming on, but the situation did not quite re semble that at Ago Bay, Japan, when in 1956 Mr. Keith Bureau, of the commercial firm of Brown & Bureau, plus other Australian and American interests, obtained per mission to invite in some Japanese experts to have a go at it.

The man who showed them how was Tokuichi Kuribayashi, president of the Nippo Pearl Co. of Tokyo one of the several Japanese organ isations which have developed from the original pearl culture industry established by the late Kokichi Mikimoto.

Fabulous Size

Now it appears that pearls of fabulous size are beginning to roll from the oysters planted by Pearls Proprietary Ltd. at Kuri Bay— named after Mr. Kuribayashi—in Australia’s North-West.

A string of the Kuri Bay pearls is reported to have recently been sold in New York for $lOO,OOO.

Japan had the know-how, but apparently Western Australian coastal waters had the chemical constituents and the temperature that Japan has not g9t. The com bination has resulted, if reports are correct, in pearls exceeding Japans bB About 40 Japanese are employed in inserting the tiny beads—cut from imported Mississippi River mussel shells—into the flesh of the selected Australian oysters, whose

are opened by means of an ihetic. i than two years after going production the company >ted its first crop of pearls in 1958. Some 30 per cent, of the ) treated oysters had then :ed commercial pearls, some as 0.9 inch in diameter and ues ranging up to $1,700 for gle gem. The Japanese in ; take half the profits, mese culture-pearl firms have > suffered great losses through ms and through occasional in ns of some microscopic sea ’his has lead to experiments e production of fresh-water re was an announcement from apanese Government in Oc that such pearls of up to half :h in diameter have now been zed at the Hakone fishery ex mtal station in western Japan.

NZ Experiments

Mew Zealand early this year ;e was granted to Mr. E J. rdson, of Rongotai, Welling to set up an experimental i on a small island in Island learby, to explore the pos / of producing pearls from The paua—known as abalone lerica—is the shell-fish pro j the translucent bluish shell n New Zealand for the manu e of jewellery and inlay work.

Richardson is working in con □n with Japanese advisers who [ready producing pearls from ame mollusc in Japan.