Broome Guide: Pearl Hamaguchi
Born in Chinatown in 1940, Pearl Hamaguchi remembers Broome in the days of pearling masters and divers, when the luggers would line up near Streeter’s Jetty and the town was multicultural before the word was even coined.
“I think my generation had the best of the romantic glamour and history of Broome,” Pearl says. “We got the last of the pearling in its boom time.”
That’s not to say that Pearl is overly romantic about the past — “we were tough because we had it tough,” she says. She recalls her mother, a member of the Stolen Generation who came to Broome as a servant, telling her about coming back to town in 1946 after World War II.
“The Broome she knew no longer existed,” says Pearl, who also has Scottish and Chinese heritage. “She had to start again from scratch.”
She recalls going to Sun Pictures once a week, when the tide would come in and flood the seating area during the film. In those days, Pearl worked as a shop assistant at Streeter & Male, which she says was one of two main shops in town and sold “everything”.
It was while working in the shop that Pearl met her husband, the late Hiroshi Hamaguchi, a Japanese pearl diver. The pair married in 1960.
“I think he was an adventurer, because he’d come from Wakayama Prefecture, south of Osaka, and there were old men that were here pre-war and you know with old men’s tales ... they’d paint the town of their youth as paved with gold. They made it (sound) exciting.”
Hiroshi later ran his own pearl farm and is said to have been the first non-Caucasian to obtain a pearling licence in his own right. One of the couple’s sons, Craig, still works with pearls, as a jeweller with his own business — Hamaguchi Designs.
By Pearl’s reckoning, only “little remnants” of old Broome still remain but she always takes visitors to Town Beach, where she swam as a child.
