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| Diving for Pearls | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Katherine Thomson |
| Date premiered | 1991 |
| Place premiered | Australia |
| Original language | English |
Diving for Pearls is an Australian play by Katherine Thomson set against the background of the economic rationalism of the 1980s, in Port Kembla. It became one of the most popular Australian plays of the 1990s. [1]
A pearl is a hard, glistening object produced within the soft tissue of a living shelled mollusk or another animal, such as fossil conulariids. Just like the shell of a mollusk, a pearl is composed of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has deposited in concentric layers. The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other shapes, known as baroque pearls, can occur. The finest quality of natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries. Because of this, pearl has become a metaphor for something rare, fine, admirable and valuable.
Broome, also known as Rubibi by the Yawuru people, is a coastal pearling and tourist town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, 1,681 km (1,045 mi) north of Perth. The town recorded a population of 14,660 in the 2021 census. It is the largest town in the Kimberley region.
Freediving, free-diving, free diving, breath-hold diving, or skin diving is a form of underwater diving that relies on breath-holding until resurfacing rather than the use of breathing apparatus such as scuba gear.
Diving activities are the things people do while diving underwater. People may dive for various reasons, both personal and professional. While a newly qualified recreational diver may dive purely for the experience of diving, most divers have some additional reason for being underwater. Recreational diving is purely for enjoyment and has several specialisations and technical disciplines to provide more scope for varied activities for which specialist training can be offered, such as cave diving, wreck diving, ice diving and deep diving. Several underwater sports are available for exercise and competition.
Thursday Island, colloquially known as TI, or in the Kawrareg dialect, Waiben or Waibene, is an island of the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago of at least 274 small islands in the Torres Strait. TI is located approximately 39 kilometres north of Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, Australia. Thursday Island is also the name of the town in the south and west of the island and also the name of the locality which contains the island within the Shire of Torres. The town of Rose Hill is located on the north-eastern tip of the island.
Ama are Japanese divers famous for collecting pearls, though traditionally their main catch is seafood. The vast majority of ama are women.
Pearl hunting, also known as pearling, is the activity of recovering pearls from wild molluscs, usually oysters or mussels, in the sea or freshwater. Pearl hunting was prevalent in the Persian Gulf region and Japan for thousands of years. On the northern and north-western coast of Western Australia pearl diving began in the 1850s, and started in the Torres Strait Islands in the 1860s, where the term also covers diving for nacre or mother of pearl found in what were known as pearl shells.
Sub Marine Explorer is a submersible built between 1863 and 1866 by Julius H. Kroehl and Ariel Patterson in Brooklyn, New York for the Pacific Pearl Company. It was hand powered and had an interconnected system of a high-pressure air chamber or compartment, a pressurized working chamber for the crew, and water ballast tanks. Problems with decompression sickness and overfishing of the pearl beds led to the abandonment of Sub Marine Explorer in Panama in 1869 despite publicized plans to shift the craft to the pearl beds of Baja California.
Pearl Jam is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1990. The band's lineup consists of founding members Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, and Eddie Vedder, as well as Matt Cameron (drums), who joined in 1998. Keyboardist Boom Gaspar has also been a touring/session member with the band since 2002. Drummers Jack Irons, Dave Krusen, Matt Chamberlain, and Dave Abbruzzese are former members of the band. Pearl Jam outsold many of their contemporaries from the early 1990s, and are considered one of the most influential bands of the decade, being dubbed as "the most popular American rock and roll band of the '90s".
Ron Josiah Taylor, AM was a prominent Australian shark expert, as is his widow, Valerie Taylor. They were credited with being pioneers in several areas, including being the first people to film great white sharks without the protection of a cage. Their expertise has been called upon for films such as Jaws, Orca and Sky Pirates.
In aviation and underwater diving, alternobaric vertigo is dizziness resulting from unequal pressures being exerted between the ears due to one Eustachian tube being less patent than the other.
SS President Coolidge was an American luxury ocean liner that was completed in 1931. She was operated by Dollar Steamship Lines until 1938, and then by American President Lines until 1941. She served as a troopship from December 1941 until October 1942, when she was sunk by mines in Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides at the Espiritu Santo Naval Base, part of current-day Vanuatu. President Coolidge had a sister ship, SS President Hoover, completed in 1930 and lost when she ran aground in a typhoon in 1937.
Pearling in Western Australia includes the harvesting and farming of both pearls and pearl shells along the north-western coast of Western Australia.
Paspaley, officially the Paspaley Pearling Company, a private company, is Australia's largest and oldest pearling company; that cultivates, farms, harvests, wholesales and retails South Sea pearls for the purposes of luxury jewellery supply and manufacture. Paspaley claims that it is a strong advocate of environmental responsibility within the pearling industry.
William Hugh Edwards is a Western Australian former journalist, author and marine photographer who has written numerous books on maritime, local and natural history and diving.
A Submarine Escape Training Tower is a facility used for training submariners in methods of emergency escape from a disabled submarine underwater. It is a deep tank filled with water with at least one underwater entrance at depth simulating an airlock in a submarine. Since the 1930s, towers have been built for use by the Royal Navy, US Navy, Royal Australian Navy and in several other countries.
Yul Vazquez is a Cuban-American actor and musician. He has appeared in Runaway Bride (1999), Bad Boys II (2003), War of the Worlds (2005), American Gangster (2007), The A-Team (2010), Captain Phillips (2013), The Infiltrator (2016), Midnight, Texas (2017–2018), Russian Doll (2019), and Severance (2022). Vazquez used to be the lead guitarist for melodic rock bands Urgent and Diving for Pearls.
King of the Coral Sea is a 1954 film starring Chips Rafferty and Charles Tingwell, directed by Lee Robinson and shot on location in Thursday Island. It was one of the most commercially successful Australian films of the 1950s and was Rod Taylor's film debut.
Brian Andrew Hills, born 19 March 1934 in Cardiff, Wales, died 13 January 2006 in Brisbane, Queensland, was a physiologist who worked on decompression theory.
Louis Marie-Auguste Boutan was a French biologist and photographer. He was a pioneer in the field of underwater photography.
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