The True Story of a Fatal Experiment.

In 1912 Broome was as much Asian as Australian, filled with the smell of unfamiliar spices and a babel of competing languages. The town thrived on the hugely profitable, and extremely dangerous pearl shell industry, where Asian labour was cheap to hire, and easy to replace. It was a frontier town, where racial tensions simmered uneasily between whites, Asians and Aborigines; age-long inhabitants of the land around Broome who had been forced to skin-dive for shells, but who were now displaced and discarded . . .

This is a gripping work of narrative history that echoes with many of the same fears, prejudices and hopes as society today.

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