A detailed study of the origins and demise of schooner-based
pearling in Australia. For most of its history, Australian pearling
was a shore-based activity. But from the mid-1880s until the World
War I era, the industry was dominated by highly mobile, heavily
capitalized, schooner-based fleets of pearling luggers, known as
floating stations, that exploited Australia's northern continental
shelf and the nearby waters of the Netherlands Indies. Octopus
Crowd:Maritime History and the Business of Australian Pearling in
Its Schooner Age is the first book-length study of schooner-based
pearling and explores the floating station system and the men who
developed and employed it. Steve Mullins focuses on the Clark
Combination, a syndicate led by James Clark, Australia's most
influential pearler. The combination honed the floating station
system to the point where it was accused of exhausting pearling
grounds, elbowing out small-time operators, strangling the
economies of pearling ports, and bringing the industry to the brink
of disaster. Combination partners were vilified as monopolists-they
were referred to as an ""octopus crowd""-and their schooners were
stigmatized as hell ships and floating sweatshops. Schooner-based
floating stations crossed maritime frontiers with impunity, testing
colonial and national territorial jurisdictions. The Clark
Combination passed through four fisheries management regimes,
triggering significant change and causing governments to alter laws
and extend maritime boundaries. It drew labor from ports across the
Asia-Pacific, and its product competed in a volatile world market.
Octopus Crowd takes all these factors into account to explain
Australian pearling during its schooner age. It argues that the
demise of the floating station system was not caused by resource
depletion, as was often predicted, but by ideology and Australia's
shifting sociopolitical landscape.
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