WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

The shell was gathered by 'dry shelling' or 'reefing' at low tides. In the past, the double
log raft was used to visit offshore reefs to collect shell. Today Aboriginal people
source their shell from pearl farm operators with whom they have an arrangement, or
still go out on the reefs to harvest them.
Pearl shell has a variety of uses ranging from the decorative to the secret, including
personal adornment, rain making, the denoting of status, initiation, and in magic and
sorcery (Akerman and Stanton 1994). It is a key component in the traditional systems
of justice of Kimberley people, it figures in their religious narratives of the Dreaming,
it is depicted in Kimberley rock art, and it is a component of the regalia used in
traditional performances of song and dance (Doohan and Bornman 2009).
Throughout the Kimberley, men and women use small blades, discs and crescents of
pearl shell for personal adornment. The Bardi use whole shell as 'phallocrypts' (pubic
covers) in ceremonial dance and the Nyikina suspend them from a frame to attract
rain. The Bardi and Nyul Nyul use plain and engraved shells as emblems for
initiation, to signify status, in ceremony and law. The Worrorra use it in law and for
ornamentation, and the Wunambal use fragments for ornamentation and in men's
ritual performance, law and justice (McCarthy 1939). The Forrest River people use
engraved fragments in medicine and sorcery (McCarthy 1939). While pearl shell
objects may be used in a public or profane domain where women and the uninitiated
can see and handle them, there are other uses of these shells that are closed and may
only be discussed by initiated men. The pearl shell may move from the profane world
into the sphere of the secret-sacred and then be returned to the secular arena at the
conclusion of ceremonies (Akerman et al. 2010).
McCarthy identified seven trade trunk routes related to the 'barter, exchange and
distributions of boomerangs, ochre, pitjuri, pearl and baler shells' (McCarthy 1939,
104). Of all these routes, the Kimberley pearl shell and Cape York baler shell were
the most extensive: 'The distribution of pearl and baler phallocrypts and ornaments
forms the most remarkable example of distant trading relationships in Australia'
(McCarthy 1939, 92).
Within the Kimberley, pearl shell is part of a regional exchange system known as
wurnan to Worrorra, Wunambal, Gaambera, Ngarinyin and Kwini language groups
[also known as anngarr or rubarn to the Bardi-Jawi (Bagshaw 1999) and yinyili to
the Yawuru and Karajarri (Akerman et al. 2010)]. This exchange network,
documented in the earliest ethnographic accounts, continues to be of major
significance to Kimberley Aboriginal people today as part of their economic and ritual
life (Doohan and Bornman 2009).
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'All us Kimberley Aborigines are connected through the wurnan. This is how we trade
one thing or another right across the Kimberley and down into the desert. All sorts of
things, not just secret thing, but meat and sugar-bag, clothes and motorcars and money
too…We send back jaguli, pearl shell. Other people might ask me to bring white
ochre from my country for painting a background…'(quote from Paddy Neowarra
cited in Redmond 2001, 187).
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