Redbill: From Pearls to Peace - The Life and Times of a Remarkable Lugger

By Kate Lance, Fremantle: FACP, 2004, 399 pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Christine Choo in the July 2006 issue.

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The romance of pearls and the image of the balmy tropics belie the sheer drudgery and danger of the pearling industry and life on a pearling lugger. The pearling industry, its history, exotic locations and colourful characters have been the subject of an almost endless stream of publications, scholarly volumes, fiction and coffee-table glossies. Redbill at first looks like it might be one such, but not long into this book, I found it to be exceptionally accessible, well researched and written, deserving the 2005 Western Australia Premier's Book Award. Kate Lance has obviously fallen in love with a grand old lady of a pearling lugger, built and commissioned by Ancell Gregory, Master Pearler of Broome, in 1903 and named after the sooty oystercatcher. This is Lance's biography of Redbill.

The book traces the life of Redbill from her birth as a pearling lugger though many metamorphoses to her final and dramatic return home at Gantheume Point, Broome in 2000. But this is not just a story about where Redbill went and how she was used. Here is a wonderfully woven, at times very intimate, story of the life of a vessel and its owners in which the author draws a compelling picture of the social and political environment in which Redbill worked. The reader is taken through the intrigue and politics of the pearling industry in Broome, race-relations in multi-ethnic society in northern Australia including the many changes in policy and practice relating to race relations as it affected the pearling and other industries. It was not just the ominous clouds of the North Australian wet with their threat of cyclones that brought change and destruction, both world wars left their toll on vessels and their industry. Redbill became HMAS Redbill during the second world war, and afterwards worked in other northern waters before resting for a long while in Papua New Guinea. Phoenix-like she re-emerged with an important role to play in the Peace Movement, now working in the colder Southern Ocean. Later on Redbill was the home of an education project and other endeavours for troubled youth. 'The story of the life of a simple lugger, it seems, is also a story of the lost, the exiles: dispossessed Aborigines, immigrant Europeans, indentured Asians, wartime sailors, colonised Gogodala, refugee Timorese, desperate youngsters. Perhaps Redbill's greatest gift was that she provided a refuge to those yearning for home and trying to survive the best they could, yet weaving, accidentally, something extraordinary out of their hardship'. (p 330)

Redbill is interesting history. The author has drawn on oral accounts, private and public documents to write about the life and times of a beautifully made (and re-made) wooden boat. In the process she sheds light on many aspects of Australian history which have not been generally available to a reading public, for example, the behind-the-scenes workings of the pearling industry, the story of Greenpeace and activists in the environmental movement, and the 'outward bound' type programmes for troubled youth. We gain a view of Australian history 'from the bow' and get a flavour of the passionate commitment of boaties who love their wooden vessels.

Redbill is a good read, written with flair.

Citation

• Christine Choo. 'Review: Redbill: From Pearls to Peace - The Life and Times of a Remarkable Lugger by Kate Lance' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 22 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Once there were hundreds of wooden ketches like Redbill fishing for pearlshell in the old north-west, but none of them had her amazing gift for survival.
  
  Redbill lived through the great days of Broome pearling, and when war came to Darwin she was there as bombs began to fall.
  
  In Papua she hunted crocodiles and carried cargo for a tribe reclaiming its lost arts.
  
  As Redbill of Greenpeace she sailed the South Pacific to defy the French. She helped the refugees of East Timor, she carried troublesome teenagers through the rough waters of Bass Strait and she found the way home for a young Aboriginal man.
  
  Over a century Redbill coped with a lot - and then she ran into Rosita, the most powerful tropical cyclone to strike Broome in ninety years.
  
  Like many before her, author Kate Lance fell for Redbill's gentle magic, and in this richly illustrated book she traces the many lives of a most remarkable vessel.

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