14 Jul 08 Cygnet Bay - (below) back to the hub of the pearl farm to the area known as "Divers" where yep you got it - the divers live. Anyway this cairn of rock was made by Ronald the German diver who exercised every day by carrying one rock from this pile to make another cairn somewhere over there...........he ran while doing this by the way..........and this is how Ronald kept fit.
On the right here poor old Jimmy O'Toole fell down a well. Well not really, apparently the boys who live and work at the area called "Divers" had some spare concrete, so, as you do, they made a fictitious headstone for a fictitious Irishman.......... or is that Scotsman.........















14 Jul 08 - Cygnet Bay - (below) another rock for a headstone for an un-named diver, possibly Japanese. But on the right here you can see a very special headstone with carved writing - if I have any friends out there who can read it would you please let margo know what it says.




14 Jul 08 Cygnet Bay - That hill in the picture below below where you can see DB fishing is the one we climbed up to find these headstones. The Dean Murdoch Brown one is that of THE Mr Brown who started the Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm in 1946 with Mrs Brown, he is up there all by himself overlooking the ocean. Bit sad.
The middle headstone is that of the last white hard hat pearl diver - he had been brought out from The Mother Country England as an Able Bodied Seaman diver together with three other English AB Seamen to replace the Japanese divers who were working out of Broome. AB William J Castor served on the HMS Fantome, but it turned out that the Japanese were far better divers than the English and could dive for longer and deeper, it also turns out that Japanese girls are the best of any nationality, creed or colour at pearl diving..............
The right hand rock headstone is that of a Japanese Diver. Only the upper echalon were buried with the privelege of a marble headstone. The officer's were buried with a marble headstone instead of a rock as a marker. The ships they came out from England on could only carry limited numbers of "real" headstones, so the others had to just make do.