Mark Dodd arrived in Broome in 1978 as a 20-year-old looking for adventure, after working his way across northern Australia. There he fell in with the crew of the fabled DMcD, one of the last of the old wooden pearling luggers that
still worked the Kimberley coast diving for pearl shell. The Last Pearling Lugger is his extraordinary memoir of five seasons on the Broome pearling fleet as a deckhand and diver in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Hanifa Deen enters the wonderful world of the archives and discovers a tribe of men with a hidden history. Men whose stories are rarely told: the Ghans, Cameleers, Sepoys, hawkers, herbalists, and pearl divers, known collectively as Mohammedans in early Australian history.
Mahomet Allum, wonder herbalist and ladies' man, bush battler Ali Abdul, the feisty Afghan Rock men, and Sam the republican pearl diver, are some of Deen's 'men from the archives'. To others they are troublemakers and 'lustful aliens'. Unwelcome and a threat to Australian workers, these are the dark strangers in the days of the White Australia Policy, when race was used to classify people and bar them from entering the country.
