Thursday Island is the commercial centre for all Torres Strait. About its deep harbour has grown up a clean, well-regulated town, the home of representatives of all the peoples of the South Pacific.
The youngest of these island maidens has to go through several months more of suffering before she can appear with her complete blouse of tattooing. The design must be pricked in with a thorn driven under her skin.
Experienced men claim they can tell by the appearance of the outside of certain oyster shells that they contain pearls. Natives are not allowed to open such finds, which are reserved for the white overseer.
The state government has already built a hydro-electric power station at Great Lake, about sixty miles north of Hobart. This delivers thirty thousand horse power to the Electrolytic Zinc Corporation, whose works are the largest of the kind in existence. It also supplies a big carbide-manufacturing plant as well as power for Hobart’s street cars and lighting system. Woollen mills, a big chocolate factory, and other industrial plants will get their power from this station. So will Launceston as soon as the transmission line from the lake to the northern city is completed. Launceston has its own power plant but this does not give sufficient current for its needs. Ultimately the capacity of the Great Lake power house will be raised to seventy-two thousand horse power. Other projects are planned, for Tasmania’s hydro-electric resources are estimated at more than two hundred thousand horse power. There is even talk of transmitting some of the power from the island by cable to the mainland.
CHAPTER XXII
THE PEARL FISHERIES OF THURSDAY ISLAND
THE metropolis of the pearl-fishing industry of the Pacific Ocean is Thursday Island. It lies in Torres Strait off the north coast of Queensland and is part of that state. I visited it on my way to Java and the East Indies, but its story rightly belongs with that of Australia, and so I tell it here.