Indigenous and Asian slaves were the lifeblood of Western Australia’s early pearl industry Men carry baskets of mother-of-pearl onto a beach in Broome, Western Australia. Photo: Getty Images Aalingoon came into the bay and lives beneath the sea, wrote late Indigenous pearl shell carver Aubrey Tigan Galiwa, quoted in Lustre, a 2018 book about the Australian pearling industry. He comes out every full moon, when it s a big tide. As he floats on his back, as he drifts, the scales fall off his back, and turn into goowarn (pearl shells) as they drift down to the seabed below. The tides come in and chuck them everywhere, on the reefs, all around the islands. This way he always gives us more shells. This is a power. This is part of our ceremony.
Under the hum of mechanical equipment and the steady chirp of a heart-rate monitor, a COVID-19 patient lies quietly in the intensive care unit of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital.
She is 65, clad in the same bright yellow gown as the other nine patients in the unit, and her eyes are closed as a mechanical ventilator pumps air into her body behind sliding glass doors.
A nurse comes over and whispers that the patient’s husband is on his way to the hospital, but the announcement is not one of relief: He’s coming in an ambulance. He’s sick, too.