The discovery of rich pearling fields in Northern Australia helped the development of the Northwest and Torres Strait. From 1800 to 1850, trade routes in Australia brought hundreds of sailing ships from Brisbane and Sydney through the Torres Strait and onto ports in India and other parts of Asia.

From the 1860s-1870s, pastoralists, who established stations around Roebourne in Pilbara, started pearl shelling operations in Cossack during their low season using Aboriginal people’s labour.

The Pearlshell Fishing Regulation of 1871 and the Pearlshell Fishery Regulation Act of 1873 controlled the involvement of Aboriginal people to protect them from gross abuse. The prohibition of Aboriginal women as divers created an acute shortage of labour that was filled by the importation of Asian workers.

These were mainly impoverished ethnic Chinese, Malays, Filipinos, men from India, Batavia (the Dutch East Indies), and other islands to the north of Australia who were indentured in the farming, pastoral and pearling industries.