The Last Lugger of Roebuck Bay
A Novel of the Pearling Coast

About this book:

The red pindan dust of Broome stains everything—the teeth, the pores, the very soul of a town built on pearl shell and borrowed time. In April 1941, Japanese diver Kenji Sato returns to the lugger *Ibis* for another season of wrestling silver-lip oysters from the Kimberley seabed, thirty fathoms down where a single mistake means crushed bone in a copper helmet. His life depends on Salty, a Bardi tender who reads the tides like scripture and holds Kenji’s air hose with hands that never tremble. But the real current running beneath the surface isn't the eight-knot rip off Cape Boileau—it's the shadow of war creeping south from Indo-China, the whisper of plastic buttons replacing mother-of-pearl, and a master pearler who knows the fleet may be burned before the season ends.

Atmospheric and visceral, *The Last Lugger of Roebuck Bay* plunges you into a vanished world where Malay, Koepanger, Japanese, Chinese, and Bardi men breathe the same salt air and gamble on the same breath-held minutes. From the suffocating ritual of dressing a diver to the sudden green flash of a silver-lip shell in the silt, every page rings with the authority of lived history. Here, the bends wait in the deep, the teredo worms eat hulls alive, and the biggest predator isn't the tiger shark circling the shot rope—it's the stroke of a pen in Canberra that could requisition every boat in the harbour.

Kenji has survived twenty-eight seasons by knowing exactly where the bottom drops into black emptiness. But this year, the birds have fled the islands, the old men are dreaming of smoke, and the tide is turning toward something no diver can equalize against. A masterwork of maritime fiction that captures the brotherhood of the deck, the tyranny of the deep, and a coastline on the knife-edge of history—where every shell brought up might be the last.