Word: australian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Buttons & Pearls. Pearlers have long known about Australia's big shells. Before World War II, Japanese divers worked the beds, and the export of pearl shells reached $1,000,000 annually. The war wrecked the industry. Though the Australian government tried promoting the shells, the diving is dangerous (five divers were killed in one null bed alone last year), and cheap plastic buttons have all but ruined the market for those of expensive (up to $2 for a set of six nickel-sized buttons) mother-of-pearl...
...impetus for making the giant silver lips produce pearls instead of buttons came from the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, which has the job of promoting new industries. Experiments produced only crude pearls, but showed promise. The man who turned the experiments into profits was Keith Bureau, an Australian businessman and partner in the big Melbourne importing firm of Brown & Bureau. Three years ago he formed a syndicate with a U.S. businessman, an Australian pearler, and asked Japanese Culture Pearl Expert Tokuichi Kuribayashi, president of Tokyo's Nippo Pearl Co. Ltd., to join them...
Since the war, the Australian economy has expanded nearly threefold, and "production would not have been possible without the immigrants, who make up half our 19,000 employees," says an executive of General Motors-Holden's, the G.M. subsidiary that makes 50% of Australia's vehicles. Half of the country's steelworkers and almost two-thirds of the workers on the billion dollar Snowy Mountains hydroelectric irrigation complex in New South Wales are, as fellow union members call them, "new blokes." Although some have slowed their work to the notorious prewar "Australian crawl," the overall impact...
...Weird Mob. Some immigrants find the bland phrase "New Australian" as offensive as the "dago" and "hunky" it was designed to replace. "I've been here eight years," complains a Greek, "and they still call me a bloody New Australian. When do I become an old one?" But barriers are breaking down: immigrants now hold 20% of all Australian jobs, and are neighbors of the old in suburban streets. Some 80,000 bachelor immigrants have found native-born wives. They're a Weird Mob, a breezy book about an Italian newcomer's discovery...
...Australian brotherhood, is a 160,000-copy national bestseller...