Nicholas Paspaley (born Paspalis) belonged to a family that emigrated from the Greek island of Kastellorizo to north-western Australia and settled in Cossack, at a time when Broome, Cossack and Darwin were the world's leading pearling ports. His father Theodosis Paspalis, with the help of the family, built up a pearling fleet. Nicholas joined the trade at fourteen, and by 1932, aged nineteen, ran his own lugger, diving for natural pearls and mother-of-pearl shell.
As the beds off Port Hedland were exhausted he moved to the less-worked waters off Darwin, where he built a fleet of five pearling vessels, changed the family name to Paspaley and founded the Paspaley Pearling Company. At the outbreak of the Second World War the government impounded and destroyed the pearling luggers of northern Australia to keep them from Japanese forces. After the war he bought four luggers abandoned by the Royal Australian Navy on Darwin's beaches, rebuilt them and resumed pearling, until the plastic button collapsed the mother-of-pearl trade in the mid-1950s.
Inspired by Japan's Akoya cultured pearls, he set out to culture pearls from Australia's large South Sea oyster, Pinctada maxima. In the 1950s he negotiated a joint venture with the Kuribayashi family, whose experts had worked on Baron Iwasaki's pre-war South Sea pearl project, and when the government lifted its ban on pearl culture the first two Australian pearl farms were licensed: Kuri Bay, controlled by the Kuribayashis, and Port Essington, controlled by Paspaley. The cultured South Sea pearl became the most valuable category of cultured pearl.
His wife Vivienne Lavinia Paspaley (1913–2003) worked with him to build the company and was a prominent figure in Darwin. He was appointed MBE in 1982 for services to the pearling industry, business and the community, and died in 1984.