Pearls of promise
A nascent pearl industry is offering hope to oyster farmers in New South Wales.
IT’S A HOT FEBRUARY morning but I feel cool relief as I step into the darkness of a little fibro shed. Rickety stumps and overgrown mangroves signal this is one of many old oyster sheds dotted along the shores of Broken Bay, a large estuary about 50km north of Sydney’s CBD at the conf luence of the Hawkesbury River, Pittwater and Brisbane Water. The handwritten letters “BBP” above the doorway are the only clue this one is not abandoned. Nestled on Brisbane Water, Broken Bay’s northern arm, it is the home of Broken Bay Pearls, a company at the heart of a new, multimillion-dollar pearl farming industry on Australia’s east coast.
Two women sit just inside the door, focused on their mission. Rose Crisp, the elder of the pair, will seed 300 oysters before today’s end. She rises and walks to the end of a narrow jetty, hauls out a sludge-covered mesh bag and carries it back to her seat, where she works by torchlight. She delicately and methodically reaches for an oyster and clasps its shell open with a small blue clip. With surgeon’s steadiness, she inserts a 3 x 3mm square of saibo (shell-producing mantle tissue from a donor oyster). Just as carefully she next inserts a small mother-of-pearl bead into the oyster’s gonad. This is the nucleus around which the oyster will secrete layers of nacre (the hard, iridescent substance that forms the inner layer of an oyster shell), gradually building a pearl. Rose puts the oyster aside and its lips slowly close.
Seated beside Rose is Celeste Boonaerts. She’s younger and newer at this highly skilled pearl seeding but seems just as meticulous. As I chat to them, the women don’t miss a beat, carefully tucking saibo into shell after shell of native akoya oyster.
IN AUSTRALIA, PEARL cultivation began with marine biologist William Saville-Kent, who pioneered the scientific management of Australia’s fisheries in the 1880s. As Tasmania’s inspector of fisheries, Saville-Kent was tasked with restoring the state’s badly depleted oyster beds. He rebuilt them by establishing government reserves and introducing minimum-size regulations, among other things, and went on to apply the same techniques in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. Over the years, Saville-Kent experimented with culturing pearls, particularly on Thursday Island, in far north Queensland. By 1904 he was one of the f irst in the world to successfully produce spherical cultured pearls of commercial quality.
How Rose and Celeste came to be seeding oysters in this shed on Broken Bay’s mangrove-lined backwaters, and how pearl farming came to the NSW coast is another story.
In the 1990s, Rose and her husband Ian ran one of many businesses farming edible Sydney rock oysters in Broken Bay. But the Sydney rock oyster industry has faced a range of environmental challenges and for the past decades production has been in decline. In the early 2000s, the parasitic QX disease swept through the Hawkesbury, depleting oyster stocks and virtually wiping out the region’s oyster growers. Many businesses switched to farming introduced Pacif ic oysters but another disease soon struck: the viral Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome (POMS). By 2015 hundreds of livelihoods were lost and the NSW oyster industry and its farmers were on their knees. Amid this gloom for the edible oyster fisheries of NSW, a sliver of hope appeared in the form of pearls.
“Back in the late ’90s, two Japanese companies started to show an interest in pearling in NSW,” says Dr Wayne O’Connor, principal research scientist at Fisheries NSW. The companies were interested in exploring akoya oyster farming in NSW in an effort to produce better quality pearls – the species occurs naturally from as far north as Japan to just south of Sydney. “They were going through a downturn in the quality of stock in Japan and starting to look for other areas to try and farm pearl oysters,” Wayne explains. “They realised that if they moved further away from the tropics, the quality of the nacre, or the pearl material inside the shell, seemed to get better and better.”
A Japan–Australia consortium was soon set up and the Australian Museum was contracted to do a survey of akoya oyster populations on the NSW coast.
“The quality of the nacre was really, really good,” Wayne says. Fisheries NSW, tasked with saving the state’s failing edible oyster industry, saw an opportunity. “One of the caveats we had was that if we produced pearl oysters to support their industry developments, we would like farmers from NSW to have the opportunity to become involved.”
Ian Crisp was one such farmer. “We started to see a lot of small oysters of another species caught on our Sydney rocks,” Ian says.
“That coincided with the research that Fisheries had been doing on the pearl oyster and we very quickly realised that this was the same species.” Ian was able to conf irm that akoya oysters naturally occurred at one of their farms on Brisbane Water. “Basically I kicked the door in and said, ‘Look, we want to have a crack at this.’”
By 2003 Ian and Rose had succeeded in farming akoya oysters and, more importantly, in growing pearls as well. But the Japanese consortium failed to obtain a licence for commercial operations and was forced to leave.
The Crisps and their newly formed company, Broken Bay Pearls, were left without support. They’d had the foresight to get Rose trained in the implantation process, but the young company was not yet viable.
Amid these despairing prospects, a saviour appeared: third-generation pearl farmer James Brown, manager of Cygnet Bay Pearls, a long-standing pearl farm located north of Broome, in WA. His was one of only three companies to survive calamitous losses of pearl oysters in the Kimberley in 2007 and the 2008 global f inancial crisis. “I contacted the guys at Broken Bay and said, ‘I’m f inally coming to Sydney. I’d love to come and have a look at the farm,’” James says.
But Ian and Rose were in the process of selling their business. “I wrote back and said that I might be an interested party… I got a phone call almost instantly,” James says. They formed a new umbrella company, Pearls of Australia, and the Crisps became shareholders. Their years of hard work had paid off.
When it came to the business of pearls and marketing, James had ideas. During the economic slowdown in WA, he successfully introduced tourism to his Kimberley operations, and he set about employing the same tactic to the east coast operations.
I’M EXCITED TO be among a throng of tourists boarding a boat at Woy Woy Wharf, on Brisbane Water. Sydney rock oyster farmer Steve Williamson is at the helm, operating the tour on behalf of Broken Bay Pearls. He motors our catamaran to the middle of the estuary and slows. We stare at a line of black buoys while he talks about the pearling process. We are mostly uninspired. He motors away and kills the throttle again, this time close to the little shed where Rose and Celeste had been seeding oysters. Like a magician, he pulls out a tray spread with surgical instruments. Now he has our attention.
From a sludge-covered bag, he pulls out a tightly closed oyster. Waving a knife, he explains how Broken Bay Pearls grows tens of thousands of oysters each year, but only 30 per cent yield a pearl, and fewer still a good one. He levers the oyster’s shells apart and 40 tourists erupt from their seats, hardly believing their eyes. There, nestled among the oyster’s squishy organs, is a jewel – rare and beautiful as only nature can create.
Broken Bay Pearls is the only pearl farm operating in NSW, and it produces some of the best cultured akoya pearls in the world. In 2017 German PhD student Laura Otter, who is based at Macquarie University, in Sydney, visited the Brisbane Water farm with her supervisor. They noticed that the pearls featured an unusual colour palette. “We were sitting there collecting the shells and thinking, ‘Well, this is weird; these pearls look super special,’” Laura says. Upon opening some of the oysters, she noted that they occurred in a wide variety of colours, ranging from classic white and silver to more unconventional colours such as yellow, orange, pink and blue. “I got this golden yellow pearl and it was just amazing to see because the akoya pearl usually is white…not yellow or golden, or even blue, which these were,” she says.
To conf irm that these pearls differed from those grown elsewhere, Laura used a high-powered Raman spectrometer to distinguish the components of the nacre. No-one expected the result: the pearls were so unusual that Laura’s f indings were disputed when she submitted her article to the scientif ic community for peer review. “I actually had to convince the reviewers that these are really the natural colour palettes available and that they’re not enhanced afterwards,” Laura says. “No-one had ever seen this before.”
There, nestled among the oyster’s squishy organs, is a jewel–rare and beautiful as only nature can create.
A growing number of Australian retailers have embraced the Brisbane Water pearls and are using them to create locally manufactured jewellery, although that hasn’t always been the case. Their distinct colour palette was a problem Ian faced when he f irst tried to sell them. “At that stage we had a jewellery industry in Australia that hadn’t seen an unbleached, undyed akoya pearl since the 1960s,” he says. “No-one in the Australian jewellery market understood what we were doing.”
Ian traipsed through Sydney with bags of pearls, trying to sell to jeweller after jeweller with no luck. “I’d basically given up,” he says, but eventually walked into Percy Marks, a longestablished Australian jewellery business. The general manager Cameron Marks knew the value of what he saw immediately. “We knew at that point we had quality pearls,” Ian says.
THE NSW PEARL industry is looking promising, although an assured future is impossible to predict. Oysters are often known as the canaries of estuaries, because their health ref lects waterway health. Around the world, oyster losses are linked with urban pollution, ocean acidif ication, algal blooms, coastal development and overf ishing, which is a evergreen issue. In the late 1800s in Australia, Saville-Kent tried to rein in pearl shell overf ishing in Torres Strait, where 10,000 tons of shells were harvested annually, depleting the shallows.
There is a long history in NSW of oyster losses due to environmental factors and disease, but Broken Bay Pearls has the support of Fisheries NSW, and Wayne O’Connor is determined to protect the pearl oysters of Brisbane Water. It is a good industry for the estuary, because oysters need no food added to the water, and the farms require no chemicals or fertilisers. The molluscs also f ilter the water – the best pearl oysters are large ones that live for two or more years, filtering some 25L of water per hour as they feed on algae and minute organisms.
“What’s happened with every oyster industry is that they have developed and then along the way they’ve had a number of different challenges,” Wayne says. These have included foodborne illnesses, norovirus outbreaks, QX disease and winter mortality disease. “The pearl industry will def initely face these challenges,” he says. “The key to riding through is to make sure [it is] diversif ied.”
Wayne means not just business diversity but also genetic diversity. His lab is running trials to produce disease-resistant oyster strains and to implement breeding programs to protect stocks. “The other thing is to be really diligent about monitoring the health of your oysters and looking for threats,” Wayne says. “Don’t wait for the point where it becomes economically unviable to farm. It’s important to note when you’ve got unusual mortalities and use the facilities available to you.”
The hatchery facilities of Fisheries NSW supply Broken Bay Pearls with young oysters. “All of the small spat are produced by us,” Wayne says. “For them to commercially contract a large hatchery to do it would be a very expensive process. The cost of producing algae, the cost of running the pumps, doing all of that can be leveraged against our general activities, so we can do it very, very cheaply.”
For a f ledgling industry, having the support of modern scientific research and data, as well as business acumen and years of oyster farming experience, is a good recipe for success. The future of the company looks promising.
IT’S WINTER WHEN I next visit the shed. The dawn temperature is only 7°C but I’m too excited to feel the cold. Steve Williamson pilots our punt to an undisclosed location and begins hauling in crates. I lean into the frigid water, hoping I can keep a grip on my underwater camera and avoid falling in. These oysters are not the batch I observed being seeded six months ago; these were seeded a year earlier. This year’s harvest will be smaller than the normal 10–30,000 shells, because James Brown wants to reserve many for their “shellar door” tours, an upcoming tourism experience that will be similar to winery cellar door tastings.
Back in the shed, Steve opens shells and passes them to Celeste. She’s full of anticipation. “You get to see them in the light for the f irst time, coming out of a dirty shell,” she says. “You’ve birthed this little pearl.” She prods the oyster’s f lesh, seeking that prize of all prizes, a perfectly formed and lustrous gem-quality pearl. Some oysters have an implanted bead without any nacre deposits; some contain beads that are only half covered; and some shells only house keshi, tiny natural pearls produced by the oyster in response to irritants. But many do contain shimmering, perfectly rounded pearls. These gems represent hope for the NSW oyster industry. As Cameron Marks said: “They’re beautiful, beautiful pearls. Everything Australian is good if you harvest it in beautiful pristine waters.”