40 Australian Geographic

I

T’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 con-

f 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 nor ther n a r m, 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 method-

ically 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 metic-

ulous. As I chat to them, the women don’t miss a beat, carefully

tucking saibo into shell after shell of native akoya oyster.

I

N AUSTRALIA, PEARL cultivation began with marine biologist

William Saville-Kent, who pioneered the scientific manage-

ment of Australia’s fisheries in the 1880s. As Tasmania’s inspec-

tor 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 first 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 envi-

ronmental 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 Pacific 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.

Pearl seeding involves opening the

living oyster only as far as it does to feed,

then implanting a tiny piece of graft

tissue deep in its reproductive area.

Rose Crisp (at rear) was trained in the

once-secretive process of pearl seeding

by a visiting Japanese technician.

Perhaps the fi rst female seeder in

Australia, she has since trained young

local jeweller Celeste Boonaerts.