March. April 41“Back in the late ’90s, two Japanese companies started to
show a n interest in pea rl ing in NSW,” says Dr Way ne O’Con nor,
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 indus-
try 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 confirm that akoya oysters
naturally occurred at one of their farms on Brisbane Water.
“Ba sica l ly I k icked the door in a nd sa id, ‘Look, we wa nt 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 commer-
cial 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 calam-
itous losses of pearl oysters in the Kimberley in 2007 and the
2008 global financial crisis. “I contacted the guys at Broken
Bay and said, ‘I’m finally coming to Sydney. I’d love to come
and have a look at the farm,’” James says.Amid this gloom for the edible oyster fisheries of
NSW, a sliver of hope appeared in the form of pearls.
Oysters won’t survive in polluted
waters, explains Steve Williamson
as he looks across the healthy
estuary of Brisbane Water from the
headquarters of Broken Bay Pearls.