March. April 43A 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 first 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 Austral-
ian 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 long-
established 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.T
HE 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 acidification, algal
blooms, coastal development and overfishing, which is a ever-
green issue. In the late 1800s in Australia, Saville-Kent tried to
rein in pearl shell overfishing 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 envi-
ronmental 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 indus-
try for the estuary, because oysters need no food added to the
water, and the farms require no chemicals or fertilisers. The
molluscs also filter 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 food-
borne illnesses, norovirus outbreaks, QX disease and winter
mor t a l it y d isea se. “The pea rl indust r y w i l l def in itely face these
cha l lenges,” he says. “The key to r id i ng th roug h is to m a ke sure
[it is] diversified.”
Wayne means not just business diversity but also genetic
diversity. His lab is running trials to produce disease-resistantoyster strains and to implement breeding programs to protect
stocks. “The other thing is to be really diligent about monitor-
ing 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 unu-
sual 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,” Way ne says. “For them to com mercia l ly cont ract a la rge
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.I
T’S WINTER WHEN I next visit the shed. The dawn temper-
ature 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 yea r ea rl ier. Th is yea r’s ha r vest
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 first 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 with-
out 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.” AGLaura Otter uses a laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass
spectrometer to analyse minerals in Broken Bay pearls and identify
the pigments that contribute to their stunning colours.Oysters use nacre, their mother-of-pearl shell lining, to create
pearls but only a few species can do it. The gold hue, a feature of
Broken Bay gems, is one of many colours they are yielding.