FROM SHELL Native oyster brought back from the brink by Richard Cornish

FROM SHELL native oyster brought back from the brink

Steven Cooper holds a big fat oyster in his hand. It is a local oyster. It’s not from Coffin Bay nor Narooma. It is a local oyster grown in the waters between Flinders and Shoreham. “It’s an angasi oyster,” says Steven. “An oyster native to these waters. There used to be millions of them in Western Port and Port Phillip, but they were fished out over a century ago. Now I am bringing them back, and they are delicious.”

Steven and his crew at Flinders Oyster Company are breeding the oysters in a converted abalone-rearing facility on Phillip Island. He used to breed and farm abalone on the west coast before a virus wiped out the industry. The angasi oysters he is farming come from a few remaining colonies in the waters off the islands in Western Port. Once upon a time, angasi oysters formed massive underwater reefs as high and wide as a bus extending for hundreds of metres. Reefs like this lined the seabeds from Mallacoota to Port Augusta in South Australia and down the east coast of Tasmania. During the colonial period, fishers would take great claw-like dredges, rip out great chunks of these reefs, prise off the oysters, bag them up, and ship them to Melbourne. When gold was discovered near Ballarat, the oysters were shipped there from reefs off Geelong. The orgy of consumption increased during the heights of the gold boom, peaking in the 1870s and continuing into the Marvellous Melbourne boom. Washed down with French champagne chilled on ice imported as ballast from Canada, there were almost a hundred oyster bars in Melbourne. By the 1890s, the oysters around the bay were almost all gone. The fishers went down the Tasmanian coast and all the way to Gippsland and South Australia. These great reefs, as biologically diverse as the Great Barrier Reef, had been fished to oblivion. the best chefs on the Peninsula use Flinders Oyster Company, including Michael Demagistris from Polperro and Matt Wilkinson at Montalto. “They are big, beautiful, briny mouthfuls of minerals and seaweed flavour,” says Matt. In the past, he has crumbed and fried portions of the oyster and served them with a freerange pork dish.

The angasi oysters season starts in June after the breeding season and finishes as summer begins. Stephen has developed another arm to the business to keep the business flowing, bringing in the best Pacific oysters from South Australia and Sydney rock oysters from the south coast of NSW year-round. All the oysters are available for sale in season from the Flinders Pier every day in summer and every weekend at other times of the year from 10am-4pm. www.flindersoysters.com

Steven now grows them in baskets that float in the water column, filter-feeding on plankton, cleaning the water as they grow. Within a couple of years, the little oysters have grown from something the size of a 10c coin to something that would take up most of the palm of your hand. They are more like the Belon oyster you get in France than a Sydney rock oyster and have a similar texture to a Pacific with a briny, flinty flavour. Some of