Scales glitter across the fishskin bay
In opalescent shallows, wavelets chase their shadows over sand
Up the bank, mud-oysters' petrified ruffles shimmy out of the midden
None live in this water now, new silt eclipsed them.
Can you see the water shimmering? Glittering? Go closer. Where is this water?
Imagine it is Twofold Bay, the old Davidson Whaling Station near Eden on the NSW far south coast. I was standing on an ancient shell deposit above the old wharf, when I first picked up a shell. Our guide that day, the naturalist John Blay, told me it was a mud oyster shell. He said they used to live in the inlet there, but didn’t any more, probably because of siltation from the timber industry.
I had never heard of a ‘mud oyster’.
I learned that at the time of European arrival on this continent, more than 1500 kilometres of the southern coastlines were fringed with shellfish reefs, some of them many hectares in size. They were largely built by the Australian flat, or ‘mud’, oyster, Ostrea angasi. Unlike the more familiar native rock oyster, angasi flat oysters bond to shell – that is, to one another. In this way they grew on and over one another across generations, accumulating in great accretions that formed reefs. Rich, dense and diverse ecosystems, providing shelter and food for other molluscs, crustaceans, fish and all kinds of marine life. They purified the water, each oyster filtering up to 150 litres per day.
Before the whalers and timber-takers
people cut coolamon and canoes
let the trees stand
gleaned fortuitous beachings, orca’s scraps
Then: metal, kettles, dredges, bloodshed.
A silver sky lowers a swag to hide the mountain’s face.
Wind skirmishes across the inlet.
Whitewash gnaws the sandbar's pointing finger.
Pied cormorant hangs sharp patient wings to dry.
Sunshine turns the midden grit to glitter.
Ostrea angasi look nearly identical to the European flat oyster, Ostrea edulis. When European settlers arrived on the east coast in 1788, flat oysters were a familiar and nutritious food, easily harvested in this strange and seemingly hostile land. Flat angasi oysters didn’t even need to be chipped off the rocks, they could be raked or dredged up in huge numbers.
The shells were burned to make lime and cement. Alongside the shells left after consumption, Aboriginal shell deposits were mined for this purpose.
George Vancouver arrived here on the west coast in 1791. He entered and named King George Sound while looking for water and charting the coastline, and, from his journal:
“In our way out of this harbour, the boats grounded on a bank we had not before perceived; this was covered with oysters of a most delicious flavour, on which we sumptuously regaled; and… we commemorated the discovery by calling it Oyster Harbour.”
Vancouver observed the weirs, or fish traps, of Wattierup, but remarked on the absence of shell middens, surmising that the locals did not harvest and eat shellfish. His crews harvested enough oysters for three meals before they sailed east.
On the east coast, shellfish were eaten, and carefully managed by Aboriginal people. Family or tribal groups arriving for their season of feasting on seafood would observe the top layers of the shell deposits to see what recent visitors had harvested. They would collect something different, so each species had time to replenish.
After European arrival, rampant over-fishing was accompanied by the wasteful practice of sorting catches on land - small oysters and bycatch left to rot on the beach. Even reefs that weren’t dredged up died off, affected by pollution and turbidity from land clearing, agriculture and industry, or from introduced diseases. As settlements grew and spread around Australia’s southern coast, so did the destruction. Within a century of colonisation, the shellfish reefs were mostly dead or gone.
Learning that these living mega-structures once existed, I felt a strange kind of grief. They had been largely destroyed before my parents, or even grandparents, were born and I had never known them. But I grieved not only their loss, but the loss, certainly from the mainstream, of their memory. Unlike the thylacine, the flat oyster reefs were largely forgotten.
Australia’s flat oysters are more sensitive and fragile than rock oysters, vulnerable to changes in water quality, and with layered brittle shells that fracture and shatter. Unlike some other oyster species, angasi live-brood their larvae in the flesh of their mantle for period, rather than releasing eggs and sperm directly in the open water. These qualities also made them less viable to cultivate. It occurs to me that these ‘inconvenient’ characteristics are often perceived as conventionally ‘feminine’ – frilly, ruffled, fragile, delicate, sensitive, maternal.
It seemed to me that the continent once had a frilly shellfish edging, which had been violently ripped away. Alongside their high-maintenance ‘feminine’ traits, the distribution of the remaining shellfish reefs was skeletal, lacelike. I decided to try making oyster lace, and learned how to do freestyle machine embroidery. I began making lace oysters on the east coast, and completed the collection, and stitched them together into this piece of fabric here in Albany in 2024.
This water is not near Eden, but further north - Wagonga Inlet at Narooma. This choppy surface is above a shellfish reef restoration site, where a new limestone and shell substrate has been laid, and seeded with flat oyster spat. It is one of 21 sites around the southern coasts. Another is here, in Oyster Harbour.
Now look at the photographs. Once I had stitched the lace together, I began to play with it. Historically we destroyed the reefs, but now we are trying to restore them – and I had assembled my lace oysters into a fabric reef. Lace both obscures and reveals. Lace has historically been used in dress, furnishing and at the table, and I posed with it in different arrangements.
When I began moving the lace, it became elusive and spectral. Like our ecological memory – or our collective forgetting. Like shifting baselines, or intergenerational amnesia.
The tide peels back to show me her mementos:
white, big as my palm, crenelated, laminous.
Engraved by ocean borers, finer frills and ruffles sanded away.
Memory of many mouths breathing brine and milt, brooding spat, feeding generations.
Relics of acres of bivalves piled into nacreous sea-lung reefs, furzed with algae.
Every crevice a refuge.
When you have finished looking at the photographs, I invite you to move into the next room.