Pearls of promise
IT’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 confluence 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 northern arm, 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 methodically 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
