top of page

Local Beginnings:

Surrounded as it is by beautiful clean waterways brimming with oysters, it was inevitable that this rich resource would form the basis of an important local industry on the far south coast.

​

European settlers were utilising supplies soon after they began settling in the area. By 1853 the abundance of rock oysters “…at a short distance…” from the Pambula township was reported; & four years later Sydney media commented on Merimbula’s mud oyster supply. “Big Jack” Hayden reportedly took oysters from the Tanja district to his friend Richard Rogers at Tarraganda in the 1870s; while a German settler named Speers collected oysters near the mouth of Wapengo Lake.

​

Leases for oyster culture were made available in Pambula Lake & River during the 1880s & in about the early 1890s Thomas Herbert Woollard of Green Point near Millingandi reportedly took the first spawn from Broadwater to Merimbula to begin oyster farming in that waterway.

​

Early oyster farmers gathering their harvest from the rocks.
bottom of page