It's Australia's great secret, I think, the Sydney Rock Oyster.
You know, it's the oyster that when Captain Cook arrived at Botany Bay, he wrote in his
journal that the oysters here are small but very sweet to the taste.
And that's the same unique oyster that we're growing now.
And basically this oyster only grows up and down the New South Wales coastline.
It doesn't grow anywhere else in the world.
I'm Gary Rodley, I'm an oyster farmer from Nelson's Lake.
We farm under the banner of Tarthra Oysters.
I'd always liked the idea of being a farmer and I always liked the idea of being on the
water.
So when the opportunity came to buy an oyster farm, that for me was the perfect mix, a farmer
on the water.
I've got my wife Joanne and son Sam, who's our farm manager now and daughter Brooke, very
much a family concern and the four of us iron out the problems as they come up and it's
been quite a ride over these 26 years.
The Sydney Rock Oyster is a really unique thing but it's a really slow-growing creature
so you have to be very, very passionate about what you do to grow Sydney Rock Oysters because
it's a very demanding species to grow.
But Sydney Rock for us is always the way we want to go because the flavour of the Sydney
Rock Oyster is just something that continually we see in our retail shop.
People come in and we give them an oyster to taste and when you see the look on their
faces you just realise that you're growing something special, you're producing something
special and if I don't do anything else in life, the fact that I've been able to produce
oysters that make people that happy has got to make me happy in my day to age I think.
Nelson's Lake is such a fabulous office so I have this unique opportunity in my life
to instead of driving to work on the M4 in Sydney, I'm driving through the bush and
having live birds and wallabies jump in front of me and then I come out to a beautiful pristine
environment where I can produce food and I think that's a great legacy to have in your
life that you're actually feeding people and for us to be doing that in this beautiful
place is something special and nowadays I have the added bonus of having all my family
involved so I've got a situation where my son Sam who's a trained marine scientist has
now come back to be our farm manager and that's a very very special thing for us to have Sam
able to work in our business and make a good living out of being an oyster farmer and living
in the place that he loves as well and maybe one day our daughter Brooke might do the same
thing and so that's a very very special thing for us to not only have a business which is
now considered to be pretty successful but to also have a family life that is something
that I think probably in earlier days I could have only dreamed of.
