History of old oyster town

When Matthew Flinders discovered Coffin Bay in 1802 he found two groups of around 200 Aboriginal people known as the Nauo. Due to the abundance of food in the Coffin Bay area both the inland and coastal groups would meet here to settle disputes and also to hold ceremonies, such as marriages. Whalers were the first white people to enter and reside in the Coffin Bay area with reports of whalers being on the coast as early as 1804. Henry Hawson was the first pastoralist to own the Coffin Bay run and first explored the area in 1839. He was issued the pastoral lease in 1847 and named the run Kellidie. However, it was not until John Mortlock acquired the run that Kellidie Bay was developed. Mortlock built a house on the shores of Kellidie Bay around 1866 and early surveys in 1871 by Thomas Evans show a house, store, garden, sheep yards, and huts in the vicinity of the current Coffin Bay township.

First mention of the commercial exploitation of oysters in Coffin Bay appear in an extract from a letter dated 23 May 1848 and written by “One of the Adventurers” on a voyage onboard the Emma Sherrat from Port Adelaide to Port Lincoln and Kangaroo Island. It is widely believed in the year 1849 there were up to thirty cutters dredging native oysters in the bays near Kellidie Bay. The settlement soon became known as Oyster Town. This small town was established rather quickly, around 1849, and huts were constructed for the fisherman’s families who brought various animals and other necessities needed for a town to survive.

The Oyster fisherman at Oyster Town worked all day until dusk, when they would clean the oysters of the foreign matter that grew on thier shells. The oysters were then bedded down, live, in the waters of Oyster Town until market day which came every fortnight and Oyster Town would become a hive of activity. Up to thirty bullock wagons from Port Lincoln would travel the 48kms to Oyster Town and each would be loaded with up to 25 bags of oysters, each holding approximately 350 oysters. The bullock wagons would then return to Port Lincoln with the oysters for local consumption and for shipment to Port Adelaide to feed consumers in the new city of Adelaide.

Regretfully, as a result of over fishing, the oyster fishery faced an official closure for seven out of nine years between 1882 and 1891, which provides a likely end date to this semi-permanent small settlement. It is unclear why this native oyster has never recovered and finding a live native oyster has become a rarity. Some marine biologists suggest a probable cause is that the fisherman would not have returned their dead oyster shells to the sea, as they would only dredge them up next time, and they would probably have discarded them on shore. In natural events, dead shells on the ocean floor would provide a solid surface for young oyster spat to attach and grow. In addition to this, spat passing through the dredge would likely have been covered and smothered in dredge silt. These two issues could have contributed to the sudden decline in the native oyster population.

Oyster Town has left little evidence of its existence in the 1840’s, and the land is now owned by the Department for Environment and Heritage. There are two modern shacks situated on the site where Oyster Town once existed.

The surveys by Thomas Evans show the approximate location of a further three huts on the southern shores of Kellidie Bay, and we now know that the remains of the Oyster Town settlement near Coffin Bay constitute a group of significant archaeological sites for the state of South Australia. These remains are an example of a settlement associated with traditional maritime extractive industries including whaling, sealing, and fishing that were of considerable importance in the 19th century. In the late 1960’s the first Pacific oyster was imported from Japan via hatcheries in Tasmania to Coffin Bay and this has since spawned a flourishing industry worth many millions of dollars to the State’s economy. Today Coffin Bay’s (Pacific) oysters are known nationally and internationally for their excellence, providing testament to the quality of the environment and habitat of the native oyster of yesteryear.