TRANSCRIPT
Hunting on the water is a natural way of life in the Tiwi Islands.
Mantiyupwi clan member Les Morris Ullungurra says they're looking for new ways of harvesting traditional foods - starting with the Black-lip oyster.
"Been growing up eating them oysters, all the bush food from the sea, oysters, turtle, dugong, crab lots of thing in the sea. Good, salty."
It's a delicacy which grows wild on rocks fringing the two main islands of Melville and Bathurst.
Now they're being farmed in cages, floating offshore, where crocodile populations both large and dangerous.
Urban Kerinaiua from the Mantiyubwi clan says it's a great opportunity for the local community.
"Grab a chip off the reef and for us to get that black-lip oyster is good for our people you know and I can see a different thing growing."
Green algae is a key element in the oyster diet and luckily, is abundant in local waterways.
The oysters are flipped to dry daily and are inspected for new growth while hatchery production, which is critical to the process, is currently done out of a lab in Darwin.
Evan Needham from the Darwin Aquaculture Centre says researchers have been collecting spawn from wild oysters and feeding them on a formula of algae until they’re big enough to release.
"I think that having a product that has a provenance that is grow in a remote destination by traditional owners in the Northern Territory is a fabulous story. I suppose the first step in the process was figuring out could we actually breed them? Yes oysters are bred around the world but this particular species hadn't been bred before so we had a world first with breeding this oyster and now we're just trying to perfect the techniques to produce commercial quantities of oysters."
The Tiwi islands is one of four Top End communities with trials underway with the work being supported by research grants and the Northern Territory government.
But as Les and Urban explain, there are hopes to take the black-lip oyster to global markets in the next two years with more investment needed before the project ends in 2026.
LES: "Better for them kids you know learn about them oysters. It will be great you know for them little ones growing up in the future."
URBAN: "I hope it will grow and we can send it to Darwin and all of the globe and they can have a taste an oyster that grows on our water."
