My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  One evening I found myself on a small fishing boat on Port Phillip Bay. The fishermen—yes, an all-male crew—set the boat into the water on the other side of Corio Bay, on which they were to fish. I found out later that local Geelong residents had been slashing the tyres of the fishermen’s trailers. This more remote spot was safer. I was heading out to do a story for the paper, my feet squeezed into the rubber wader, gingerly holding my camera above the spray coming from the bow.

  Fisherman Sam Georgiou powered his fishing boat through the water. He was grinning as we rode across the choppy wake of another boat. ‘I love this,’ Georgiou shouted over the din of the motor. ‘I am one of the men who puts the fish on your table. Fresh, local fish. And we love what we do.’ At the time, Georgiou was also chairman of the Western Port and Port Phillip Professional Fishermen’s Association. Hundreds of fishermen once worked in the bay, selling their catch from the jetties and piers to which they tethered their boats. Scores of little piers, each servicing the community. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were just a dozen or so full-time licensed operators still fishing the 1950 square kilometres of the bay on a regular basis. Visitors to Melbourne query about eating fish out of a waterway so close to a large population. The truth of the matter is that the bay is quite healthy. It retains much of its seagrass beds and coral reefs at the head, where the bay meets Bass Strait. The shipping industry, through blasting to deepen the channel, has caused damage to the heads, while dredging has unleashed some heavy metals. Tests done comparing fairy penguins in St Kilda to their cousins in Western Port Bay showed the city birds had higher levels of mercury in their bodies than their country cousins, who do the daily waddle up the beach at Phillip Island.

  Georgiou was working with another boat to catch the fish. The water they were working is very shallow and only a few hundred metres from the farms along the coast on the Bellarine Peninsula. His deckhand, Chris Nicholson, took a smaller boat and cut a broad arc in the water, letting out a long, dark net behind him. This was a seine net. It had floats on the top and little weights on the bottom, and was hauled through the water back towards the shore. The two ends were drawn together to form a purse. Pelicans and gulls flew in to take part in the action, diving into the water and flying off with fish in their beaks. Back on Georgiou’s boat there was an urgent call on the radio. A seal had come crashing through the net. The air was thick with Greek curses. By the time we reached the nets, the seal was inside. Cormorants and terns had joined the party. The seal rolled and snorted about on the surface, diving below and reappearing with a black bream in its mouth.

  ‘He’ll scare all the fish out and eat the rest,’ said Georgiou.

  The sun dropped behind the horizon, flooding the sky with pinks and mauves. Waders on and standing chest high in the warm water, Georgiou and his fishing partner, Angelo Xenos, sorted the fish. Measuring stick in one hand, they threw their fish into bins on board. Undersized fish went into the bay. ‘I’ll see you next year,’ said Xenos to a little garfish. The catch was not great. Nicholson threw a single Moreton Bay bug onto the deck. ‘When I was working with the scallop boats twenty years ago we used to see lots of these,’ said Georgiou. ‘But not so many these days. The bay is much cleaner than it was back then. Then there was so much more algae, now it is the sun-bleached seagrass that is the problem.’

  A large flathead was landed, a slight discolouration on its head. ‘Remember a few months back there was the lesions scare with the bay fish?’ asked Xenos. ‘That was due to the hot weather. Sunburned fish! Now they have recovered.’

  The sorting went on. High-value fish, King George whiting, flathead and garfish were separated into different boxes. The team motored on in the dark further down the bay. They shot another net in the still water near Clifton Springs. A fat moon rose over the Bellarine Peninsula. There was a familiar snort. The seal had followed them. The catch was dismal. The men grabbed a quick bite to eat. Xenos opened a container filled with dried meats, olives, cheese and spanakopita, made by his wife that morning.

  They headed back to shore to wash and sort their catch. Within the hour they would have dropped the fish off at the fish market. It was 2 a.m.

  Georgiou looked into the boxes. ‘Bloody seal,’ he said. ‘But you know what? There’s nothing we can do. His kind have been here long before we got here. It’s everybody’s bay.’

  That evening on the water taught me a lot about that style of fishing. It was a simple procedure that used technology that was thousands of years old. I have seen photographs of similar nets used by the Yuin Aboriginal people from the South Coast of New South Wales. The modern bay fishers have underwater fish finders and powerful little boats, but the rest of the technology is pretty simple. Port Phillip Bay is a relatively small fishery, with commercial fishers producing about 600 tonnes of fish annually; its real importance lies in the fact that it is so close to Melbourne. A fish caught in the bay in the early hours of the morning can well be on the dining table later that same night or the next day. Port Phillip Bay is a sustainable fishery and has been recognised as such by environmental bodies like Greenpeace. It is a model of how looking after waterways and the surrounding environment benefits everybody. It is perhaps one of the best sustainable fisheries in the world, producing quality fish that any ethical pescatarian would be pleased to eat. In November 2015 the Victorian Labor Government, supported by the Liberal opposition, voted to end commercial netting in Port Phillip Bay, to appease the recreational fishing lobby. It was a triumph of political expediency over old-fashioned common sense. In April 2016, when the bans came into place, I went to my local fish shop and where once had been glowing fresh squid and calamari and bay fish rigid with rigor mortis, there now sat two tired-looking factory farmed salmon from Tasmania.

  Australians have always settled in places of great bounty. Scientist and author Tim Flannery has described the upper reaches of Port Phillip Bay at the time of settlement as being a ‘temperate Kakadu’—wetlands teeming with ‘brolgas, Cape Barren geese, swans, ducks, eels and frogs’. Great middens of native angasi oyster shells in the dunes along the beaches around Port Phillip Bay indicate where Bunurong and Wathaurong Aboriginal peoples sat down on the beach for Melbourne’s original oyster frenzies. Back then the oysters gathered in big reefs ringing the bay. The feasts continued when the whitefellas arrived. During the gold rush, oysters dredged from the bay were served with French champagne chilled on ice shipped from America. Oyster shells, both those harvested from the bay and from historical middens, were also burned, to make lime for cement to hold together what are now our fine old buildings. In the gold rush era, Victorians’ appetite for oysters was insatiable and by the 1880s, after Melburnians had eaten almost all the oysters in the bay, we began shipping them in from Tasmania. Within a few generations we had eaten out one of the great oyster waterways of the world. The feast continued all the way down Bass Strait and the east coast of Tasmania.

  Flying in over its snow-capped highlands, you approach Hobart Airport over a clear estuary called Pittwater. It was here that the first Pacific oysters were brought to Australia, from Japan, in 1947. (Earlier plans, in the late 1930s, were stymied by World War II.) Most died. Later, spat, or tiny baby oysters, were flown in and the survival rate was much higher. Today, Tasmania produces around 2250 tonnes of Pacific oysters a year. An industry that is the result of an earlier environmental catastrophe.

  In New South Wales some oyster growers consider the introduced Pacific oyster to be another environmental catastrophe. Pacific oysters are incredibly fast growing, taking just a year to eighteen months to reach maturity in the warm waters of New South Wales. A native Sydney rock oyster will take three to four years to reach maturity. This fast growth rate means that when Pacific oysters spawn, they colonise the rocks on which the native Sydney rock oysters grow and simply outgrow them. The Sydney rock oyster farmers depend on wild oyster spawn to repopulate their own farms, while Pacific oysters are almost exclusively grown from hatcher
y-raised spat. Breeders have successfully produced a Pacific oyster called a triploid that does not reproduce. This is being championed in New South Wales by some growers, who see it as a better environmental solution.

  Oysters are the canaries of the food production system. They are sensitive little filter feeders and if any muck gets in the waterway, then they don’t grow as well or will die. If the waterway is polluted, either by chemicals or sewage, the entire waterway will have to be closed down until the pollution ceases. In southern New South Wales there is a battle for resources. The logging industry wants the forests. The forests filter the water. The oyster industry wants clean water.

  ‘Good oysters start with good water,’ oyster farmer Shane Buckley told me. ‘If you have good water, then you can grow good oysters.’ He has a lease at Wapengo Lake, an estuary about forty-five minutes north of Merimbula on the New South Wales South Coast. He is a quiet man with a dry sense of humour and a real passion for what he does. He explained that oysters are filter feeders. They take in water and filter the plankton on which they feed. Whatever the plankton feed on helps influence the taste of the oyster. Trace minerals in the water also determine the flavour of an oyster. The saltier the water in which the oysters are grown, the more amino acids they produce, some of which produce umami.

  We motored out onto the water in his aluminium punt. Buckley pointed to a mountain in the distance. ‘That’s Mumbulla. It’s a mountain sacred to the local Aboriginal families and the headwaters of the Wapengo Creek that runs into the lake,’ he said. It is also close to an actively logged forestry site. Buckley explained that a few years back, he and fellow oyster growers worked with the forestry industry to make sure run-off from logging sites didn’t enter the waterway. They also worked with the local shire to tarmac the dirt road that runs along the side of the lake.

  ‘But when the rains come there is always the threat of nasty bugs like E. coli washing into the water,’ Buckley said. ‘The bugs don’t last long but the fishery is closed until tests done on the oysters come back negative. It’s not a big problem for us like it is for people on more populated waterways.’

  This is the same across the nation: health authorities monitor the water conditions in which oysters grow, to avoid outbreaks of disease. In 1997, after heavy rain, more than 400 people were infected with hepatitis A and one person died from eating oysters from Wallis Lake in New South Wales. The oysters had been contaminated with sewage overflowing from septic tanks.

  Australians eat about 16 million dozen oysters annually. New South Wales produces the bulk of the crop, 41 per cent, with most of those being the native Sydney rock oyster. South Australia grows 37 per cent of our oysters, these being the Pacific oyster, originally from Japan. Tasmania grows almost all of the rest, mainly Pacifics, while Queensland has a small industry, south of Hervey Bay, growing rock oysters.

  Buckley gently motored up to a line of plastic baskets suspended from a taut wire just above the water, being careful not to disturb the reed bed that had grown back since he removed the old-fashioned wooden rack system installed in the mid-twentieth century. The shade from the infrastructure killed the weed. He pushed the boat closer, like a gondolier. As the tide rose and fell, the baskets either floated upside-down or hung the right way up.

  ‘This is what we call tumbling,’ said Buckley. It helps the oyster grow a deeper shell and a fuller ‘fish’, as the flesh is referred to in the trade. This method, used extensively across the industry, encourages the growth of the muscle that closes the shell when the oyster is exposed to air—the adductor—but doesn’t overwork it, giving the flesh a less chewy mouthfeel.

  Nearby were what appeared to be venetian blinds floating in the water. They were in fact plastic slats on which the spat, or baby oysters, settle after they are fertilised. It’s this urge to reproduce that determines so much of any oyster’s quality. In spring and early summer the oysters fatten up and become laden with sperm and eggs. But then, when the water is warm enough and there is a downpour, the oysters pump the water full of eggs and sperm, which commingle in the water. The resulting spat eventually cling on to whatever surface they can find, from rock to unlucky hermit crab.

  After spawning, oysters appear spent and flaccid, lose weight and that creamy taste and texture. Shortly, however, they regain some condition and have a more flinty taste, meatier texture and aromas of iodine, making them more suitable for eating with a dry white wine, such as muscadet or chablis. Oysters can spawn as long as the water is warm enough and there is a flow of fresh water. Their urge to spawn can be kicked on by a full moon as well.

  When I asked Buckley about the adage ‘never eat an oyster in a month without an R’, he replied bluntly, ‘What a lot of bullshit. I have a lot of French customers, who prefer them after they have spawned.’

  Buckley will harvest these oysters when they are about three years old and sell them directly to restaurants. The one thing he insists on is that his oysters are freshly shucked—he won’t sell them to restaurants that open oysters before service.

  ‘What’s the point?’ he asked. ‘I have gone to all this trouble to create the best oysters I can. Why let them sit open for a few hours? They are at their best the moment they are opened.’ I mentioned to him that for me at that moment oysters were off the menu.

  Buckley pointed to the sand dune on the other side of the estuary. There was a large rise in the sand covered by light scrub, banksias and wattles. ‘That is a midden. They are all along the coast here. The Aboriginal people ate and still eat what the land had to offer,’ he said. ‘If you caught a goanna, you ate it. If there were daisy yams you dug them up and ate them. Look at all that food,’ he said, pointing to the Sydney rock oysters that were growing on the rocks. ‘I don’t think I have ever heard of an Indigenous vegetarian.’

  Seeing the way that Shane and other oyster growers look after not only the waterway but the hinterland gave me another ethical choice to think about when My Year Without Meat was eventually over.

  11

  The Denouement

  There is a 1968 film about King Henry II called The Lion in Winter starring Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins and John Castle. In it the old king, played by O’Toole, discovers he is being usurped by his sons, played by Hopkins and Castle. He throws them both into the dungeon to await their death. Down there they hear him coming. Prince Richard, played by Hopkins, says, ‘He’s here. He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg,’ to which Castle’s Prince Geoffrey replies derisively, ‘My, you chivalric fool … as if the way one fell down mattered.’ Hopkins draws himself up and responds calmly, ‘When the fall is all there is, it matters.’

  THE DEATH

  We keep reserves of energy in our body stored in different ways. Some of it is stored as muscle sugar. When you exert yourself, like when lifting a weight or climbing a hill, the sugar in your muscles, called glycogen, is combined with oxygen to power muscles. When there is not enough oxygen to react with the glycogen, a compound called lactate forms. It causes the pH in your muscles to change and momentarily you feel a burning sensation. When you get your breath back a little, the lactate changes back to another substance, called pyruvate, which reacts with oxygen to create energy. Things go back to normal.

  That muscle sugar, glycogen, is an important part of the enjoyment people get from eating meat. When an animal dies the glycogen is transformed into lactic acid. Because the animal is dead there is no oxygen pumping around the blood. So an anaerobic transformation occurs, where enzymes break down the glycogen into lactic acid. This lowers the pH. The lower the pH of something, the more acidic it is. Lactic acid gives the meat a clean finish on the palate. It also assists in the dry ageing of meat. This is the process in which a whole carcass, or part thereof, is hung in a coolroom and allowed to age for anywhere from fourteen days to three months. During this period the skin and fat protect the meat inside from the air, stopping it from drying out and mummifying. It protects the
meat from bugs getting inside and spoiling it. The lower pH also helps stop the growth of the bugs.

  The other part of dry ageing is that enzymes break down the muscles, making them more tender. Enzymes also break down proteins into amino acids. As we know, amino acids, such as glutamate, make food taste yummier. Ever noticed how different a chicken tastes when it is close to (but not past) its use-by date? Try it. Even an extra few days in the fridge will increase the flavour of your average chook.

  This is how marinades work. These are often high-acid preparations, in which we immerse meat to add flavour and tenderise the flesh. Some acids denature animal protein. Add lemon juice to raw fish and you get the classic dish ceviche. Put pineapple with meat and the lot can quickly turn to mush as the enzyme bromelase breaks down the muscle fibre. There is another element to marinating and that is time. These acidic environments slow down bugs that would otherwise make meat go off. By allowing the meat to age, marinades retard bacterial decomposition and enhance enzymatic breakdown. Giving meat a good marination not only allows it to take on the flavour of the herbs and juices around it but also develop more naturally occurring deliciousness from amino acids. Traditional dishes like escabeche, in which game meats and fish are immersed in spiced vinegar, were very, very acidic and were more of a pre-refrigeration preservative than a marinade. Despite the meat being quite sour, escabeche is very delicious, as the protein inside is quietly breaking down into amino acids.