Some people think oysters are just for eating. Those people never met Jill, the family ‘pet’

It was the glory that killed Bernie Connell’s champion.

Well, it could have been the flood. Or maybe old age. What the retired oyster farmer, known throughout Batemans Bay as the King of the Clyde River, is sure of is this: weeks after his prized Pacific oyster, Jill, was crowned Australia’s biggest at the Narooma Oyster Festival for the second time, he found her dead.

Heavy-set Jill lived through the Black Summer and its aftermath in 2020, when strong rains washed ash off the banks and into the Batemans Bay estuary.

But four years later, she was too sick to withstand the freshwater floods she’d been surviving for a decade. Connell puts it down to the post-competition celebrations.

“She might have been handled a thousand times or more,” he says. “I walk around the crowd showing her off, and everyone wants to pick her up, and they’d drop her a little bit.” He winces. “Poor bugger. She’d be a big’un now, two years older.”

In her heyday, Jill weighed 3.01 kilograms and was named the inaugural world’s heaviest oyster by the Australian Book of Records.

For all of her girth – “She’s a pretty oyster,” Connell says. “That perfect shape.” – she was short. She lacked length. And that cost her.

To be recognised as the largest oyster on Earth by Guinness World Records – an honour that qualifies on length – Jill had to have more millimetres on her. Although she weighed almost twice as much as the 1.62kg, 35.5cm Danish titleholder, Jill’s stature pipped her at the post.

Connell is not bothered about that. The result of one Narooma Oyster Festival championship, however, is a point of contention.

The Connell family has been farming oysters on the same NSW South Coast lease for 100 years. For the past five, Connell has won every “Australia’s biggest oyster” competition at the festival, except in 2022.

That’s when neighbour and rival Kirk Hargreaves took the title with his oyster, Uncle Ray. Both he and Jill weighed 2.71kg, so the trophy was awarded on length. Jill lost by a centimetre.

“Maybe he slipped a 50 [dollar note] to the judges,” jokes fellow competitor Jim Yiannaros, known throughout the region for his charm. “He’s a good bloke, so we didn’t protest.”

If they had protested, said Connell and Yiannaros, it would have been about the measuring tape having to be whipped out at all. Uncle Ray’s weight, they say, was bolstered by “hitchhikers” – foreign Sydney Rock Oysters and barnacles that had started growing on his shell.

Connell had filed Jill’s down. The rules are that each oyster is clean and healthy, which a veterinarian checks on the day. But Hargreaves slipped through the cracks.

“That is not right,” Yiannaros says with a smile. “I can’t jump on the scales and have [Connell] on my back, and say this is how much I weigh … if you go and buy a kilo prawn, you want a kilo of prawn, you don’t get a scoop of ice in there.”

As Yiannaros navigates the tinnie towards Hargreaves’ shed, Connell – who is a man of few words but delivers them in good humour – cheekily warns this masthead: “Don’t you tell him we said all that, it’ll start trouble.”

When asked about the foreign oysters on Uncle Ray, Hargreaves laughs. They were part of the family, he insists, so he had to keep them on his champion.

“It was in the rules apparently,” he says with a grin. “So yeah, there was a bit of controversy, but still came away with the chocolates, that’s the main thing.”

There is now a pre-weigh to check over contenders before they’re weighed on-stage.

Hargreaves is no stranger to the ribbing from Connell and Yiannaros; the first generation oyster farmer has been on the Clyde River since 1998.

Beneath the trio’s banter is a camaraderie and deep respect that can only come from decades of working in side-by-side sheds.

Like Jill, Uncle Ray died shortly after his victory. He was nine, one year younger than Jill when she died. Uncle Ray’s descendent, King Ray III, will be Hargreaves’ contender at the festival this weekend.

But the bloodline of the oysters does not guarantee they will be a champion. To this, Yiannaros can attest; his giant Pacific oyster Georgie was from the same batch as Jill, though she’s never quite reached Jill’s level of plump. Last year, Georgie was 2.22kg.

That’s still significantly heavier than most of the Pacific oysters we see grown in Australia, something Connell says is demonstrative of the magic of the Clyde River, considered one of the purest and cleanest rivers on the eastern seaboard.

But is there something more at play?

Introduced to Tasmania from Japan in the 1940s, Pacific oysters are banned in all of Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and most of NSW.

A potential threat to our native rock oyster, the Pacific oysters cultivated in the Clyde, Georges and Hawkesbury rivers are functionally sterile. The Georges and Hawkesbury, however, were hit hard by floods and deadly Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome (POMS) outbreaks, which wiped out millions of molluscs.

While the Clyde has grappled with oyster loss due to environmental challenges – “Sometimes all your leases go out to sea,” Connell says. “You’ve got to bloody start again then ... thousands of baskets. Anyway, that’s farming” – it’s largely been spared from parasitic protozoans that have, at times, crippled the other rivers’ industries.

That’s given Pacific oysters such as King Ray III a luxury his northern neighbours, which can be sold for eating from 12 months of age, don’t have: time.

Nature, however, can’t get all the credit. Hargreaves, Connell and Yiannaros, once they identify the baby as a fast grower and pluck it from its batch, expend significant effort nurturing their candidates to get them to gargantuan status.

Hargreaves, for example, drops his contenders deep so that they can feast on the abundance of algae at that level. A month before the competition, he brings them up into the intertidal zone.

That adds weight to the shell as it hardens in the sun and strengthens the adductor muscles, which keep the oyster tightly closed and allow it to retain moisture when out of the water.

Then there are the bandits. Keeping them safe from being stolen requires hiding the baskets that the Pacific oysters call home towards the back of their farms. Thieves hankering for a thrill, and fishermen for a feed, are unlikely to spend time manoeuvring their boats through the rows when they can take a basket off the first line.

That does mean the farmers lose track of where they are. Connell definitely spent a few hours looking for Jill more than once. But why bother?

“Just for fun,” Hargreaves says. “It’s a bit of banter between us all.”

The Narooma Oyster Festival, held this year from May 1 to May 3, does not offer prize money for its biggest oyster competition.

There are whispers that Connell could have collected $100,000 for Jill from a foreign buyer who wanted to eat the biggest oyster in the world, but the thought of eating Jill brought a tear to Connell’s eye when she was alive. “You’re tough,” he responded when asked if he would.

Hargreaves claims he refused an offer for $50,000 for one of his behemoths that has since died. A Sydney seafood purchasing agent told this masthead those prices sound “a bit inflated even with media hype behind it”.

The average Pacific oyster sold for eating weighs between 50 and 80 grams; they are sold unshucked by Fair Seafood for $28/dozen. Yiannaros’ farm Batemans Bay Oysters sells grandes that weigh between 340g and 500g for $82/dozen, and he has previously sold 1kg oysters at the festival for $100 each.

In hindsight, Hargreaves says, had he known the oyster was going to die shortly afterwards, he probably would have sold it.

“But when they’re living, it’s just not worth it,” he says. “It’s better to have it as a pet.”

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