Farmers in a prime oyster growing region south of Hobart are making the heart-breaking decision to close their operations because a mysterious illness is killing oysters in the bay. After three years of stock losses, watching millions of dollars including their superannuation and homes vanish, some have reached breaking point.
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00:00This once bustling, oyster-growing waterway at Cremorne, south of Hobart, has turned silent.
00:09Oysters are dead or dying.
00:10Except there's something in the water that's stopping the fish from feeding and killing
00:14them.
00:15There's something massively wrong in the ecosystem somewhere along the line.
00:19Ron Schwenke put 800,000 baby oysters in the bay in spring, hoping for the best.
00:25At harvest, they would have been worth three-quarters of a million dollars, but now they're worth
00:30nothing.
00:31We're really the canaries of the bay at the moment.
00:37Whatever's happening in the bay, we'll see with our test oysters, so it's not looking
00:44good.
00:45During the 1990s, Pipe Clay Lagoon was one of the most productive oyster-growing waterways
00:50in the state.
00:52Hundreds and millions of oysters came out of here.
00:55Now these farms are struggling.
00:58It shows just how dramatically things can change in the world of farming.
01:03Farmers say the state government was slow to act.
01:06The mystery illness has been killing oysters for three years.
01:09In this situation, we're just not getting any information, any kind of help really to
01:15try to, or a very limited amount of help.
01:18Stuart Hanson can't hang on.
01:20He's packing up.
01:21It's been too long, it's been a few years, and you just can't keep putting money into
01:27a bottomless pit.
01:28A new investigation funded by the Tasmanian government started in December.
01:34We've got an aquatic microbiologist, we've got a physiologist, an aquatic veterinarian,
01:40and we've got a marine ecologist.
01:41So we've got a good suite of experts and technical staff to support this study.
01:48A wide net for a complex problem that's already driven farmers out of business.