Bluff and Oysters

Courtesy of NZ Today magazine.

 Oysters. How does something that looks so awful end up being such a taste sensation? I saw my first oysters the day I saw my first crayfish & and I couldn’t believe either of them.

It was 1948 and a cold winter’s day in Dunedin. I was hurrying to the North East Valley primary school and stopped to look in the window of a fish shop & one of those traditional ones with tiled window displays.

I was intrigued by small, narrow, glass, screw topped bottles that appeared to contain several pieces of what can only be described as snot. And sitting alongside was this fearsome red creature, all spiny and ugly looking. I had no idea at all what these things were and that night I asked my grandparents, at whose house I was staying, what these things might have been.

“Oysters and crayfish,” I was told by Nannie Dick in her gentle Scottish brogue. “Wealthy people eat those.”

“How?” I wondered to myself as they didn’t look like any food that I was used to. But I was satisfied that they were of this earth and not from outer space.

In 1954 my parents bought a shop at the seaside resort of Brighton and both oysters and crayfish became regular mealtime delicacies. During the oyster season my father would order large tins containing several dozen oysters and I got the job of opening the tins and spooning a dozen into small plastic pottles, ready for sale & the days of the glass bottles had already long gone.

The crayfish came courtesy of the fishermen at Taieri Mouth who would call into the shop on a regular basis dropping off sugar bags of crays and I had the job of boiling the washing copper and dropping the dark brown critters into the foaming water and watching them turn bright red. I developed a taste for both & but particularly oysters, raw or battered, crayfish I have always found a bit sweet.

They were Bluff oysters of course and I never realised that there were any other sort until I visited Auckland in the late 1960s and was taken to lunch by some business people.

“Doing lunch” to discuss business was just coming into fashion in Auckland and it was even more fashionable to have oysters & they were the delicacy of the moment. Apparently.

We went to a restaurant near the Grafton Bridge and my hosts asked if I would like to try oysters.

To be honest I didn’t think that there any big deal about oysters, but they seemed to think there was. Oysters had become part of the staple winter diet in Dunedin.  But when the oysters arrived at our table in the Auckland restaurant that day I was appalled.  They were harsher looking than the soft hued creatures I had been brought up on and they tasted sharp and over-salted. I was told they were local rock oysters and so I returned to Dunedin secure in the knowledge that while we didn’t have a harbour bridge, we at least had far, far superior oysters in the South.

In recent years the Bluff oyster has become a highly prized seasonal delicacy in Auckland and it’s fashionable to go along to one of the trendy Auckland eateries, cafes and restaurants and gorge yourself on the first of the season’s catch. These are flown North in a spirit of competition a bit like getting the first Scottish grouse of the season onto a table in a London restaurant. And they are almost always described as “freshly shucked”.

Now it is quite correct to use the word “shuck” for the difficult task of opening the oyster and sliding the creature off the shell, but in Bluff, the home of the fabled creature, it’s good enough to use the word “opened”, rather than pretend to be trendy.

And I suspect that the growing popularity and reputation of the Bluff oyster has had an effect on the price & back in the days when I opened tins and spooned a dozen into plastic pots they were a seasonal delight rather than a very expensive one.

I’m a Bluff oyster devotee & not just because they are fashionable, but like many southerners they are something that I grew up with and are part of traditional Southern fare along with blue cod, swede that’s been touched by the winter frost, Jersey Benne potatoes, leg of lamb or hogget and, of course, cheese rolls.  And I also know a bit about Bluff & perhaps the last true working port town left in New Zealand.  My uncle Tom Fordyce was a policeman here in the 1940s and 1950s.

While the oysters are called “Bluff” it’s probably more accurate to call them Foveaux Strait, but Bluff is where the oyster fleet is based and so that’s become the popular name. All of which leads me to the invitation that arrived via Lindsay Beer to attend this year’s Bluff Oyster Festival. Lindsay’s an Invercargill journalist who works in the field of public relations and “Bluff” is among his clients.

I am not a big fan of wine and food festivals, they’re just a bit too “spesh”, but the Bluff Oyster Festival sounded as though it might be a bit more me, besides which, any chance to get south for a day or two.

The Bluff Oyster Festival has had a bit of a rocky road and for the past couple of years its actually been held in Invercargill & which is almost as silly as the Ellerslie Flower Show being located in Manurewa & or now Christchurch!

But this year it was being moved back to Bluff and it had to work & otherwise it would be back to Invercargill. So the organisers pulled out all stops to see that it worked. And it did work. Within hours of going on sale all of the tickets had been sold and the word was that there would be no more available. But, on the day, there were walk-up door sales and nobody was turned away. The place more than bulged at the seams. It was jam-packed.

The organisers were obviously hoping for a fine day but they didn’t get it. However not even a cold southerly with occasional driving rain squalls took the edge off the day & if anything, the weather kind of added to the authenticity, because dredging for oysters in Foveaux Strait is probably only second to catching crabs in the North Pacific as seen in the Discovery Channel’s “The World’s Deadliest Catch”.  This is not a job for the faint-hearted and having what can probably only be described as a typical Bluff winter’s day added to the occasion. This was not a flash, trendy, pretentious festival.

 This was heartland stuff & good honest, hard-working folk celebrating the local seafood.

The venue was down near the port in a large, old building that was used for the “events” such as the oyster opening (not shucking) contest, the fashion parade and the fancy dress competition. Outside there were three large marquees & one for sitting in, one for drinking in and one for eating in. And these were interlinked by open areas with some sheets of plywood laid on the gravel/earth ground as a rudimentary dance floor. A makeshift stage was erected on the back of a truck and local singers and bands entertained while Fat Freddy’s Drop were billed as the star attraction. In fact though, it was the seafood that was the main attraction. A team of openers struggled to keep up with the demand for raw oysters at $24 a dozen while the stalls offering the battered variety were equally busy at $30 a dozen.

But there wasn’t only oysters & there was also that other legendary local seafood & blue cod, served in battered, bite-sized chunks. I just love blue cod & flaky, white, subtle flavour. Just delicious. There was also salmon from Stewart Island and piping hot seafood chowder which was the first to run out.

The rain and the wind made standing outside uncomfortable and the gravel/earth outdoor areas were quickly churned into a shallow sea of mud, but nobody seemed to care.

Some visiting Aucklanders were overhead to complain that it was “freezing” where it was actually far from freezing at about eight or nine degrees. Some visitors from Queensland were far more comfortable saying the change from semi-tropical heat just added to the spirit of the show. And I had to agree.

Everyone was dressed for the occasion, but there was a distinct lack of fashion frippery and we launched into eating, drinking and being merry.

It was a great, great event.

We left at about four o’clock heading back into Invercargill where we were staying for the night and, yes, absolutely predictably there was a Police drink driving operation just on the outskirts of Bluff.

The wind had dropped slightly the next day, the rain had gone away altogether but the sky remained partly cloudy. We headed back out to Bluff to have a look around the old town. Radio and TV host Marcus Lush has made his home in Bluff but I hadn’t spotted him at the Festival the day before. But then, I hadn’t seen mayor Tim either although he had been there.  The town had got totally behind the festival. There had been craft and other stalls along the footpath of the main street on the Saturday, but on Sunday morning the town was quiet.

Fishing boats were heading out to sea, pounding through moderate seas out into Foveaux Strait as we did the predictable and drove to the end of SH1 and took the compulsory photograph, like several million others have done before.

Other port towns like Lyttleton and Port Chalmers may remain working ports, but they’ve become fashionable and property prices have soared as worker’s cottages have been restored into quaint residences and expensive new homes have been built.

But Bluff remains essentially, well, Bluff, notwithstanding the arrival of Mister Lush.

There are empty shops, large empty buildings and there’s an air of gentle decay over some parts of it. But this adds to the quaintness, genuiness and authenticity of Bluff.

We walked the streets and saw that the huge Club Hotel had closed since my last visit, then we walked the wharves, saw a huge sea lion “basking” in the chill waters of the harbour and then drove to the top of Bluff Hill where the top of Stewart Island was under a blanket of cloud, but the views are truly sensational.

We had stayed the night in Invercargill, thinking there’d be no available accommodation in Bluff.

But there are good motels, backpacker hotels and a top quality restaurant along with a cafe or two. A weekend in Bluff would be a fascinating step back into the past.

We’d flown into Dunedin on Friday and driven down on Saturday morning using SH1 through Balclutha and Gore. The return to Dunedin was via the Catlins road through Owaka giving us another glimpse of this forgotten and often overlooked corner of New Zealand. The Bluff Oyster Festival had been a resounding, overwhelming success.

It was true blue, dinky die heartland New Zealand and its future must be assured.

Story and photographs by Allan Dick. Previously published in issue 26 of NZ TODAY. To subscribe phone 0800 611 911 or e-mail .

print