by Tessa Moriarty photos by Nicko Lawrence
As people came in from the outdoors, their cheeks were aglow with the cold. But the warmth of the fire inside the Merricks Store, the excitement of conversation and the blush of the Ballieu Cuvee Brut, soon made it feel like the evening was going to sparkle.
Before long, we were ushered into the beautifully set tables of the open dining room and welcomed to the night’s event by the Western Port Writes Festival Program Director Karina Smith.
Unfortunately, one of the event speakers Max Allen, couldn’t be with us at the last minute. However, his colleague and friend Richard Cornish – going it on his own – started us off with a standing toast to the sea and a get better soon wish for Max.
Richard Cornish, an award-winning food writer, and author of such titles as Phillipa’s Home-baking, Brain Food, My Year Without Meat and the wonderful MoVida series (which he co-authored with Frank Camorra), is a storyteller well connected to place. And in this instance it is his connection to this place. To the Merrick’s Store and the Western Port, where he has spent many years. On the land and the seas, and the beaches, he has wandered.
Richard pays great tribute to the many women in the stories he tells us about. From the First Nations women who harvested the flat Angasi mud oysters for their families, over thousands of years. To the women who farmed the land on the hills above our shores, and those women in the early days of Merricks Store, who laid the foundations of the great eating place we know it as today.
In his younger days as he walked the beaches of our bay, Richard always knew there was something missing. He felt the presence of those who were here before him. And as he tells us ‘when you look for something, it reveals itself to you.’ So it was, that he discovered the story of the local Ostrea Angasi – the native Australian southern flat mud oyster. Endemic to southern Australia, from Western Australia to southeast New South Wales and around Victoria and Tasmania.
The fat flat salty sandstone-coloured local oysters that were prolific in the 1840’s, but by the 1880’s they had virtually disappeared due to the over-harvesting by immigrants. And as Richard went on to say ‘the angasi oysters became ghosts of the ocean.’
But luckily, the shells or middens of the oysters and other shellfish act as substrate for new oyster colonies. And while there have been many attempts to revive the local mud oyster, only in recent years has there been success. A company in Flinders has been working to create a local industry and bring the oyster of the Western Port back to our offshore waters. For one of his own stories about that – read Richard Cornish’s article – The Sad but True History of Native Oysters
In addition to Richard’s storytelling was the wine and food that we were treated to by chefs and staff of Merricks Store. The entrée of Angasi oysters of Tasmanian and the Sydney Rock oysters, the mains of succulent chicken in vadouvan sauce, melt in the mouth beef cheeks in green peppercorn sauce, potato gratin, fennel salad and Merricks farm brassicas. All beautifully matched with Elgee Park Cabernet Merlot and a Ballieu Pinot Gris. Our palates and our appetites were satiated. Then just when I thought we could not fit in another morsel, there was more. Cheeses, lavosh and pate de fruit profiteroles with whipped chocolate ganache. Of course, this was accompanied by a gorgeous petite Elgee Park Cuvee Rouge, 2018.
To complete the evenings storytelling, Richard gave us some gems about his writing process. ‘Storytelling is about people.’ ‘We are held together by stories.’ And for him (and many other writers), it is about ‘being present to the moment we are in. Being where the stories happen.’
