The oyster is your world

I am on Clyde River at Batemans Bay, paddling a kayak with former all-Australian sailing and windsurfing champion Ian Dewey, who is talking enthusiastically to my back.

Dewey, who started Straight Up Kayaks in 1996, offering guided surf and open-ocean trips as well as escorted river excursions, is giving me a colonial history lesson. He explains that Batemans Bay could have been the capital of Australia. It was named by Captain Cook after the captain of the HMS Northumberland, which Cook mastered.

The Clyde (Bhundoo) River was named by Alexander Berry after the famous Scottish river. The Illawarra and South Coast Steam Navigation Company discovered it to be navigable in 1854. I'm enjoying the history lesson and the tranquil scenery but the real attraction here lies beneath: the oysters.

Luckily for me, Dewey, a former oceanographer who also worked as an exercise analyst in naval weapons research, knows his molluscs.

Oyster farming began here in about 1860, Dewey says. Ten years later there was a fleet of 40 oyster boats and today 22 farms produce the coveted Sydney rock oyster, which is considered by many connoisseurs to be the finest of all the edible filter-feeders.

Dewey tells me the oyster's reputation as an aphrodisiac comes from its own hectic reproductive lifestyle - an oyster produces up to one million larvae. If they are "bored", oysters also have the ability to change sex; many males turn into females.

As Dewey paddles manfully around tomato sticks, he points out the marauding stingrays and calls my attention to the sound of feeding prawns. He points to a bird stalking the shoreline: "The oystercatcher is one of the world's most misnamed birds," he says.

"Oysters require neither catching nor even reasonable stalking skills.