21/04/2026
Merroir, is one of my favourite words.
It is one of those sexy French words that just rolls off the tongue. It comes from ‘Mer’ meaning sea and ‘Terroir’ meaning sense of place. Keep the Mer, add the oir and you have Merroir. And it’s meaning is even more beautiful than it sounds.
In wine, people talk about terroir: the way soil, slope, weather and place shape flavour. In seafood, the equivalent is merroir: the taste of the sea, and of a particular stretch of coast.
Few places in Australia express merroir more clearly than Western Australia’s Great Southern, where the Southern Ocean meets sheltered harbours, estuaries, rocky headlands and one of the most influential current systems in the country. Along this coast, seafood is shaped not by one single environment, but by a mosaic of waters that change with exposure, season, salinity and movement.
The Great Southern is a coast of contrasts. Around Albany, open ocean energy pushes into King George Sound, while Princess Royal Harbour and Oyster Harbour offer more protected conditions. Farther along the region, reefs, surf beaches, granite points, estuaries and inlets each create slightly different marine habitats. That matters because seafood reflects more than species alone. It reflects where an animal has grown, what it has eaten, how much the water moves, how salty it is, and what the season is doing. The result is a style of seafood that often feels clean, mineral, wind-shaped and deeply seasonal.
A major force behind that regional character is the Leeuwin Current. This warm current runs south along Western Australia and then east along the south coast, influencing temperature, larval transport and biological productivity. On the south coast, its interaction with local conditions helps set the rhythm of life in nearshore and estuarine environments. It is one of the reasons the Great Southern is not simply a cold southern coast, but a meeting place where broader ocean circulation, local wind, tidal exchange and freshwater input all interact.
Those forces shape seafood in practical ways. In sheltered systems such as Oyster Harbour, estuarine exchange and tidal movement influence the salinity and nutrient patterns that affect marine life. In more exposed coastal water, seafood develops under stronger surge, more oxygenated water and different feeding conditions. That is why seafood from one part of the Great Southern can feel firmer, sweeter, more mineral or more robust than seafood from another nearby location. Merroir is really the taste of those small but powerful differences in water and place.
An Oyster from Albany will taste totally different from an Oyster from NSW’s Saphire Coast even though they are the exact same Oyster species, the ‘Sydney Rock Oyster’. Merroir makes all the difference.
To understand the Great Southern’s merroir we first must understand the climate, the wind, the waves, the currents and the different species that thrive in the Great Southern and to do that we must look towards the traditional custodians of the land, a people who have been fishing and farming this region for thousands of years, a people that know. The Menang/ Noongar people. This means more than just paying lip-service and nodding at appropriate times during welcome to country. This is truly recognising that there were people living in the Great Southern over 18 000 years ago who not only lived but thrived in a land of plenty because they understood their lives were indelibly entwined with the land and the land with them. They knew when the paperbark trees bloomed it signalled the Salmon would soon start running.
At Wattierup / Oyster Harbour, the ancient stone fish traps associated with Menang people remain one of the clearest, tangible examples of the Menang people’s relationship with the fragile marine ecosystem and one of the first examples in mankind’s history of sustainable fishing practices. For thousands of years the Menang people used this fishing method whereby using locally sourced dark lateritic rock they would build semi-circular weirs on the tidal flats not just in Oyster Harbour but across the region.
They were built according to sustainable fishing practices. Larger rocks on the bottom and smaller rocks at the top, rocks that were just the right size and positioned with just the right spacing to ensure that smaller juvenile fish, the fingerlings were able to escape and continue growing and breeding, they only took what was needed thus ensuring there was always fish for next season, for the future and for their children. During high tide the fish were able to enter, as the water receded it would trap target fish such as black bream, herring, King George Whiting, Sea mullet, Cobbler and Australian Salmon which would then be caught by hand or speared.
These traps worked with tidal movement and fish behaviour, showing a sophisticated reading of estuarine rhythms: where fish would move, when they would gather, and how the shape of the shoreline and the ebbing tide could be used to harvest carefully and intelligently.
That history belongs in a conversation about merroir because merroir is not only about chemistry or currents. It is also about knowledge of place. Hence stemming from ‘Terroir’, sense of place. Long before the language of provenance appeared in modern food culture, Menang people were already had a term for this “Wardan Boodjar” and refers to the “Sea Country or Coast and encompasses not just the physical connection between the sea and the people but also the cultural, spiritual and ecological significance.
Albany Oysters are a great example of the link between the Noongar Menang people who have been custodians the Kinjarling Boodjar for thousands of years and present day Great Southern. The Menang people found in Oyster Harbour and along our rocky shorelines an abundant food source in the Native Flat Oyster (Ostrea Angasi). In the 1800’s The Great Angasi reefs were destroyed through intensive dredge fishing, then we cleared the land which led to sediment runoff, then we farmed the land which led to nutrient loading. All these factors destroyed any hope Oyster Harbour had of naturally rebuilding. When we destroy one part of a marine ecosystem the effects are as a ripple upon Oyster Harbour on a clear, windless day. Seagrass is a natural hatchery and sanctuary for small fish, crustaceans and invertebrates who all depend upon it. Oysters filter up to 200liters of water a day and they release nutrients (p**p them out essentially) upon the harbour or Ocean floor, this is premium seagrass fertilizer, so if you destroy the oyster beds you destroy the Seagrasses and then on down the ecosystem. The biodiversity is 2-3 times greater around oyster beds than a mere 200m away. This truly illustrates how important Oyster beds are for the marine ecosystem. In the last 20 years as Oyster Harbour has been repopulated with Oysters, specifically the Sydney Rock Oyster (Saccostrea Glomerata) there has been a steady, measure resurgence of the fragile and once depleted eco-system.
One of the greatest treasures of the Great Southern are Sardines, the region’s small pelagic fish that make the link between ocean condition and flavour especially clear. Australian sardines are a key part of the south coast marine system. DPIRD material identifies the south coast as an important area for purse seine fishing targeting pilchards and other small pelagic species, and notes that schools move close to major population centres such as King George Sound. These fish convert plankton-rich water into energy, oil and flesh, which means their abundance and condition are closely tied to seasonal marine productivity. When currents, shelter and food availability align, sardines concentrate, and the entire ecosystem responds.
This is part of what gives Great Southern seafood its living, seasonal character. Sardines are not just another fish species on a list; they are a signal of what the water is doing. Their condition, oil content and timing reflect the sea itself. When bait pushes into sheltered water around Albany, predators gather, seabirds work harder, and the coast feels suddenly charged with movement. From a merroir perspective, sardines may be one of the purest edible expressions of current, plankton and season on this coast.
Then there is Western Australian salmon, one of the most visible and dramatic seasonal fish movements along the south coast. National fisheries reporting states that the species spawns in Western Australia, with eggs and larvae then dispersed by the Leeuwin Current. The fish later grow and mature in Eastern waters before moving back toward their spawning areas in the west. This gives salmon a life cycle that is inseparable from current systems. Their famous seasonal presence along the south coast is not random. It is the visible surface of a much larger oceanic pattern.
That makes salmon central to the Great Southern’s merroir. They are fish shaped not only by local beaches and bait schools, but by an ocean-scale journey linked to current flow, larval drift and migration. Their autumn movement along the coast often overlaps with periods when baitfish are active closer inshore, tying salmon, sardines, currents and coastal productivity into one connected story. When people watch salmon schools gather along Great Southern beaches, they are seeing merroir in motion: a regional identity expressed through migration, timing and water movement.
So when we talk about the merroir or the Wardan Boodjar of the Great Southern we are really talking about a layered coastal conversation between currents, coastline, estuaries, tidal exchange, plankton, baitfish, migration and cultural knowledge. It is there in the clean intensity of shellfish from sheltered water. It is there in the richness and timing of sardines. It is there in the muscular seasonal return of Australian salmon. And it is there in the Menang fish traps at Oyster Harbour, which remind us that this coast’s patterns were being understood and worked with long before modern seafood language tried to explain them. The Great Southern’s seafood does not merely come from the sea. It tastes of this sea, this season and this long relationship with place.
