Hallidays Point Fish Farm & Hatchery operated from March 1987 until 4th July 1999.

The farm was quite special.

It was the first to operate as private catchment and private disposal and water re-use. It was vertically integrated with hatchery, nursery and growout capabilities. Indeed, these were the reason it survived and prospered commercially.

It took 12 months of pleading with banks to get the $60,000 funding to begin construction. When we started construction the land was covered with15 year old re-growth.

Initially, we purchased a large drott. It was a D600 C Hannamag, which is a German built metal track machine with rippers and a 3.5 cubic meter 4 in 1 front bucket instead of blade. The machine was 22 tonne with 140 horsepower. The bucket allowed for the placement of good quality clay around the walls and the weight allowed for adequate compaction. To this day the 25 ponds do not leak.

The land was cleared and ponds constructed over several months but the farm began producing fingerlings after only a few weeks. We constructed the hatchery and the nursery ponds first and within 3 months we had turned over $20,000 in fingerling sales.

Altogether the farm took 450 hours of machine time to construct. The Hannamag cost $22,000 and it did $30,000 worth of earth works. We spent $5000 on fuel and sold the machine for $17,000.

The fish farm sold fingerlings of silver perch, yellow belly, Bass, Koi, Catfish and goldfish. It also had a small growout operation of 3-5 tonnes of silver perch per two year cycle. In those days silver perch were $24.50 per kilogram live.

The fish farm also exported fingerlings and broodstock into China and Taiwan and we acted as consultants to the Chinese Government on a few occasions.

We designed RAS systems (The Pod) and built the largest recirculating aquaculture facility in the country, at Taree NSW. It is still in operation although it lacks technical input as do many RAS systems in this country.

We also developed breeding and spawning technology for freshwater native species which was cutting edge at the time.

Hallidays Point Fish Farm ceased on the 4th of July 1999 with my marrige break-down. I was simply escorted off the property and, legally, not permitted to come within 100 meters.

At that time the farm had approximately $200,000 worth of stock in Australian Native Species plus many thousands of dollars in broodstock of goldfish and other alternate species.

All of those fish were simply left to bird predation and starvation. The fish stocks included irreplaceable imported broodstock of goldfish and Koi as well as Bass, Yellow Belly and unrelated strains of Silver Perch.