Before highways, refrigerated trucks and container terminals, Port Phillip was a working highway.
For generations, small ketches, schooners and trading vessels crossed the bay carrying goods between Melbourne, the Mornington Peninsula, the Bellarine Peninsula and the western shores. They carried potatoes, lime, timber, supplies and passengers. They also carried a product that tells an overlooked story about the relationship between coastal waters, food production and regional communities: shell grit.
Radio Marinara recently revisited the shell-grit trade, a once-important bay industry that collected naturally replenishing shell deposits from locations including Lara, Clifton Springs, Portarlington and St Leonards. The shells were bagged and shipped to Melbourne, where they were used for poultry feed, trotting tracks, glass manufacture and other purposes.
It may sound like a small historical detail, but it offers a larger lesson for today.
Seafood and marine policy are often discussed as though the only questions are fishing, recreation or conservation. The history of Port Phillip shows that coastal waters have always supported much more: transport, food production, local enterprise, regional jobs, manufacturing and community identity.
A visit to Williamstown captures the vital pulse of Victoria’s late nineteenth-century maritime boom. Between 1860 and 1890, the port served as Melbourne's primary deep-water gateway, welcoming a continuous influx of vessels carrying immigrants and manufactured goods from the UK and Europe. Standing as a grand sentinel from this era is the Williamstown Customs House (completed in 1875), which served as the critical checkpoint for collecting colonial duties and managing border shipping traffic.
Crucially, Williamstown was directly linked to the colony’s economic engine via the railway line completed in 1859. This infrastructure allowed heavy machinery arriving at the piers to be loaded straight onto freight trains destined for the goldfields, bypassing the shallow waters of the Yarra River and rapidly fueling the wealth of "Marvellous Melbourne."
The sail traders were not romantic relics at the time. They were practical businesses. They connected communities that roads did not yet serve efficiently. They made use of local resources. They depended on weather, tides, local knowledge and the health of the bay itself.
By the 1940s, better roads and trucks made much of this trade uneconomic. The vessels disappeared from regular commercial service, but the lesson remains relevant. When we make decisions about bays, ports, habitat, access and coastal development, we should remember that working waters have a history and a value beyond what can be seen from the shore.
For seafood consumers, this matters because food systems do not begin at the supermarket or restaurant. They begin in places, communities and ecosystems. The seafood on a plate is connected to fishing families, ports, processors, transport systems, marine habitats and local knowledge built over generations.
A consumer-first seafood future should therefore respect both innovation and heritage. Australia needs modern traceability, accurate labels, stronger food integrity systems and better consumer information. But it also needs to remember that healthy coastal communities are part of food security.
Port Phillip’s sail traders remind us that the bay was never merely a backdrop to Melbourne. It was an economic engine, a food-and-trade corridor and a shared working landscape.
That history deserves to be better known as Victoria considers the future of its marine spaces.
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