Betty Long, 'The Kelp Lady'

In January 1970, The Australian Women’s Weekly ran a double-page spread article about Betty Long, Narooma’s ‘The Kelp Lady’.

The article described how Betty and her daughter, then age 17, and son, then age 15, would collect kelp that had been washed up on Narooma’s beaches and painstakingly process it into an edible powder. It also described why Betty had moved from Sydney to the South Coast and ‘had been driven to her present way of life’.

What it failed to do was to acknowledge that Betty Long was a trailblazer, and the business she had established was most likely the first in Australia to commercially process seaweed. The company is still operating today, its ownership having changed a couple of times since 1970.

Betty’s interest in harvesting and processing kelp resulted from a meeting with the Natural Health Society of N.S.W. after she had developed a serious and supposedly-incurable circulatory disease. The Society told her that seaweed was rich in iodine (in fact, the richest source of iodine in the world) and trace minerals, proteins, vitamins, and the mucilage it contains provided an effective dietary fibre – but that the available kelp in Australia was imported, and often stale.

So, Betty set about determining which of the many varieties of kelp on the South Coast were best, and experimenting with ways to process it, establishing a successful business that ultimately attracted orders from around the world.

But this story has progressed significantly beyond Betty and her children collecting ‘golden kelp’ from local beaches. In 2015 the business that Betty had established was sold to Jo Lane, a resident of Tilba Tilba – just up the road from Narooma.

Jo is an environmental and marine scientist. She became aware of the worldwide demand for kelp-based products, but found the amount of kelp that was washing up onto local beaches was declining (possibly because sea water temperatures were rising) and was becoming insufficient to meet potential demand.

So, she turned her attention to the possibility of farming kelp (as had been successfully done overseas) in Australian waters.

In 2018, Jo was awarded a Churchill Fellowship and visited Korea, Ireland, Norway and the United States to investigate technologies that might be appropriate for introducing kelp farming to Australia.

She returned to Australia convinced of the economic and environmental benefits of faming kelp. (Kelp is the planet’s fastest growing organism, absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and helps nearby organisms such as mussels and oysters to grow.)
She then spent several years researching the lifecycle of kelp and determining how to raise seedstock that would be available year round to stock an underwater kelp farm. (In the wild, kelp only reproduces seasonally.)

Then she applied to NSW Fisheries for a licence to establish some trial farms off the coast of Bermagui and Pambula. They responded by classing her project as a State Significant Development that required a thorough and complex Environmental Impact Assessment. The cost of that is around $400,000 – an amount beyond the means of a small developing business or industry.

The end result was that Jo has relocated to South Australia where more support has been forthcoming for her efforts to establish an Australian kelp farming industry. She has secured two offshore lease sites in that state, expecting to harvest her first crops in March next year.