For five years as owner of the iconic Oyster Barn in Ceduna, South Australia, it was nothing for Suvi Selenge to shuck 50 dozen oysters — that's 600 oysters — every day.
She started work before 4am, or 3am on busy days, heading home 16 hours later, sometimes with a daily tally of 60 dozen oysters shucked.
Ms Selenge is from Mongolia and moved to Australia in 2014 after meeting her future husband, Peter Tully, who was in her home country setting up mines.
The union was not a likely prospect.
Ms Selenge was a single mum working in a restaurant called Casablanca, where Mr Tully had failed to pay the bill for his large table of diners, leaving her facing the prospect of having to pay because they'd skipped out.
The bill was the equivalent of two months' wages.
The embarrassed Australian fronted up a day later and fixed the bill, winning her heart.
Life's wish
They were engaged in 2012 and Ms Selenge came to Australia two years later, along with her daughter and son Tsetsegdari and Byambabayar Nyamdorj.
At first they lived at Mr Tully's home town, Lock, on South Australia's central Eyre Peninsula, but then Ms Selenge saw Ceduna and fell in love with the coast.
"It was a beautiful view of the ocean, calm, and I said, 'I want to move to Ceduna,'" Ms Selenge said.
"It was a few years into our relationship that I learned her life wish was to have her own kitchen and business," Mr Tully said.
"I saw the Oyster Barn and thought what a great place for a sushi place."
A year later they bought the business.
Peace pearl
Ms Selenge enjoyed the difficult task of shucking oysters and hardly ever cut herself.
"If we were very busy we were shucking 50 dozen a day, so four days is 200 dozen oysters," she said.
"In 30 minutes, I shucked maybe 10 dozen."
The menu was labour intensive and brought Asian flavours of noodles and curries to the frontier town.
"At 4am, I [would] bring the oysters in and just shuck the oysters, then I cook the rice, the chicken, prawns, then noodles, and chicken again and I roll at 8:30am sushi, and the rolling is finished by 11am and then we're ready for cooking fish and chips," Ms Selenge said.
Her full Mongolian name, Enkhsuvd Selenge, means peace pearl.
She's even been rewarded for all that oyster shucking – finding a small pearl in one of them.
And the Oyster Barn has become the pearl of Ceduna, luring Nullarbor travellers to stop in the far west coast town to feast on some of the town's celebrated fresh seafood.
Employee Kellie Hoffrichter said the Oyster Barn was iconic to Ceduna with its rooftop dining.
"People come to Ceduna and some people say it's on their wishlist to sit on top of the Oyster Barn and eat oysters," she said.
"Some of the stories people will say to us, or they've heard about us walking somewhere in Byron Bay, and they say, 'Oh if you go through and you're going across the Nullarbor, make sure you call into the Oyster Barn.'"
Making noodles in Ulaanbaatar
Mr Tully said a lot of his wife's passion for food came from her father.
"Her father was the chef in the restaurant where I met her and was half Chinese. She has brought a lot of her Mongolian and Asian background to her food," he said.
Ms Selenge remembers how from the age of eight she would help her father make noodles early in the morning.
At 6am they would catch a bus into the heart of Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar to deliver the noodles to a lunch bar.
"Then I'd catch the train home [alone] in time to go to school," Ms Selenge said.
She and her father would lug 20 kilogram bags of noodles to the bus, sometimes in temperatures as cold as minus 40 degrees Celsius.
Little shack with big bags of oysters
Ms Hoffrichter hadn't worked at the Oyster Barn until Ms Selenge bought it but her connection goes back to its beginnings.
"My husband Grant's great uncle actually started the Oyster Barn and they've got an oyster lease at Denial Bay and that's pretty well where the oysters started here," Ms Hoffrichter said.
"Back in the day, they used to have an honesty system here where they used to leave the great big wheat bags of oysters out the back in a little shed and the truck drivers or whoever was picking them up would just leave their cash there and pick up the oysters.
"They are quite gutted when they ask for that and we can't leave the oysters in the back shed for them.
"It's 22 years this little shack's been here on the side of the road."
It was set up to sell oysters to the public and raise awareness of the Ceduna industry and that oysters on Eyre Peninsula were not just limited to Coffin Bay.
That reputation is celebrated at Oysterfest each October.
"Oysters are very important for Ceduna. We were always home of the King George whiting but now oysters are pretty big," Ms Hoffrichter said.
'Superhuman' energy
Ms Selenge sold the business in December 2022 to new owners Fil and Jami Pohahau, who added wood-fired pizzas to the menu.
Mr Tully said his wife hadn't slowed down much. She has picked up a couple of jobs and is dreaming up future ventures.
"I'd describe her as tireless. She really is superhuman with her energy," Mr Tully said.
Her legacy is still felt at the oyster barn.
"We get so many phone calls to see what's on special this week, it's unbelievable," Ms Hoffrichter said.
Ms Selenge became an Australian citizen on Australia Day this year and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
"I just love it here," she said.
