Chapter XI: In an Australian Vineyard

Fruit Supply—Tintarra Wine—Mr. Thomas Hardy—The Temperance Question.

One of the charms of South Australia is the fruit, which, in the shape of grapes, and pears, and peaches, and apples, you see everywhere displayed, and at astonishingly low prices. Grapes are sold at five pounds for sixpence in the retail shops, and I have seen magnificent grapes three pounds for sixpence, which in London would be held cheap at half-a-crown. If the colony is ever to be very rich, its fruit trade will be no inconsiderable factor in the consummation so devoutly to be wished. The farmer and the squatter have to contend with difficulties which often end in bankruptcy, owing to the terrible droughts common in this part of the world. But if the merchants of Adelaide will send us their spare fruit, we in London can take any amount and at very remunerative prices. I saw during my tour the vineyards of Mr. Thomas Hardy, within a short distance of Adelaide, and I must own that the place is well worth a visit. Though of small extent (the area is only 60 acres), Bankside, as the vineyard is called, yields a more varied produce, and furnishes a better illustration of the capabilities of the soil and climate of the district in which it is situated, than any other estate in Australia. Mr. Hardy is a fine specimen of a horticulturist, and well deserves the splendid silver trophy which ornaments his drawing-room—and of which he is justly proud—given him as one who has done more than anyone in the colony to develop its resources. He has made good use of his grapes. We are not all teetotalers, and he grows more grapes on his various estates than the Australians can eat, whether as grapes for dessert, or in the shape of raisins and currants. With the rest he makes wine. He is proud of his wine—proud of the fact that even at Bordeaux, in the heart of the enemy’s country, as it were, he won a gold medal for its excellence; proud of the fact that his celebrated Tintara wine has found a good place in the London market. As I have seen it manufactured I can testify as to its purity. He was sending this year 45,000 gallons to London. He would prefer to keep it longer in his cellars, but the Londoners want it, and he cannot keep them waiting. Why not sell the original grapes? asks the teetotaler. I reply, He grows more grapes than the community can devour with a decent regard to its health, and as people exist who are mistaken enough to think Paul was right when he recommended Timothy a little wine for his stomach’s sake and his often infirmities, Mr. Hardy thinks he is a public benefactor if he supplies the public with a genuine wine, the produce of the grape and of the grape alone.

Mr. Hardy is no ignoramus; he is a much-travelled man, and has studied the vineyards of France and Spain and California. In his establishment he uses the best machinery—which of course is French—for the distillation of the purest and strongest spirits of wine, to which purpose such grapes are devoted as are not good enough for the production of wine of the best quality. As to the manufacture of wine, that is a very simple affair. The grapes are picked and placed in carts, and carried to the mill, where they lie fermenting in a mass; the juice is then pressed off into slate vats, a brown and by no means attractive-looking fluid. The red wines take longer to ferment, as the outside skin contains the colouring matter. In the case of the white grapes, the stalks are cut away by a machine invented for the purpose, otherwise the astringency of the wine would be too great. After a time the juice is put into casks, where it lies stored in cool and capacious cellars till it is required by the outside public. In some of the casks I saw the wine had been kept ten or twelve years. Last year Mr. Hardy made in this way 160,000 gallons of wine. He began life as a gold-digger. He commenced growing grapes for wine in 1853, and has been at it ever since. Another charming vineyard is that of Sir Samuel Davenport, to which Thomas Binney, when in Australia, was always ready to retreat. It is very interesting, this original vineyard of Mr. Hardy’s. Since 1853 he has purchased several vineyards in various districts, the most important one being Tintara, about 25 miles to the South of Adelaide, where he has 150 acres under vines. It is in the town cellars that most of the blending is accomplished. A good deal of wine is bottled off at Bankside, but the main bulk of the generous fluid, to be poetical, is carted away in casks, on waggons which are as un-romantic as the horses which draw them or the men who drive. There is little of the picturesque in the manufacture of Australian wine.

But as to the grounds, no words can describe their exuberance. Some of the pears Mr. Hardy exhibited at the London Exhibition weighed three pounds each, and were afterwards, I believe, eaten by Royalty. The Bankside property consists of a very deep chocolate soil, resting on a strong clay. Irrigation is easily practised over this small area. Water is raised from the bed of the Torrens River to the top of the bank, and, that being higher than the surrounding country, is easily distributed. It is curious what good a little water can accomplish. In one part the ground rises, and as water will not run uphill—at any rate, in Australia—the trees have to do without, and it is astonishing to note the difference between the trees and the fruit they bear, compared with the others, although but a few feet from each other. Everywhere around me were oranges ripening for the home market. ‘An acre of oranges is a fortune, is it not?’ I asked, with my head full of what I had read. ‘Ah,’ replied Mr. Hardy, with a smile, ‘those books are written by men who have land to sell.’ Then we came to the lemons. What a wonderful plant is the lemon tree! You may see the ripe fruit growing side-by-side with the blossom. It is productive all the year round, like—I will not say whose; let the reader fill up the blank—like Mr. —’s great mind. As to the quinces, I never saw anything like them, and though I intimated that in England we did not make much of them, Mr. Hardy assured me that in his opinion quince jam was the finest in the world. The citrons, however, were still finer than the quinces. We had also quite a show of olives; they grow in rows, and, like the almonds on the estate, they are made to do duty as fencing-posts. A vine in the open air over the house attracted my notice; it had spread over a surface of many yards, and was a good illustration of what may be done on Australian soil. Surely every Australian ought to grow his own grapes; and then as to making them into raisins and currants, nothing seems easier under such a sun. The grapes at Bankside are gathered and laid on boards to dry. Those for raisins for the table are laid on gravel—a custom Mr. Hardy borrowed from the Spaniards. It is not found necessary to turn them, the under grapes drying as well as the top ones, from the heat of the gravel floor. The turning of grapes into raisins is a more complicated process than merely growing them for the market. The bunches of ripe fruit are placed in oblong sieves and plunged for twenty seconds into a tank of boiling lye made from ashes, which are got from the vine prunings. The dipping takes the bloom off the fruit, but causes it to dry in one-third the time it would otherwise take. They are then spread evenly on wooden trays and exposed to the sun. When the grapes are about three-parts dried, they are removed to kilns, heated with hot-air pipes, and the drying is completed in from twelve to twenty-four hours, when they are taken out and rubbed partly free of most of the stalks. The next process is to run them through a winnowing machine which still further strips them of their stalk. They are then packed up in boxes by girls and pressed with a handy screw-press, six at a time. Currants are treated in a similar manner, minus the dipping. The raisins intended for the table, I may mention, are also not dipped, as that would spoil their appearance by removing the bloom. In the grounds a good many sultanas are also grown; quite equal to the fruit imported. Altogether, at Bankside, they turn out about twenty tons of dried fruit every year.

Australia, Mr. Hardy anticipates, will be able to equal the best wine districts in the world. A similar remark may apply to its almonds and raisins and currants. Adelaide rejoices in a trade which bids fair to become greater every year. As the Select Committee upon Vegetable Produce reported at the end of 1887: ‘If the whole area of our colony now devoted to the growth of wheat were one vast vineyard, the yield would not be equal to the deficiency in the wine production of France through the devastation of the phylloxera.’ Hence South Australia, to the disgust of Dr. Hannay, calculates much on her growing wine trade. Statistics furnished by Mr. Hayter, the Government Statist of Victoria, give evidence of the way in which wine in South Australia is superseding the consumption of spirits. This may account for the sobriety which seems to characterise South Australia as compared with the rest of the colonies. Altogether, Adelaide may claim to be the fairest city of Australia, and to contain the kindest and best-mannered people—so far as they may be judged by the passing stranger at their gates, and if I was in search of an ideal life I should say it would be that of one who sits under his own vine and fig-tree, as the South Australian grape-grower does.

While writing of wine, it may be as well to sum up here what I have to say on intemperance in Australia. No little excitement was produced in Adelaide when the writer was there by a telegraphic report of a speech by Dr. Hannay on his return from Australia, as to the amount of drinking in Adelaide, certainly the most sober of all the prosperous cities on the Australian Continent. As usual, the telegraphic report was wrong, and Dr. Hannay assures me that what he did say was that he regretted to find that so many gentlemen in Adelaide looked to the increase of the Australian wine trade as a source of colonial revenue and colonial prosperity. As a devoted temperance reformer, it is clear Dr. Hannay could not have said less. It was an opinion which he was quite at liberty to utter, and with which no one could find fault. Had the telegraphic abridgment been correct, he would certainly have been to blame, as, undoubtedly, Adelaide is a sober city—that is, sober as compared with Sydney and Melbourne. In the older cities there are yet traces of the times when, as during the madness created by the discovery of alluvial gold, miners, who in England had been content with beer and porter, would drink twenty pounds’ worth of champagne at a sitting, pouring it all into a pail, and asking every passer-by to have a drink; but that awful time of extravagance is past; however, the taint of it remains, and there is still a startling amount of drunkenness, especially among that part of the population who can least afford it—the wage-earning class, who, in Australia, if they are sober and industrious, have advantages in the way of investment which assuredly they lack at home. Workmen as a rule are paid high wages, and, when they receive a large amount at a time, as they often do, do not know what to do with it. In too many cases, in the interior more especially, they still adhere to the custom of knocking a cheque down, as they call it. The workman repairs to the nearest public-house, gives his cheque into the publican’s hands, and then begins a drunken orgie in which everyone is asked to join, till the landlord tells him his money is all gone, gives him a bottle of rum, and then kicks him out of the house, often to perish by the road-side, thus once more illustrating the old remark, ‘that the tender mercies of the wicked are very cruel.’ One publican is said to have made £40,000 a year at one time in this way. The temperance reformers in Australia have, it is very evident, a wide field of usefulness before them. Many of the Australians spend enormous sums of money in drink. I travelled with an Australian, who seemed to me never what is vulgarly called the worse for liquor, yet whose weekly bill on board the steamer amounted to between four and five pounds, a sum of money which assuredly might have been better employed. In one respect Australia sets us a good example. It has taken to building temperance coffee hotels, or palaces, as they term them, on the grandest scale. As the meals are all served up without intoxicating drinks, these places must have a good effect, as the guest, however fond of drink he may be, is compelled for the time to be an abstainer. Adelaide unfortunately has no good temperance hotels worthy of the name.

It is a great question in Australia as to which is the finer city—Melbourne or Sydney—and the inhabitants of each are wonderfully jealous of each other. You offend a Melbourne man if you have anything to say in favour of Sydney, and at the latter city you hear little in favour of Melbourne. Both cities show too many public-houses, and both cities contain far too many drunkards; but in Sydney they are an especial nuisance, as every house has, as a rule, two rooms on each side the principal entrance which are used as bars, and which all day long, very much to the annoyance of the traveller, who is compelled to use them, are filled by a disreputable crowd, boozing from morning till night. It is the same as regards the theatre—the bar is as conspicuous, and quite as well filled, as the theatre itself. In many cases the bar is hired and carried on as a separate speculation, independently of the hotel proprietor. Two or three showy barmaids are engaged, a screen is put before the door to shield it from public gaze, and inside there is a license of which few people have an idea. The girls sell the drink, and they drink themselves. As the evening advances the hilarity is of a somewhat boisterous character. Now and then a girl comes from behind the bar and waltzes round the room with some admirer—while she leers over his shoulder at another. The utmost freedom is permitted, and hundreds of idiots thus waste their time and spend their money, and injure their health, and learn how easy and how pleasant is the road to destruction. Fortunately, the bars are closed at eleven, and they are shut up on a Sunday, or they would be a great deal more mischievous than they really are; but the mischief they do is very great. In Australia the population is of an exceedingly shifting character; men are always on the move from one place to another, and of an evening, as they are strangers in the city and have no friends, and time hangs heavy on their hands, they have recourse to the nearest bar. It is there the sharper always takes his victim. In every case, and I heard of several, in which inexperienced travellers had been fleeced, I always found that the dupe had first been taken to the bar and treated to a drink. As I came back I fell in with a poor steerage passenger who had been done out of £20, a sum he could ill afford to lose, by a repetition of the confidence trick. He made the acquaintance of the sharper by means of the latter offering him a drink. Hundreds and thousands of pounds have been lost in this way. There is no place so dangerous to a ‘new chum,’ as the emigrant to Australia is called, as the bar of a public-house. Alas! in Sydney these pitfalls are on every side; I think that there is only one hotel in the town without its bar.

It was the old custom to sell lots of land by auction at which a good deal of wine was drunk, under the excitement produced by which many a purchaser bought his whistle at a dearer price. ‘If such lunches cost £40,’ writes one of the oldest of the Melbourne colonists, Mr. Westgarth, ‘which was given to me as a moderate average, who suffered? argued their justifiers; the exhilaration they produced gave £400 more to the net proceeds.’ The brisk liquor appreciably blew up the prices, as the same lots, cut up and rearranged, would come again and yet again under the hammer; and no doubt many a poor speculator burnt his fingers in that way, especially when we remember how at one time there came such a wonderful depreciation of property in what its admirers still love to term ‘Marvellous Melbourne.’ It may be that there is less drinking now, and that people go to business and to sales with less muddled brains. But no one can walk in the shipping quarter of Melbourne on a Saturday afternoon, or stop at a Sydney hotel for a day or two, without feeling that in either town there is vast room for improvement in the matter of drink. In both places there is a fearful amount of gambling and betting and wild speculation, and undoubtedly a good deal of that goes on under the influence of the drink. Many of the suicides which, as I told the people of Adelaide, were such a matter of wonderment to me, are to be attributed to drink, or the depression caused by it when the excitement is over, and the poor shattered drinker is, indeed, a cup too low and quite unable in his dazed condition to face the stern realities of life. Travelling one day from Brisbane to Sydney, the writer met a gentleman, of whom he asked if Mr. Blank was known to him.

‘Yes, well,’ was the reply.

‘I am going to see him.’

‘Why,’ said the gentleman, ‘he committed suicide only a little while ago; and the Western Australian papers are full of the details.’

There was no need to say any more. The poor fellow had gone out as an emigrant. At home he had been in the habit of drinking to excess, and in Australia the loneliness and difficulty of his life was too much for him; he drank to excess, and then took away with his own rash hand his blighted life. In Australia the number of such blighted lives through drink is far too plentiful.