THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
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Oscar Seppelt, Tom and Robert Hardy, Frank Penfold Hyland, Walter Reynell, Colonel Fallon, and Cuthbert Burgoyne, described by wine historian Max Allen as ‘the old boys’ wine trade network’. But the association was extremely effective in keeping the federal government’s hands off the wine industry, staunching the temperance movement and foiling prohibitionist propaganda. The newly formed council, which was widely reported by the press, also ‘welcomed the proposal of the South Australian Government to establish a firmer control over the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors by means of a specially qualified Liquor Control Board with administrative powers; and urging the other States to take action on similar lines’, according to the Weekly Times in a 1st of June 1918 story . Although wowserism didn’t kill the wine industry, it kickstarted government control of wine sales and a new tax-collecting initiative in the form of licence fees and excises. This was the price paid by the wine industry for its post-war survival. . . . Returning soldiers from Europe, exhausted from the war, began coming back to Australia in 1919. Many were infected by influenza, which soon spread through the Australian community. The pneumonic influenza, known by the misnomer Spanish flu, infected almost a third of Australia’s population and killed nearly 15,000 people, most of whom were between the ages of 20 and 40. Similar to the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2019, the crisis saw the closure of schools, churches, theatres, pubs, and race meetings so as to encourage self-isolation and reduce the spread of the virus. Winemaker Corrina Wright’s great-grandmother Dulcie Rosa Christie, whose family grew grapes in McLaren Vale and sold their harvest to the Emu Wine Company, wrote a diary during this period. On one occasion, she wrote about her brother Tom, who died of influenza after the end of hostilities while waiting for a ship home from Cairo in December 1918. She then noted the arrival of Spanish flu in South Australia on the 29th of January 1919 and the first death in McLaren Vale just a week later. (Dulcie Rosa Christie would survive the pandemic and live to the age of 96.) . . .
Anzac Cove, Türkiye. The
pictorial panorama of the Great War: embracing Egypt, Gallipoli, Palestine, France, Belgium, Germany and the Navy, from an exhibition of war photographs in natural colour. Colart’s Studios, 1915–1918. [SLNSW PXD 481]
‘The treatment in Salonica for the Spanish flu is to dose with brandy and aspirin as soon as the first symptoms are felt and then go to bed. This is said to be very effective and reduces the attack to a minimum.’ – Warwick Examiner and Times , Queensland, 4th of January 1919
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