THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
View of a quarantine camp set up for interstate visitors at Jubilee Oval, Adelaide, South Australia during the influenza outbreak. [SLSA PRG-280-1 -15-432]
quite beyond the normal output, and it also led to a rapid increase in the demand for Australian wine.’ This translated to a rush to plant vineyards, and the total area of vineyards in South Australia that year had almost doubled since 1914. The potential of exports to the British Empire, particularly England, kept optimism high, but most of the soldier settlements were farmed by complete novices. Over 37,500 returning soldiers established farms in the Riverina, McLaren Vale, Coonawarra, and elsewhere. Yet, by 1929, almost half of them, as noted in the 1918–1939 Australia’s migration history timeline on the New South Wales government’s website, under ‘Plagues, Pandemics and Bridges’, ‘had given up and left their land’. A lack of farming experience, isolation, a long drought, and falling prices made life very difficult. But as the properties were sold or abandoned, immigrants from Italy and Greece began to arrive. More experienced and willing to endure physical hardships, many started to make a real go of things. The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, around the towns of Griffith and Leeton in New South Wales, was earmarked for new soldier settlements, blocks of land that could provide a family living based on horticulture and agriculture. The region, originally explored by John Oxley in 1817, was described in his journal as ‘a country which for bareness and desolation ... has no equal’. Irrigation during the turn of the 20th century transformed the area, more commonly known as the Riverina district, ‘Riverina’ being a derivation of the Spanish entre rios, between two rivers. The Riverina region has played an important supporting part in Australia’s modern fine wine history. Many established wine producers were encouraged by the federal and state governments to assist in developing new production facilities.
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