THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
Angaston Hotel, Angaston main street, Barossa Valley, South Australia, 1 May 1924. [Yalumba Collection]
The British Empire Exhibition of 1924 at Wembley Park was another world-expo- type event to promote and strengthen bonds between the colonies. At the time, Britain’s world power was waning, with other nations, like the United States and Japan, flexing their military power. The author PG Wodehouse, in his short story ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’, has his character Sir Roderick Glossop describe the exhibition as ‘the most supremely absorbing and educational collection of objects, both animate and inanimate, gathered from the four corners of the Empire, that has ever been assembled in England’s history’. Above one of the main entrances was an advertisement promoting Burgoyne’s Empire Wines. In the Australian court, particular prominence was given to Australian wine. A diorama of an Australian vineyard was on display, and visitors could taste Australian wine. One of those who helped Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Fallon, special commissioner to the British Empire Exhibition, was the young Ron Haselgrove. Haselgrove recalled, ‘I had been in touch with the Federal Council in Australia who decided on a wine exhibition in 1924, at the Wembley Exhibition, in the charge of Colonel Fallon, and as he would need assistance, I anticipated this by applying for the job, and thanks to Ron Martin, Leslie Salter, and Leo Buring, I think, got it. Wonderful.’ In one of the stands was an 80-year-old vine removed from the Stonyfell Vineyard. The Emu Wine Company and PB Burgoyne were also prominent exhibitors. But that same year, UK politician and former Lieutenant Colonel Sir Assheton Pownall, who had inherited his uncle’s wine business and the famous Emu brand, sold his interest to WH Chaplin & Co, with Walter Bagenal as the company’s Australian representative. According to historian Rosemary Burden in her 1978 book A Family Tradition in Fine Winemaking on Thomas Hardy & Sons , ‘From this time Emu began to develop into the largest exporter of Australian wine
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