THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
of opportunity. A 1928 poster called for ‘men for the land and women for the home’ with ‘employment guaranteed, good wages and plenty of opportunity’. New steelworks were established at Port Kembla in New South Wales, and the Ford Motor Company began producing cars in Geelong. But falling wheat and wool prices, increased government debt, and unemployment started to bite from 1927 onwards. Prohibition of alcohol was also on the cards by 1928. A full-page advertisement on the 8th of August 1928 edition of The Bulletin headlined prohibition as ‘£8,000,000 a year for a fad!’ It was estimated that it would affect the livelihoods of 30,000 workers and 90,000 dependents and that its implementation would be a failure and a tragedy. This economic decline also forced vignerons to reshape their ambitions, including the forced sale of the Thomson family’s original St Andrews Vineyard at Rhymney, ‘the hilly country behind Ararat’, in 1927. They relocated to their Best’s Great Western property on the banks of the Concongella River, which Frederick Pinson Thomson had purchased in 1920, beginning a new lease of life for this venerable 19th-century vineyard. Meanwhile, back in McLaren Vale, Frank Osborn, with the help of his brother- in-law Sam Tolley, designed and built a compact winery at Bundarra Vineyard with ‘a row of nine five-ton open fermenting tanks, a block of 19 concrete storage tanks totalling some 40,000 gallons, and hand-operated basket presses’, according to the d’Arenberg winery’s website. The following year in 1928, he made his first wines, mostly heavy, dry red table wine for the Australian burgundy market in the United Kingdom and a small amount of port. This venture, the d’Arenberg winery website notes, was established to ‘cash in on the Commonwealth export bounty of four shillings per gallon’. The wines were labelled Bundarra Vineyards by FE Osborn & Sons. By 1928, Penfolds had established a firm grip in New South Wales. Its largest winery at Griffith had been commissioned to process fruit from the post-war soldier settlement schemes. Minchinbury at Rooty Hill, just 35 miles from Sydney, had become the foremost champagne cellar in the state. Its Sparkling Vale property in the Hunter Valley was a ‘feeder vineyard’ for Minchinbury and supplied fruit for sparkling wine production. Meanwhile, it operated several vineyards in the Hunter Valley, including Dalwood (acquired in 1904), Kaludah, Rhine Vale, and Allandale. An article published in Adelaide’s Observer in May 1928, stated that Penfolds was purchasing 30,000 tons of grapes for the ‘making of wine and spirit’. At an average of £8 per ton, this translated to ‘nearly £250,000 being spent on fruit a year’. Highlighting the sentiment of the time regarding the consumption of alcohol, the self-styled journalist ‘Rufus’ also wrote in the Adelaide Observer on the 26th of May 1928 that, ‘In the face of figures like those for one firm only, the very mention of prohibition seems farcical’.
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