CHAPTER 19 | 1946–1949 – Return to Normality
mentioned by Max Lake in his Classic Wines of Australia. The fruits for all of these wines were sourced from the 1888-planted Block 42 vineyard. The Auldana, Magill, and Kalimna Vineyards would represent the foundation of Penfolds’ fine wine business during the coming heady days of the 1950s and 1960s. Penfolds soon recognised that the wine market would change as soldiers returned and immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe settled in Australia. Many of them brought back a taste for table wine and the shared experience of wine, food, and conversation. The six o’clock swill mentality, formed after 1916, was finally on notice. The six o’clock swill, which had become a semi-national institution and disgrace, was also seen by many social activists as an impediment to social progress in Australia. Although Queensland (an 8 pm closing) and Tasmania (10 pm) had different licensing laws, the drinking culture was geared towards bingeing rather than, as the Daily Telegraph in Sydney on the 30th of August 1939 described, ‘the delights of a leisurely well-chosen meal eaten with wine or beer or conversation’. In 1947, a referendum was introduced by the New South Wales government to ask voters whether opening hours should be extended. The Housewives Association, the New South Wales Temperance Alliance, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement all vigorously opposed the motion, arguing that ‘the HOME must come FIRST’. But Alice Jackson, the editor of Women’s Weekly in Sydney, was a vocal supporter of a 10 o’clock closing to promote more genial gatherings, arguing that ‘nobody can be made sober by regulations’. But to many people’s surprise, the referendum failed to change the existing laws. According to Lauren Samuelson of the University of Wollongong, notions of
St Agnes Distillery, Renmark, South Australia ca 1940. [Angoves Collection]
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