CHAPTER 19 | 1946–1949 – Return to Normality
1948 OLIVER’S TARANGA OLD BLOCK VINEYARD McLaren Vale, South Australia
The Old Block, as it is now called, was planted by HJ Oliver after returning from wartime service. Corinna Wright and Brioni Oliver call this particular selection of shiraz ‘Oliver’s Old’. The 1948-planted vines are situated on various soils, especially sandy loams. The vineyard provides fruit for Oliver’s Taranga reserve-type wines, notably M53 Shiraz and HJ Reserve Shiraz. It is also a regular contributor to Penfolds Grange and other important ultra-fine shirazes.
In 1949, the Reverend EH Woollacott of the United Reform Church, in a letter to the Adelaide Advertiser , said, ‘In view of the high alcohol content of our wines, we hold that it is highly undesirable that women should be employed in the bottling and other aspects of the wine industry’. From the perspective of today’s standards, these comments seem absurd, but it took some time before women were given the same opportunities as men within the wine industry. At a family level, however, women owned vineyards and participated in the life of the wine community, albeit without recognition for their achievements. In 1951, Hardy’s would boast of ‘its great innovation’ in the workforce: employing women for the first time in its administrative offices. ‘There was of course an ancient belief’, Rosemary Burden noted in A Family Tradition in Fine Winemaking: 125 Years Thomas Hardy & Sons, ‘that women permanently had a bad effect on wine’. This ridiculous superstition was finally overruled by the management board, a move that mirrored the attitudes of the times, but, whilst social expectations were changing, they weren’t changing quickly enough. It would take another 20 years before Roseworthy Agricultural College would accept its first female student. . . . The Snowy River Scheme, which began in 1949, was the largest infrastructure project in Australia’s history, providing an important source of hydro-electric power and directing water into Australia’s dry west hinterlands. Although the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers had been harnessed to optimise water supply for irrigation and domestic purposes, the Snowy River, which flowed eastwards into the Southern Pacific Ocean, was an untapped resource. By redirecting water towards the Murray– Darling catchment areas, it promised to improve irrigation water supply in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, Riverland regions, and downflows.
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