Julie McIntyre

Adam Smith and Faith in the Transformative Qualities of Wine in Colonial New South Wales

The desire of the governing class of colonial New South Wales to reduce drunkenness among the working classes coincided with the desire to create a wine industry. This intersection occurred in legislation encouraging substitution of light wine for beer and spirits. The notion that encouraging production and consumption of colonial wine could create sobriety arose from faith in the transformative qualities of wine. This faith can be traced from influential philosopher Adam Smiths conviction in Wealth of Nations (1776) that people who lived in proximity to wine regions in France were among the most sober Europeans to the enactment of a policy of substitution in the New South Wales Parliament in the 1860s.

Blank pages, brief notes and ethical double-binds: micro digitisation and the ‘infinite archive’

Abstract Digitised versions of archival fonds with micro or regional significance daily join mass digitisation projects of books and documents in the global digital space. For historians, the exponential expansion of searchable digital archival material has required the revision of traditional research methods. The digital age has also shifted disciplinary boundaries such as the distinction between historian and archivist. This article concerns a micro digitisation involving collaboration between historian and archivist, not in archive access as is usually the case, but in archive creation. The experience of this collaboration is generalisable to other micro-scale uploads of scanned material enabled by digital technologies. This article is a case study of this experience. It uses autoethnography to explore the practicalities and ethical processes of decision-making to create a new digital archive of wine history during the pilot stage of an Australian Research Council Industry Linkage Grant. The decision-making process that transformed a historian as traditional archive end-user to archive creator highlights the challenges for both professions in the decision to digitise, the implications for expenditure of public funds and questions of digitisation and environmental sustainability.

‘Bannelong sat down to dinner with Governor Phillip, and drank his wine and coffee as usual’: Aborigines and wine in early New South Wales

There is something surprisingly contemporary—and at the same time disturbing—in Philip Gidley King‘s First Fleet journal entry that ‘Bannelong sat down to dinner with Governor Phillip, and drank his wine and coffee as usual’. The late eighteenth-century relationship between Bennelong and British colonists which led to the Aborigine’s selective acceptance of European ‘civilisation’ is one of the earliest documented transnational exchanges in colonial Australia. Ironically, more than two centuries later, while wine is one of the nation’s most significant European-derived agricultural exports, Indigenous Australians battle debilitating alcoholism in a tragic cultural limbo. This article has been peer-reviewed.

“Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” I Do: Postwar Australian Wine, Gendered Culture and Class

ABSTRACT During an era of expanding social inclusion in the 1960s and 1970s, Australians increasingly drank more wine than at any previous time in colonial or national history. These wines were made in new styles and consumed in accordance with new habits across gender and class. The morphology of one of Australia’s most popular “introduction wines” of this period, Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle, reveals the emergence of new elements of national character. From being advertised to women in the late 1960s as “just right”, Ben Ean’s cultural messaging in the 1970s flirted with general appeal to men and women of the new middle class: “anywhere, anytime”. Then, by the mid-1980s, the ascendancy of this light, semi-sweet table wine was halted by the emergence of an elitism in which new professionals favoured consumer products of provenanced distinction. The arc of Ben Ean’s rise and fall symbolises an informalisation and subsequent reformalisation of values, conventions and identities during a time of social and cultural flux.

“A Funny Place” for a Prison: Coastal Beauty, Tourism, and Interpreting the Complex Dualities of Trial Bay Gaol, Australia

At the end of World War I, amid continuing paranoia about Germans in Australia, Officer of the Guard Lieutenant Edmond Samuels published an illustrated diary of his tour of duty to three German “concentration camps” in New South Wales (see Fig. 4.1) (Samuels 1919: 7, 31–32). Of the old walled gaol at Trial Bay that a former prison warder in the 1890s called a “half purgatory, half paradise” (in Ramsland 1996: 112–113) where elite Germanic civilian and military “prisoners of war” were interned from 1915 to 1918, Samuels (1919: 30–32) emphasized the “consideration and care” afforded at one of the “most comfortable” internment camps in the world in one of Australia’s “most picturesque spots.” Inside the prison walls POWs smoked, drank beer, played cards, and attended theatrical plays and orchestral concerts. Outside they frequented a beach cafe in the continental style and sporting facilities: surfing, fishing, and enjoying the finest tennis courts ever seen. In directing attention to the solicitous manner in which Australian authorities looked to internees’ welfare, Samuels was sending—for the Australian government—a “serious message” to Germany so that Australian POWs received the same treatment from their German captors (RSL 2015: 17). He also articulated one of the “national guiding fictions” (Pretes in White and Frew 2013: 2) that have shaped public consciousness of Trial Bay Gaol from its original construction as a showplace of penal architecture and reform in the colonial era through to its recent gazettal within a national park.

Wine studies in the humanities and social sciences: a report on symposia and the state of the field

Studies of wine slip between traditional categories of research. Just as globalisation sees wine crossing new borders in barrels, bottles and bellies – along with the disruption of traditions and t...