ABSTRACT
In the 1860s, Australian medical doctor Henry Lindeman believed that greater social order would flow from policies to encourage the growing and drinking of grape wine. Lindeman envisaged this ‘civilising industry’ would replace the native landscape of ‘dreary eucalyptus’ with European-style vineyards and attract thousands of happy European migrants to labour in neatly cultivated fields. Other versions of this Utopian boosterism also circulated among the nineteenth century Australian professional and political classes seeking to purify the colonies of drunken, disorderly behaviour of labourers drawn from the offspring of convicts and the Britain working classes – and the social chaos of the gold rushes. This chapter traces the key proponents of this ideology, the nuances of their convictions and their acquisition of people, plant stock and patterns of production from France, Spain and Germany. Amid this pastiche of European influences – as the British drank wine but did not produce it – some visionaries advocated that wine growers develop local specialisations in grape varieties to make wine a stratified or classed expression of place. These hopes faltered however against the stronger forces of working-class beer drinking habits, continued ampelographic confusion and British wine trade treatment of Australia’s export wines.
