It must not be gathered from what I have said in the last two chapters that it is all play and no work in Australia. There is a great deal too much play, and far too keen an interest in winning money instead of making real wealth; but still Australia boasts of splendid industries which she is working to real and lasting profit. While I was in Adelaide I renewed my acquaintance with a lady and gentleman with whom I had come into contact by a lucky chance during a coaching trip through the Blue Mountains and New South Wales, while I was waiting for the steamer from Sydney to Noumea. During that trip which, by the way, is one of the most delightful that you can take in any of the Five Continents, I made the interesting discovery that they not only knew me much better than I knew them, but that they had even named their house[304] after their favourite character in one of my stories. It was through their kindness that I had an opportunity of realising by personal experience the wonderful development of what bids fair to be Australia’s greatest and, in the best sense, most profitable industry. The commercial fabric of Australia rests upon wool, wine, wheat, and gold, and not the least of these is wine.
One day I received an invitation to go and spend three days at Seppeltsfield, which is the centre of one of the largest and most flourishing wine districts in Australia. Here I became the guest of Mr. Benno Seppelt, whose father was the pioneer of wine-growing in South Australia. It was here, too, that I found the most brilliant triumph in cosmopolitan colonisation that I had seen in the course of many wanderings.
We went partly by train and partly by a coach, which landed us after dark on a desperately wet night at a little township about eight miles from the vineyard. Here, owing to a telegraphic mistake, we found no conveyance to take us on to Seppeltsfield, so we put up at just such a bush hotel as I had been wont to sleep at twenty years before when I happened to have the money for[305] bed and breakfast. The principal attraction of the hostelry was a bagatelle-table on which Shem, Ham, and Japheth might have practised. The bagatelle-room was evidently the favourite lounge of the youth of the township, and the Accidental American and I passed a most enjoyable hour playing under the instruction of these gentle youths who would have been considerably astonished if they had seen some of my friend’s performances on a billiard-table. Everybody’s business in Australia is also everybody else’s, wherein Australia does not differ very much from other parts of the world, and the interest that our audience took in us was almost as flattering as their absolutely unrestrained remarks on our play were occasionally the reverse. We began as novices, and gratefully accepted the very freely given hints as to our shortcomings and the way to improve our game. No game, played on that ancient gambling machine, ever improved so quickly, and the talk among our instructors, when they realised that we had been fooling them, gave me the impression that they really regarded us as a couple of sharps who had come down from Adelaide with the intention of cleaning the country-side out.
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The next morning the wagonette came over from Seppeltsfield and I began to have my object-lesson in colonisation. The country here was very different to what I had seen in the bush at other times and other places. In fact the bush was bush no longer; all was rolling farmland, cleanly cleared and well fenced, arable land alternating with orchards, vegetable-gardens, and tree-belts disposed so as to give due protection to the young crops and fruit-trees. Everything was trim, neat, and prosperous-looking. The white houses, surrounded by their broad verandahs, were very different to the selectors’ cabins which I had seen up country on my last visit to Australia, and their surroundings were rather those of an English country house hundreds of years old, than of a country which forty years ago was uninhabited scrub.
Then came the vineyards. There are between two and three thousand acres of them round Seppeltsfield, and every acre seemed to me to be as well kept as an English nursery garden.
This is the history of them, and incidentally of the other wine-growing districts in South Australia.
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As long ago as 1829, which, for Australia, is quite ancient history, a Mr. Robert Gouger began the colonisation of South Australia. His idea was to parcel out the land into small lots and offer government assistance to people who were ready to tackle the task of subduing the wilderness. He failed to get the amount of capital to carry his ideas into practice; the government, as governments did in those days, gave him the cold shoulder, and, for the time being, his projects fell to the ground. Five years later the South Australian Association was formed. Mr. Gouger was the principal organiser of it. Then followed more correspondence with the government, and more of the usual trouble with the circumlocutary departments, and finally the South Australian Bill was brought before the British Parliament. One of the chief supporters of the Bill in the House of Lords was the Victor of Waterloo, and the first ship which landed a company of emigrants on the shores of South Australia was named the Duke of York. As these lines are being written, the Duke of Cornwall and York is travelling through the new-born Commonwealth of Australia, as the representative of the Emperor-King to[308] give the Royal and Imperial sanction to the youngest, and by no means the least vigorous of the daughter-nations of the Empire. Curiously enough, too, it happened that in 1838 Mr. George Fife Angus, Chairman of the South Australian Company, brought out a company of two hundred German emigrants in a ship named the Prince George.
After them came more Germans, then Frenchmen and Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Swedes and Norwegians, English, Scotch, and Irish; the scrub began to disappear, and the wilderness to blossom, not exactly as the rose, but as tobacco plantations. The tobacco was a rank failure in more senses than one. It grew luxuriantly, but its flavour was such that it was very much more fitted for poisoning the insects which settled on the vines which succeeded it than for filling those functions which Calverley has so exquisitely described.
 
The Storage House at Seppeltsfield, forty years ago.
 
 
The Present Storage House through which nearly a million gallons pass every year.
 
In ’51, when the tidings of the great gold discoveries in Victoria were drawing fortune-seekers to Australian shores from the uttermost ends of the earth, the father of my host at Seppeltsfield came into the Collingrove district and planted a vineyard which was about an acre[309] in extent. Not even the luckiest of all the argonauts of the fifties ever pegged out a claim that yielded as much solid and ever-increasing profit as that little patch of land in the South Australian scrub. In those days Adelaide was a pleasant little town of about fifteen thousand inhabitants; the capital of a province containing sixty-six thousand souls. Now it is a stately city with between forty and fifty thousand inhabitants, the capital of a colony with a population of four hundred thousand.
Mr. Seppelt’s acre of vineyard has grown into more than two thousand, and its produce has increased to eight hundred thousand gallons of matured wine, to say nothing of vinegar and brandy. Every year two thousand tons of grapes come in from the vinelands which lie for eight miles round Seppeltsfield, to pass through the crushers and the winery into the great vats of the cellars, and thence into the casks in which their juice is shipped to lands which have never seen the Southern Cross.
After I had been through the whole process of Australian wine-making from the grape-crushers—Australian wine is not trodden out of the grape[310] by the same process that still obtains in France, Spain, and Portugal—to the laboratory in which samples of every kind of wine are tested in order to make sure that the process of sterilisation is perfect; and after I had tasted ports and sherries, Madeiras, Hocks, Moselles, and certain specialities native to the vineyard, I said to my host the evening before we had to start away in the grey dawn to catch the train at Freeling:
“I have learnt a good deal in the last week, but I want you to tell me now how you managed to put your wines on to the European market and get a sale for them against the competition of the French, German, and Spanish wines which had had the vogue for centuries, their vineyards are all within five hundred miles of London, for instance, and here you’re ten thousand miles away. How did you manage it?”
This chapter is not an advertisement of Australian wines in general or of the products of Seppeltsfield in particular, and therefore I shall not say everything that he told me, but the nett result came to this: When the wine-growing industry of Australia began to get a bit too big for Australia’s consumption, and when it was found that varieties[311] of European vines produced wines of delicately differentiated flavours, it became a question where markets were to be found for the products of an industry which was growing much more rapidly than the native consumption.
When they found the solution of this problem the Australian wine-growers did one of the best strokes of business that ever was done within the confines of real business. By real business, I mean honest business. Those who know a great deal more about the subject than I will see much more meaning in those two words than perhaps I do. If Australian wine was going to make its way in the markets of the world it had to be wine; in other words, those who made it had to rely for their success and for the interest on the capital and the brains that they had put into the work upon a reversion to principles as old as the days of Solomon. They had to make wine from grapes and nothing else. Their rivals in the European markets had already learnt everything there was to be known about fortifying and flavouring and chemical essences. They knew how, for instance, German potato spirit could be turned into seven-year-old brandy in a few weeks, and how sherry[312] which had never been within a hundred miles of a vineyard could be made such a perfect counterfeit of the original fluid that a custom’s expert couldn’t tell the difference between a cask worth sixty pounds and one worth six. They made many failures, but in the end they not only got into the European markets, but actually out-sold the home wine-growers who had had hundreds of years start of them.
The Australian grape goes into the crusher as grape it comes out as grape-juice, and as grape-juice it crosses the seas and makes its appearance in bottles and flagons on our tables. It has been fermented and sterilised and that is all, and it is not too much to say that, saving these two necessary processes, when you drink a glass of Australian wine, red or white, still or sparkling, you are actually drinking the juice of the grape and nothing else; wherefore it may be fairly said that the development of the Australian wine industry from very small beginnings, as, for instance, from that one acre first planted with vines at Seppeltsfield into the two thousand odd acres of to-day yielding two thousand tons of grapes and eight hundred thousand gallons of wine a year, is just about as good a proof as[313] one can get that honesty is sometimes the best policy even in business.
 
Grape-crushing by machinery at Seppeltsfield. The Grapes from which Australian Wine is made are never touched by hand (or foot) after the process of Wine-making has begun.
 
Happily there was no speculation about the wine industry in Australia. If this were also true of her gold-mines and her wool-crops she would be a good deal richer and more honestly wealthy than she is.
I have seen French colonists in French colonies, Germans in German colonies, and colonists of many nationalities under the alien flags of the South American Republics, where, as a rule, they do a great deal better than in their own colonies, if they have any, but never have I seen such a perfect realisation of the ideal of cosmopolitan colonisation as I saw during my stay at Seppeltsfield.
Day after day we drove out along broad roads through the pleasant vineyards and farmlands which lay under the ranges that shielded them from the hot north winds, and every hour or so we pulled up in a village which might have been picked up by superhuman hands out of Germany, or France, or Holland, Ireland, Scotland, or England, and just put down there in the midst of what forty years ago was the South Australian Wilderness.
My ............