Australian wine is one of the great success stories of the modern wine world — bold, inventive and admired everywhere. But like much of Australia’s history, its foundations are more complicated and more uncomfortable than the celebrated labels suggest. The vineyards were planted on land taken from Aboriginal peoples, and telling the story honestly means holding two truths at once: a genuine achievement, built on a real injustice2.
Quick facts
- Australia’s wine regions stand on Aboriginal Country that was never ceded by treaty.
- British colonisation relied on terra nullius — the fiction that the land belonged to no one.
- As vineyards spread, Aboriginal people were dispossessed and drawn into vineyard labour.
- The industry today is slowly beginning to acknowledge this history.
A modern wine triumph
The industry’s achievements are real. The first vines reached Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, planted in the governor’s garden by Sydney Cove, and viticulture spread quickly as the colony grew4. In the 1830s James Busby, often called the father of Australian wine, brought back a great collection of vine cuttings from Europe that seeded the serious industry to come3. From there Australia built the famous regions — the Hunter Valley, the Barossa, McLaren Vale and many more — whose wines now sell around the globe.
Whose land?
Every one of those regions, however, sits on the ancestral Country of Aboriginal nations who had lived there for tens of thousands of years1.
| Wine region | Aboriginal Country |
|---|---|
| Hunter Valley | Wonnarua and Awabakal |
| Barossa Valley | Ngadjuri and Peramangk |
| McLaren Vale | Kaurna |
That land was taken without treaty or payment. British colonisation rested on the doctrine of terra nullius — Latin for “land belonging to no one” — the legal fiction that Australia had no owners capable of holding it1. Under that fiction, colonists claimed and fenced the Country, and the expansion of farming and vineyards was part of a frontier that dispossessed Aboriginal peoples and, in many places, brought violence with it.
The vineyards stand on Country that was never ceded.— on the Aboriginal lands beneath Australia’s wine regions6
Labour on the frontier
Dispossession had a further consequence. Pushed off their land and cut off from traditional ways of living, many Aboriginal people were drawn into the settler economy simply to survive — and among the work they were conscripted into was labour in the very vineyards planted on their Country4.
Convict labour built much of the early colonial agriculture as well, and the wine industry’s picture of gentlemanly estates and sun-drenched rows sat atop a harder reality of coerced and poorly paid work7. The pleasant image the colony liked to project — wine as a mark of a “civilised” society — quietly depended on it.
A more honest story
In recent years the Australian wine world has slowly begun to face this history. More wineries open their cellar doors with an Acknowledgement of Country, some work directly with Traditional Owners, and a small but growing number of First Nations people are making and selling wine under their own names5. Wine writers, too, have begun to ask how a wine list or a region’s story might be told more honestly5.
None of this is about diminishing the wine. It is about telling its full story — giving the land’s first peoples their proper place in a history that has too often left them out.
Holding both truths
Australia makes some of the finest wine in the world, and that is worth celebrating without reservation2. It is also true that this industry, like the nation around it, was built on the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. Those two facts do not cancel each other out; they belong together. A mature wine culture can raise a glass to what is in it and still be honest about the ground it grew from — and Australian wine, at its best, is beginning to do exactly that.
Frequently asked questions
More from this day in wine history
See everything else that happened on August 16 — who was born, what was bottled, and which laws were signed.
Read more
- The role of wine in the American Revolution
- Wine and historical trade routes
- New World vs Old World wine
References
- The Australian Museum — Terra nullius. ↑
- Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody — The Dispossession of Aboriginal People (AustLII). ↑
- Australian Dictionary of Biography — James Busby. ↑
- The World of Fine Wine — The Australian Ark: Australia’s earliest vines. ↑
- Tim Atkin MW — Decolonising a Wine List. ↑
- Australians Together — Colonisation and dispossession. ↑
- Julie McIntyre — A “civilized” drink and a “civilizing” industry: wine growing in colonial New South Wales. ↑
Recommended reading
As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book recommendations are chosen independently.
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
Related Posts
