Decolonising a wine list

In June last year Rio Tinto destroyed a cave in the Jukaan gorge in Western Australia. With it went 46,000 years of Aboriginal history and one of the most sacred sites of the Kuramma people. A little while later in the year I was drinking a bottle of Steve Pannell’s the McDonald vineyard, McLaren Vale Grenache and thinking about names that also constitute a sort of erasure. 

Australia and her wines hold a special place in my heart. I’ve visited twice and have a trove of great memories. Unfortunately, Australia and her wine industry are built on the colonial project and the attendant genocide that went with it. 

When I first visited ten years ago I don’t recall there being much dialogue about land stewardship nor engagement with the Aboriginal Peoples on whose ancestral lands the vineyards I was visiting sat. 

A second visit three years ago revealed a different picture: a new generation of winemakers was starting to face up to the reality of their place with regards to the colonial project and the realities of the privilege they were the beneficiaries of. 

I well remember the sign at the entrance to the Basket Range Festival displaying the traditional Acknowledgment of Country greeting. 

A few weeks later I noticed the same acknowledgement on the back of one of Con-Greg’s (Delinquente) bottles and it dawned on me that something was starting to change.

Back in the UK, I was talking with Dan Crane, the ex-winemaker from All Saints winery in Rutherglen about the Australian climate and landscape and I suggested that surely the loss of the Australian megafauna must have contributed to the desertification of the continent over the last 50 odd thousand years. He stopped me, pointing me towards Black Emu by Bruce Pascoe; where he details the complexities of Aboriginal land management that preceded colonisation, and how a combination of the settler’s sheep herds, the hooved locusts of Edward Abbey’s ire, and the genocide that accompanied them conspired to scour the Aboriginal lands of their agriculture while also erasing the cultural memory of Australia as a verdant land leaving country we see now.

It’s the erasure from cultural discourse that I kept finding myself returning to. Take that bottle of McDonald’s Grenache, I bought it because it sort of shares my name (also I love Steve’s wines), but what does McLaren Vale tell us? What does it tell us of the Kuarna people whose land McLaren sits on? When I think of the Vale I think of the Star of Greece, the Victory Hotel, beach cricket and all my friends who make wine there. In fact until I started looking into this I knew nothing of the almost total destruction of the Kuarna people by the British colonial project in South Australia. In fact, we’d almost completely erased them within a couple of decades of our arrival in 1836. 

The same story repeats itself wherever you look, take the King Valley in Victoria, where Tessa and Jeremy Brown make their VSB wines (their Pret a Blanc back label can take credit for this whole idea). King Valley as a regional designation tells you nothing of the Tuanguron people or indeed of the Campaspe plains massacre in 1839 where some 40 Aboriginal tribes people were murdered in cold blood by Charles Hutton. It bears mentioning that no action was taken against Hutton.

It was in this spirit of recognising the peoples whose blood had been spilt, whose lands were razed in order to declare the land ‘terra nullis’ that I decided to reconfigure the geography of my Australian list. 

So here is a short list of Aboriginal peoples who we as Australian wine lovers could take a moment to learn a little about.

New South Wales

Awabakal Country (Hunter Valley)

Wiradjuri Country (Orange)

Goondungurra Country (Hilltops)     

 Victoria

Boon Wurrung Country (Mornington Peninsula)

Tuangurong Country (Heathcote, King Valley)

Waveroo Country. (Beechworth)

Wathaurong Country (Geelong)                         

Woiworung Country (Yarra Valley)                                

South Australia

Ngadjuri Country (Barossa Valley)

Kuarna Country (McLaren Vale)   

Peramangk Country (Adelaide Hills) 

Western Australia                                                                                                               

Wardani Country (Margaret River)

Tasmania

Paredarerme Country (Coal River Valley)

I think it’s telling of the diversity of peoples that preexisted colonisation that my, by no means encyclopedic, wine list covers 14 different Aboriginal peoples, all with similar stories of erasure to tell.