KYEEMA: PLANE CRASH TOOK THE BEST

THE AUTHOR AT THE REYNELL VINEYARD FIRST PLANTED 161 YEARS AGO: A PRICELESS HERITAGE GARDEN SENTENCED TO DEATH BY SUB-DEVELOPMENT BY CONSTELLATION, THE COMPLICIT ONKAPARINGA COUNCIL, AN INTELLECTUALLY DECREPIT GOVERNMENT AND A DEVELOPER DELIGHTFULLY CALLED PIONEER HOMES. WOULD GREAT MEN LIKE THOSE WHO DIED IN THE KYEEMA BE BUILDING A YUPPIE GHETTO HERE? photo KATE ELMES

Trophy Honours Great Wine Men
Who Would We Now Mourn?
by PHILIP WHITE - This was first published in The Independent Weekly

Colin Gramp, a friend and mentor, has sent me a letter. It came in a parchment envelope, with his fair hand’s perfect cursive gracing the front. Inside was The Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette of November 1938, which contains the obituaries of his Dad, Louis Hugo Gramp, Sidney Hill Smith, and Tom Mayfield Hardy.

Together with a great South Australian parliamentarian, Charles Hawker, and fourteen other worthy souls, these leaders of the Australian wine industry died when the Douglas DC-2 which carried them, the Kyeema, crashed into Corhanwarrabul, below the summit of Mt. Dandenong in Victoria's Dandenong Ranges.

Colin was seventeen years old at boarding school, enjoying the usual afternoon cuppa with the boys in the common room when he heard the terrible story on the four o’oclock news.

Colin is a chipper, bright man to this day, but talk of the Kyeema brings a cloud to his sparkle, and he casts his gaze to the side, and down, and pauses his conversation while he remembers, then regroups his thoughts, and very carefully comes back to you.

It is a sobering treat to read of these patricians. Sidney Hill Smith was 41 years of age. He’d enlisted in the 3rd Light Horse at eighteen, was badly wounded at Romani, and lay on a stretcher in Egypt until he was shipped home. At 26, he was managing director of Yalumba. He travelled the world promoting Australian wine and Yalumba, and was a king hitter on the Viticultural Council, the Winemakers’ Association, and the Chamber of Manufacturers. He was a hyper-active member of the golf, jockey, tattersalls and commercial travellers’ associations. His cortege at Angaston was one mile long. He left a famously revered widow, Christobel.

Tom Hardy, “one of the leading vignerons in the Commonwealth ... and a gentleman to his fingertips” was a bachelor of science studying viticulture and oenology in France when the King of England went to war with his cousin the Kaiser. Tom came home, joined the 9th Light Horse, and went back to fight in Egypt and Palestine. After the war, he ran the Federal Viticultural Council, sat on the Wine Board, and became managing director of Thomas Hardy & Sons. Like his amazing wife, Eileen, he was a formidable competitive sailor.

JOHN REYNELL'S ORIGINAL VINEYARD BY THE CREEK: SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S FIRST COMMERCIAL VINEYARD? WOULD TOM MAYFIELD HARDY HAVE RIPPED IT UP FOR INTENSIVE HOUSING AS CONSTELLATION IS DOING? Photo - KATE ELMES

Hugo Gramp, managing director of Orlando, was “an expert judge of wines” and “a thorough and persevering type ... meticulously painstaking in all he undertook”. He sat on both the Viticulture and Winemakers Associations and while “he possessed a retiring disposition and his whole life was absorbed in the industry he loved,” he was nevertheless the untiring patron of his Barossa village, Rowland (Orlando) Flat. His cortege could not be measured: the graveyard was too close to his new house, where the service was conducted. But 2000 mourners sang Abide With Me.

When these men died, the wine industry hit a great warp. Their influence had been immeasurable.

Imagine what it would be like if the bosses of Fosters, Pernod Ricard, McGuigan/Australian Vintage and Constellation were suddenly removed from the international wine mess. I don’t wish them death, by any means; I just imagine them all suddenly sailing away. There would be no change. These absentee landlords have no names, and their corporations are loaded with queues of young wannabees and wouldbe-couldbees panting to get hold of the power. Say then, they too, would be gone. There would be no difference. Like other average businessmen, they would fade quietly into oblivion.

The Constellation boss who decided to uproot the old John Reynell vineyard to install an intense yuppie ghetto must have felt that crude surge of power unique to those who decide to destroy. In doing so, he proved himself a greater businessman than his predecessors, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to do it, and so failed in battle, thus begrudging the shareholders their essential fast returns. Anybody who has worked with such creatures, and watched them at close range, would know the perverse rippling of jaw muscles and necks that accompany such deliberations.

The men I mentioned first worked hard into their futures. They thoroughly knew and respected the decade-long cycles of the wine industry, and were constantly planning two, three, and four cycles ahead. They were conservatives, meaning they conserved what was good.

Now we have gum-gnawing sophists who call themselves conservationists whilst they turn entire communities off, empty our only River of its water, and destroy sacred landforms and sites in the pursuit of quick return for the faceless shareholder, so that within a few years, they may move on out, victorious, and sit instead on the board of something else, where this raw and rude dance of destruction and indulgence can be repeated.

Andrew Hardy has set up a wine show award to honour his grand-dad’s cousin, and Michael and Robert Hill Smith’s grand-dad, and my dear friend Colin’s Dad. Their sombre, great cortege continues to extend. Which is not what you could see happening to the caskets of anybody now running the show.