Australian Whisky: Part 1, History

A few months ago I got a facebook message from a guy called Niko Devlin, who is the President of the Australian Whisky Appreciation Society, which went something like, “Hey, I like your distillery maps of Scotland. You ever thought of doing one of Australia?”. Now, I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even thought there were enough distilleries in Australia to fill out a whisky map! I knew there were a few in Tasmania, but turns out that was a bit of understatement. There are currently 11 whisky distilleries in Tasmania and 24 in mainland Australia. Who knew? Not me. So, with a LOT of help from Niko and a fair bit of jiggery pokery with distillery locations (there being a total dearth of distilleries in that top middley bit of the very big country that is Australia) I did up a distillery map of Australia.  

Somewhat embarrassed by my complete lack of knowledge about the Australian whisky scene I decided to try to find out a bit more and write a blog piece about it. So, I did a bit of reading. I picked Niko’s brains some more. Thanks to the wonders of facebook, I also spoke to a guy called Mark Coburn who is in the process of setting up a new distillery in the Southern Highlands of NSW. I then remembered that Frank McHardy, of Springbank fame, was involved with the Whipper Snapper distillery so I asked him some questions too. I then promptly forgot all about it until I was watching the BBC’s Scotch! programme the other day which reminded me that I really should write this blog piece (episode 3 had a bit about Australia in it)!

Prints available to buy from Red Bubble! Click on the picture for the link (I know, I know, shameless self promotion!)

When you think about it, it’s not really surprising that Australia has a thriving whisky scene. In fact, I think Dave Broom summed it up pretty well in his ‘World Atlas of Whisky’, “The most surprising thing about the Australian whisky boom is that it’s taken so long to happen. This, after all, is a country that was widely settled by Scots, is rich in malting barley and culturally is known to like a drink”.  ​

T-shirts also available to buy from Red Bubble! Click the pic. You know you want one...

So why did it take so long to happen? That’s what I’d like to know and what, so far, I still haven’t found an answer to! In trying to write this blog post, I’ve found myself getting endlessly distracted - I keep saying to myself, “I’ll just quickly check the newspaper archives” or “I’ll just do a quick google search and see what else I can find out about x” and a couple of hours later I’m still reading and haven’t actually written anything! Most annoying. (This is why my essay hand-ins at Uni always culminated in a caffine and chocolate fuelled all-nighter followed by a mad dash to get it printed off and into the professor’s cubby hole before the deadline.) Anyway I am getting distracted again, so in a bid to give myself (and you) a bit of structure, I have decided to split this post into 2 parts; Part 1 (today’s post): History and Part 2 (tomorrow’s): Interviews with some modern day whisky producers and bottlers.

You could say that the history of spirits and distilling in Australia dates back to the arrival, if not of the First Fleet in 1788, then certainly of the first free settlers in the 1790s. Rum and brandy appear to have been the spirits of choice; Sugar plantations were established in Queensland in the mid 1800s and rum production followed shortly afterwards. Maybe the taste for rum was brought over by the British Navy with the First Fleet? It would appear to be a lasting taste too; in the 1995 book ‘Classic Spirits of the World’, rum is quoted as being, “Australia’s second drink to beer, with the leading brand, Bundaberg, outselling Johnnie Walker by two to one”. (Incidentally in the same book, Australian whisky didn’t even get a mention!). Brandy making grew from a need for a grape based spirit to produce fortified wines (much more popular at the time than table wines). The knowledge of wine making as well as presumably brandy distillation had been brought over by early European immigrants. The number of brandy distilleries grew throughout the 19th century and in 1901 the first laws were drawn up to regulate the burgeoning industry. 

Despite the large numbers of Scottish and Irish immigrants though, and the wide availability of grains and beer, whisky distilling (of the legal type at least) didn’t really seem to gain a major foothold. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that whisky distilleries didn’t exist. They did. In fact, the first legal whisky distillery in Australia was established way back in 1822, in Tasmania. That’s 2 years before the Glenlivet, the “distillery that started it all” in Scotland.  However, unlike in Scotland, legal distilling in Tasmania was to be a very short lived affair. In 1839 the Distillation Prohibition Act banned colonial distillation altogether and it was to be another 153 years before anyone was granted a distilling licence on the island.

Contrary to what I previously believed though, this does not mean that no whisky distilling took place in Australia as a whole in those intervening years, although the latter half of the 19th century did seem to be pretty quiet on that front. I struggled to find much mention of whisky distilling at all until 1929, when the Corio distillery was opened in Geelong, Victoria, by Mr William H Ross, Chairman and Managing Director of the Edinburgh-based (yes, Edinburgh, Scotland) Distillers Company Limited. DCL held a 51% share in Corio, I think largely as a way to get round the high import tarifs at the time, and according to their 1930 annual report, there was then only one other whisky producer in Australia, which they had just bought a controlling interest in, thereby “securing an interest in the whole production of Australian spirits.”  Yep, you can tell they were the precursor to Diageo, can’t you?

By 1954, Corio was apparently the largest distillery in the Southern Hemisphere, having produced, in its first 25 years of existence, some 12 million gallons (about 48 million LPA) of whisky and 5 million litres of gin. This accounted for two thirds of the total Australian whisky trade and half the gin market! 

Quantity does not always equate to quality though, and it would appear that, certainly latterly, Corio’s reputation was questionable at best. One description I saw compared it to motor oil, another described it as “rot-gut” and apparently instructions from HQ (that would be DCL) were to produce something “no better than the worst scotch whisky”. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. The distillery continued in production right up to the 1980s though, when it was closed following massive financial losses.  It’s reputation not withstanding, the Corio distillery, through its comparative longevity if nothing else, clearly had an important role in the history of the Australian whisky industry. The article I read described the Corio brand as “leaving behind a twofold legacy; firstly, it was proof positive that whisky could be made in Australia, and on a large scale, and; secondly, that if it was ever to be done again the focus would have to be on quality rather than quantity. Thankfully that’s exactly what those in the present day industry have realised.”

So there you have it. I’m still none the wiser as to why the Australian whisky boom took so long to happen but I am slightly better informed as to the history behind it. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at the rebirth of the Australian whisky industry in the 1990s and what’s happening now.