Henry Douglas of Happy Valley

When Henry Douglas stepped ashore at Reeves Point on Kangaroo Island on 3 October 1836, there was no Adelaide to speak of, and fewer than two hundred adults on the whole island. He was eighteen, an orphan travelling on his own account, and he had come out on the brig Emma, the sixth ship to reach the new colony, having sailed from London on the first of April. He had failed to secure a position with the South Australian Company before he left, and so arrived as one of the small handful of early settlers who were neither employees nor salaried officials — a paying passenger making his own way. He kept the anniversary of that landing for the rest of his life, counting his years in the colony from it.

He had paid his own fare, but gave up his berth aboard the Emma to Charles Hare, later the governor of the Yatala Labour Prison. He came out holding a land order for an Adelaide town acre, number 69, and had met the colony's future governor, George Gawler, in London before sailing. Being young and without family to act for him, he was badly served by the guardian and solicitor who should have forwarded his land receipt, and he spent thirteen years badgering successive governors before his power of attorney was finally sent out from London. He was, in the end, among the very earliest holders of land title on Kangaroo Island.

Across to the mainland

Kangaroo Island was a hard place to begin. With a man named Wilkins, Douglas built a bush hut, then took up an invitation to work at a salt lagoon, leaving his belongings in Wilkins's charge — a poor arrangement that ended, as he later told it, when "Wilkins's children set fire to the hut, and burnt or damaged nearly all my outfit." He was witness, too, to what he believed was the first accidental death in the colony, the drowning of a fellow passenger from the Emma.

He crossed to the mainland on the John Renwick in February 1837, into a colony whose whole population he reckoned at about seven hundred and fifty. He worked as a foreman in a company yard and herded sheep in the Coromandel Valley, then went into partnership with William Malpas, a clerk at the colony's bank, the two of them buying a team of six bullocks and a dray and carting timber out of the stringybark forest. It was rough work that paid fairly, and it made Douglas one of the colony's first carriers in 1837 and 1838. He was close enough to the early life of the settlement to be, by his own account, the last man to speak with Sheriff Samuel Smart before the attempt on Smart's life by the ex-convict Michael Magee — who in May 1838 became the first person hanged in South Australia.

Fifty years in the valley

In 1839 Douglas married Lydia Blunt, the service taken by the colony's first colonial chaplain, the Reverend Charles Howard, at Trinity Church in Adelaide, then still partly a building of broad palings. Soon after the wedding the couple moved south to Happy Valley to take up the country land Douglas had selected, their entire household carried comfortably on the bullock dray and a cart.

The land he chose lay where the Happy Valley Reservoir now stands, and the Douglases would hold it for half a century. For the first twenty years they farmed it by the methods of the day, reaping the corn by hand and threshing it with the flail because the stripper had not yet been invented, and weathering a wheat price that swung from as little as two shillings and sixpence a bushel to a single pound on one good occasion. Around 1860 Douglas joined Dr Montgomery and John Rymill in a small private consortium that built one of the colony's earliest grist mills at Reynella, and as his sons grew he bought some of the first farm land taken up at Greens Plains, on Yorke Peninsula, to set them up.

By the end of the 1850s the grain returns were thinning, and in 1859 Douglas turned from wheat to wine, almonds and oil. He had long kept a few vines for the household table, but now he planted with a business in mind, trenching about six acres of hill land with the spade at a cost of four shillings a rood — thirty-two pounds an acre — before he found the plough a cheaper master. From that beginning he built up a vineyard and orchard that reached some seventy-five acres in various stages of growth, the cellars trading in time as the O'Halloran Hill Winery on the slopes above the valley floor.

I continued to extend my vineyard and orchard until my withdrawal from business and the formation of the Happy Valley Reservoir, which happened about the same time and made a great change in our affairs. At the time of leaving the valley we had about 75 acres in various stages of growth.

Henry Douglas, reminiscences written in his eighty-fourth year, South Australian Register, 7 July 1903

The water rises

The change he spoke of came with the reservoir. When Happy Valley Reservoir was opened in August 1896, the rising water claimed the heart of the Douglas land. The Government took the eighty-acre section on which some twenty-five acres of vines were growing, leaving the family about fifty-five acres along their western boundary. Rather than abandon winemaking, the Douglases bought the neighbouring vineyard and farm — once held by a Mr Thompson, probably the government contractor Walter Thompson — lifted the wine vats from their doomed cellars, and carried them across to the old Thompson farmhouse on the north side of Candy Road, where they settled in and carried on.

Henry Douglas died on 6 July 1903 at the age of eighty-six, one of the oldest colonists then living. The family he left behind has multiplied across the generations to something like sixteen hundred descendants in Australia and beyond. The Reynella doctor Louis Maurau, who built The Braes and served the district for years, counted Douglas a friend and thought very highly of him.

After his death the O'Halloran Hill Winery continued under Mrs Douglas, who when the visiting wine writer Ernest Whitington came through in 1903 was working some sixty acres of vines and making between twelve and fifteen thousand gallons a year. She enlarged the holding by buying the adjacent Wilsford Jam Factory and its farmlands, and kept the cellars going until 1912, when she sold out to Thomas Wickham and Herbert Candy. Under Wickham and Candy, and later the Candy brothers alone, the vines were worked until the last vintage was crushed in 1960 and the land surveyed for houses.

What carried his name

The hill at the northern end of the reservoir was known for a time as Douglas Hill, after the family who had farmed there for fifty years before the water came. The name fell out of use by the early years of the new century, about the same time as the man who gave it. His second son, also Henry Douglas, was for many years proprietor of the Happy Valley vineyards in his own right, and outlived his father by nearly thirty years, dying at Willunga in January 1932 at the age of eighty-seven with five of his own brothers and sisters still living, scattered between South Australia and the west.

Sources

• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 7 July 1903 — "The Early Days. Reminiscences of the Late Mr. Douglas," carrying long extracts from the reminiscences Douglas wrote in his eighty-fourth year. Trove
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 11 July 1903 — "Reminiscences of the Late Mr. Douglas," a reprint of the same account. Trove
• News (Adelaide), 4 February 1932 — "Mr. H. Douglas," obituary of Henry Douglas the younger, noting his father's proprietorship of the Happy Valley vineyards and the family's arrival on the Emma. Trove
• Burden, Rosemary. Wines & Wineries of the Southern Vales (1976) — chapter on Wickham and Candy, with the history of the Douglas vineyard, Ernest Whitington's 1903 account, and the sale to Wickham and Candy.
• From Almanda to United States: Lost Localities in the City of Onkaparinga, City of Onkaparinga Libraries — entry for Douglas Hill.