Thomas Hardy and the Making of McLaren Vale

One day in the 1880s, driving the back roads near McLaren Vale, Thomas Hardy stopped to talk to an old man planting vines on a stony, unpromising piece of ground. The soil, Hardy remarked in passing, did not look as though it would do much good for vines. The old farmer gave him a knowing wink and shook his head. "Ach," he said, "they tell me old Hardy's planting on worse than this." Hardy was old Hardy, and the joke ran in both directions: the man pointing out the poor ground was the very reason this farmer, and dozens like him, had a vine in the soil at all.

When Hardy first came south to McLaren Vale, the district was sliding towards ruin. The early promise of golden harvests had given way to despair as ignorant farming drained the soil and drought finished what over-cropping began. With the northern wheat fields opening up and better prospects elsewhere, smallholders walked off their land; buildings were deserted and left to fall in. It looked as though McLaren Vale would become a backwater of the south. That it did not is owed, more than to any other person, to the Devon farmer who arrived in 1873 to look at a vineyard nobody else wanted.

The Man Who Came South

Thomas Hardy was born in Devonshire in 1830 and sailed for South Australia in 1850 aboard the British Empire, working his passage as an teacher to the boys on board. He landed in August, found work through the Labour Office the next day, and was at John Reynell's farm at Reynella by that afternoon, taken on at seven shillings a week to mind cattle in the hills. Reynell, usually called the colony's first winemaker, had vines in the ground, and the young farmhand watched them with more than passing interest. In a diary he kept that first spring, Hardy set down what he hoped to carry away from the place:

Master has just finished pruning the vines.... I hope to learn a little about vines and fruit trees this summer if I stay here.

— Thomas Hardy, diary, 1850

He did not stay long — by Christmas he had moved on to better-paid work near Yankalilla, and from there to the Victorian goldfields and a turn at butchering — but the wish held. He came back convinced that the future lay in the vine, and in 1853 he bought a few acres on the banks of the Torrens near Thebarton, planted vines, olives and fruit, and named the property Bankside. He made his first wine in 1857, and was soon buying in grapes to crush alongside his own.

By the middle of the 1870s the Bankside vintage had grown to fifty-three thousand gallons, drawn from his own vines and the crops of forty growers across the plains and the foothills, and the cellars were close to capacity. Hardy was a man of unbounded energy and, as those who dealt with him put it, of unlimited pluck, determination and common sense; he was also a man who knew when a place had stopped growing. The time had come to look elsewhere, and he looked back towards the country where he had started.

Buying Tintara

In 1873 word reached him that Dr Alexander Kelly's Tintara Vineyard Company had collapsed. Kelly had planted seven hundred acres of McLaren Vale scrub with the backing of the colony's wealthiest men, only to be defeated by a market that was not ready and by country so inaccessible that the wine had to be hauled out over sandhills by teams of eight and ten horses. The whole estate — the vineyards, the slate-lined cellars dug into the hillside, the doctor's house, the unfinished mansion on the ridge — was put up for sale.

Hardy drove down from Bankside and inspected the lot with the thoroughness people had come to expect of him. He made an offer and bought the place on a walk-in walk-out basis. What he found once he had the keys was a cellar stretched to capacity with wine the company had never managed to sell. He found markets for it and sold every drop, and the proceeds covered his purchase price. Tintara, in effect, had cost him nothing. The property formally became part of the Hardy business in 1876, and among the staff he kept on was John George Kelly, the doctor's own son, who became his manager and saw out the next half-century of the vineyard his father had begun. Hardy had more land cleared and the vineyards enlarged, favouring the better varieties over the heavy croppers, and he carried on Kelly's contour planting on the steeper slopes to hold the soil against erosion.

The Mill Cellars

Tintara sat in the hills north-east of the township. Hardy soon turned his attention to McLaren Vale itself, and in particular to the decaying village of Bellevue, where a flour mill, a tannery and a hotel had all fallen quiet. The mill was Mortlock's, a substantial stone building at the eastern end of the village that had ground the district's wheat until the farms failed and the trade dried up. In 1878 Hardy bought it, sold off the milling machinery, and set about turning the building into a winery. Its timbers were so solid that he could load the three floors with vats holding forty thousand gallons, and as soon as he was established he began buying grapes from growers across the district to fill them. Within a few years new cellars had grown up around the old mill until the original structure was barely recognisable. The place became known as the Mill Cellars, and it kept the name.

To run alongside it he bought the old Clifton Hotel, once the heart of Bellevue and by then disused and reputedly haunted, turned it into a wine and refreshment shop, and reopened it with new wings and a balcony as Belle Vue House — the building that stands on the main road today as the Old McLaren Hotel. It became his headquarters; at least once a week he drove the buggy between Bankside and McLaren Vale and made the place his base.

He bought the old village school in Ellen Street and converted it into a home for his employees, and in 1882 he took on a stone building at the western end of the village, a stop-over point for the teams carting wheat up from the south, using its extensive stables for his own work horses. Legend in the district held that the old well behind it was laced with poison during a local feud, killing a number of Hardy's horses; the well was filled in and the property fell quiet. It was his great-grandson David Hardy who rescued it, restoring the old coach house in 1969 as a gallery, wine cellar and restaurant. The Barn traded for almost fifty years before it closed in 2019.

A District Revived

As Hardy's confidence filtered through the district, it began to dawn on the people around him that their own prosperity might be tied to his. He kept planting every year. In 1884 he bought four hundred and eighty acres next to Tintara and began clearing and planting it, and he opened the Glen Hardy vineyard as well. He built proper homes for his permanent workers and huts for the seasonal hands, and the local farmers, watching him, took up grape-growing on whatever ground they could find — which is how he came to be teased by the old man on the stony block. A visitor to the estate summed up what was happening:

Beginning in a small way, Mr. Hardy, by his industry and pluck, has become probably the largest and most prosperous cultivator of the soil in South Australia. He gets better profit from each acre of land he cultivates than any farmer in the colony.

— quoted in Rosemary Burden, A Family Tradition in Fine Winemaking

He was joined in the work by two men who became the backbone of the McLaren Vale operation. One was John George Kelly, his manager at Tintara. The other was Thomas Hardy Nottage, the son of Hardy's cousin, who came to the Vale as a boy of fifteen and gave sixty-six years to the firm, rising to manage Tintara and retiring only a few years before the Hardy centenary in 1953. By 1886 the combined vintage of Tintara, the Mill and Bankside had passed a hundred thousand gallons, most of it the dark, dry red the London trade wanted, and most of that bought in bulk by P. B. Burgoyne, the agent Kelly had first found for Tintara wine a decade and a half earlier.

The Vintage Festival

In 1887, at fifty-seven, Hardy took his sons formally into the business and renamed it Thomas Hardy and Sons. James took the commercial side, Thomas Nathaniel the machinery, and Robert the cellars, while their father kept undisputed control of an enterprise that was expanding faster than ever. Three years later he moved the firm's vintage festival down from Bankside, where it had been spoilt of late by gatecrashers out from the city, and gave it instead to McLaren Vale.

There it became the great day of the district's year. The employers met the whole cost of the picnic, and for one afternoon the lines between the proprietor and the humblest picker simply dissolved.

The annual vintage festival is a great event at Maclaren Vale, and on that day all social distinctions between the grower and the humblest grape picker are waived, all joining in the enjoyment of the occasion.

— The Advertiser, Adelaide, 22 April 1901

By 1901 some three hundred people would gather for foot races, horse jumping and a fiercely contested skipping match — won that year with a hundred and thirty-two unbroken skips — followed by a social and a choir in the evening at the Institute hall. The same vintage was expected to yield around three hundred thousand gallons from Tintara, Glen Hardy, the Aldinga vineyard and the smaller holdings, cooled through fermentation by a system that held the temperature down even in the heat of a McLaren Vale March. The little township the wheat had nearly emptied now turned on the grape.

The Grand Old Man

Hardy grew old without slowing much. On his eightieth birthday, in January 1910, a reporter found him still rising at six to work in his garden, and asked him how he did it.

That is my age. I may not see many more birthdays — the Lord's will be done. But I'm thankful that every morning I can get out at 6 o'clock to do a bit of digging or hoeing.

— The Advertiser, Adelaide, 15 January 1910

He died on 10 January 1912, four days short of eighty-two, after sixty-two years in the colony. The papers mourned him as the father of the South Australian wine industry, a man whose name was known in both hemispheres, and the obituaries reached instinctively for the same words his contemporaries had always used of him — pluck, energy, foresight. He had served more than twenty years on his local school board and sat on every agricultural and manufacturing body of consequence in the colony. But the truest measure of him lay forty kilometres south of his Bankside study, in a valley that had been written off as a backwater the year he first drove down to look at it, and which by the time of his death made more wine than any district in South Australia.

Sources

• Burden, Rosemary. A Family Tradition in Fine Winemaking: One Hundred and Twenty Five Years of Thomas Hardy and Sons 1853–1978. 1978, pp. 22–33 — Hardy biography; purchase of Tintara; the Old Mill, Clifton Hotel and the Barn; Glen Hardy; Nottage and J. G. Kelly; vintage figures; the old farmer anecdote; visitor's verdict
• Manning, Geoffrey. Hope Farm: Cradle of the McLaren Vale Wine Industry. 1980, Chapter 3 — McLaren Vale's decline and Hardy's arrival in 1873
• Reynell, Lenore, and Margaret Hopton. John Reynell of Reynella. 1988 — Hardy's 1850 engagement at Reynella Farm and his diary of that first spring (Thomas Hardy, diary, 1850, Adelaide Archives)
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 4 February 1886 — "The Tintara Vineyards" — production figures and the estate under Hardy. Trove
• The Advertiser (Adelaide), 22 April 1901 — "A Vintage Festival: The Wine Industry at Maclaren Vale" — the festival, the vintage estimate, social character of the day. Trove
• The Advertiser (Adelaide), 15 January 1910 — "A Grand Old Pioneer" — Hardy's eightieth birthday; his daily habits and reflections. Trove
• Register (Adelaide), 11 January 1912 — "A Veteran Vigneron: Death of Mr. Thomas Hardy" — obituary; career summary, character and public roles. Trove