Sometime between September and December, Australians will vote on a referendum that could amend the nation’s constitution to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who have been largely disenfranchised throughout Australian history. If successful, Indigenous groups will get permanent representation in the government. This referendum comes after the Australian government announced earlier this year it would give $424 million AUD ($282 million USD) in funding to “improve the lives of Australia’s original inhabitants.”
What does wine have to do with this? Wine’s place as a premium agricultural product that requires arable land and water—both scarcities down under—can be significant for Indigenous justice and reconciliation, a process that is deeply connected to ownership and custodianship of the land.
The wine industry, which spans over 360,000 planted acres of grapevines, generates over $45 billion AUD ($29 billion USD) annually. The best vineyards adhere to farming principles in line with what Australia’s Indigenous peoples call “caring for Country,” which refers to the reciprocal relationship between people and land. It is a form of sustainable land management that draws on ancestral knowledge and traditional customs.
In recent years, as climate chaos continues, members of the Australian wine industry have started to connect with local Aboriginal communities in the hopes of learning more about seasonal changes and traditional fire management practices. These include tactics like controlled burns, in which small, prescribed fires are set in the cool season to burn off dead forest matter, which helps reduce the chance of uncontrolled wildfires when the weather turns warm. These practices have been implemented for tens of thousands of years by Australia’s Traditional Custodians.
Borrowing Indigenous practices benefits the wine industry. Certainly, Australian vintners are keen to draw a connection between winemaking and Indigenous peoples, using Aboriginal names and art on wine labels. But what is the wine industry doing to benefit its Indigenous communities?
Giving recognition through wine
In 2019, Wine Australia, the industry’s national organizing body, started listing Acknowledgement of Country, or Land Acknowledgment, on its corporate reports and website. These acknowledgements specify the Indigenous land that wineries and vineyards occupy. A rising number of Australian wine companies have also done the same on their websites and back labels.
These public gestures may help facilitate an important shift, both semantically and culturally, but some worry they’re all talk. In response, some wine organizations are putting words to action.
Take Tahbilk, one of Australia’s most historic wineries, which dates to 1860. It’s located in the wetlands of the small Nagambie region in central Victoria. In 2021, Tahbilk—which means “a place of many waterholes” in the local Taungurung language—partnered with Aboriginal tourism business wawa bilk.
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