History

Olives SA Association

Olives SA (OSA) commenced in 1997 in the mid north (Clare Region) with a few people talking about the potential olives have and exploring the possibility of a future in growing them here. A local meeting at Seven Hills gathered about 50 people with Margaret Sedgley as a guest speaker. There was strong interest and nominations for committee were requested. The speaker was Don Hiller with Kent Hallett assisting in the procedures. A collection of enthusiastic people formulated regional committees (small numbers) and the drivers initiated Olives S.A and its Board.

OSA meetings were originally held at the Stag hotel and then in 1998 moved to the Police Club in Carrington St. From there we moved to the Waite Institute and in 2000 after appointing our Executive Officer for the Strategic Plan we had access to his facility on Greenhill Road Wayville. Today we are settled back at the Waite Institute.

In the early days there was a competition held for someone to create an Olives S.A logo and the winners logo still remains as everyone knows it today. A constitution was formed with assistance from the newly formed A.O.A.

We had strong support from Waite as it had already the labs and skilled personnel to assist us with chemical and organoleptic skills. A tasting panel were inaugurated at the stag hotel in 1998 with a member of the IOOC taking them through the required tasting workshops so that once they completed the course they can be IOOC accredited. This was successfully done and Richard Gawel who had experience in the wine industry was to take charge and go overseas for more IOOC training. He became qualified as a chief judge and obtained the skills and accreditation to train others.

By 1998 the membership of OSA had grown to approximately 240 and were keen for more information in olive growing. The industry at this stage showed a strong interest in olive growing not only from its members but also by the older Europeans who brought their methods of growing olives here. OSA used their knowledge as a starting point for sourcing information.

The nurseries were experiencing a boom as the promise was for farmers/hobbyists to grow olives and the returns would be magnificent. OSA looked at field days with speakers such as Susan Sweeney, Margaret Sedgley talking about varietal selections and soil requirements. We had Peter Maroudas speaking on growing techniques and potential processing details. Membership was strong but delivering information was limited as we were all learning together. The regions were strong and a sense of rivalry on who was the better performer was becoming evident.

By1999 the finances for OSA started looking grim as it was totally reliant on membership and the declining numbers, for many reasons, added more pain. Luckily by this stage Government had recognised that the olive industry had the potential to become a serious industry. Workshops were conducted through OSA and support from government came at the crucial stage. OSA had to reach its remaining members and give them support and confidence to stick with us. It worked. The marketing workshops were delivered to the different regions and proved to be just what the growers wanted. We expanded our presence to larger field days such as Cleve and Paskerville and became involved with The Royal Show, which exhibited member’s products, exposed OSA, and introduced the day-to-day people to the wonderful flavours and aromas of EVOO produced in SA. OSA was now becoming a strong name not only in SA, but the Australian Olive Association (AOA) and other regions throughout Australia. Even today OSA is considered a leader in this industry.

By 2000 OSA had accepted that there had been an enormous amount of plantings and as the peak body we had to have a strategic plan in place prior to the huge wave of production that was going to confront us in the very near future. Through the talents of Julian Sowik from FRDC, OSA was successful in obtaining a grant totalling $140,000 from the Dept of Regional transport for a strategic plan. OSA selected a Board of various industry people that could contribute towards a decisive strategic plan for not only South Australia but for the national body as well.

Today OSA is still recognised at the Peak Industry body representing olive growers in South Australia. No-one on the OSA committee is paid for their services.

History of Olives in South Australia

Towards a history of the olive industry in South Australia

The following paper is an abridged version of a larger study. Although it deals with South Australia – in fact just the area around Adelaide in which the olive industry was centred – and with just the ‘culinary’ aspect of the industry, the paper addresses an issue which was central to the development of the industry in all of the colonies into which olives were introduced in the nineteenth century: why did some settlers, predominantly British and with only little knowledge and even less experience, introduce olives and attempt to establish an industry that they were confident would rival those of Southern Europe? A version of this paper was delivered to the International Conference of the Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink, University of Adelaide, 7 July 1998.

“A few and favoured parts only of the globe can grow the olive…those parts that can should grow the olive. South Australia can, therefore South Australia should grow it.”

So proclaimed one of the pioneers of the colonial olive industry in South Australia, Samuel Davenport, in a lecture to the Adelaide Chamber of Manufactures in 1875. Davenport’s belief in the natural affinity of the olive to the soil and climate of South Australia and his confidence in the social and economic advantages that the new colony would derive from its cultivation reflected four decades of positive experience in olive cultivation and expressed an almost unqualified optimism in the future of the infant industry. It was an opinion shared by many, although perhaps without such almost religious conviction. Some, like Davenport, expressed it in lectures and books; many more expressed it more concretely by planting olive trees, initially in the gardens of Adelaide and the surrounding villages, progressively in most other parts of the State. “In almost every one of the numerous gardens and orchards surrounding the city”, wrote one Victorian visitor in 1874, the olive “can be seen flourishing.” Yet fifty years later, in the 1920s, many of the groves were neglected, the machinery obsolete and the industry was exhibiting symptoms of terminal decline.

Within a century of Davenport’s speech, the old industry had all but disappeared, leaving just remnants of a surprising number of the old plantations and a huge number of their feral offspring.

Running through all of the early history of the olive industry is that fundamental issue: the reasons for an olive industry in South Australia. As Adelaide’s Lord Mayor, Jane Lomax-Smith, questioned at the launch of Karen Reichelt and Michael Burr’s Extra Virgin in December 1997: why, given their Anglo-German culinary traditions, did the early settlers plant olives and press oil at all. There is nothing in the national or social composition of the early settlers that would have commended them to olive production; they were predominantly British and urban. A significant minority did have agricultural backgrounds but theirs was the agriculture of cereal crops and sheep.

One explanation of this is the colonial planners’ and early settlers’ use of the “Mediterranean metaphor” in which the olive figured largely. The re-creation of an idealised Mediterranean, even Classical, environment was a factor that contributed to the initial interest in olive trees and, to a lesser extent, the benefits of a diet in which olive oil was an essential ingredient. This was the ideology: classical Greek democracy would somehow grow from the cultivation of the olive and the vine. However there was a more experimental and pragmatic aspect to this. George Stephenson, who planted the first olive trees in Adelaide in 1836 and continued to promote olive cultivation, and other ‘horticulturists’ were more concerned with determining as much by trial and error as by prediction what economically useful plants were suitable for the South Australian environment.

Olives were just one of a number of crops that could have provided a diversified agricultural base for the economy of the new colony; these were, in order of importance according to Stephenson, oranges, other citrus, vines, figs and almonds and then olives.

It is clear from Stephenson’s more promotional writing that he advocated planting olive trees in the optimistic belief that somehow future generations would be able to solve the problem of how to profit from them. This explains why Stephenson and the other ‘horticulturists’ did not even attempt to make oil and why successful commercial extraction did not occur until about 30 years after the initial plantings. With Stephenson’s promotion, with such an expert nurseryman as John Bailey, with the patronage of the South Australian Company, olive trees were imported in 1844 to supplement the few bought out since 1836 and a program of propagation and planting undertaken.

Most of the early plantations were established by the Adelaide City Council from about 1856. By the 1870s there were over 30,000 olive trees in the parklands surrounding Adelaide and perhaps as many in plantations around the Adelaide Plains. This planting frenzy continued until the turn of the twentieth century such that in the early 1890s the Stoneyfell Olive Oil Company could boast that it had the biggest olive plantation, certainly in the Southern Hemisphere, possibly in the world! (and this might not have been too much of an exaggeration: the big European oil companies were founded around about the same time and European production was based initially on surplus from small groves rather than large, factory-owned plantations.)

The critical transition from horticulture to industry began with the commercial exploitation of the fruit from all these trees. A small quantity of oil was pressed for the Great International Exhibition of 1851 in London and won some acclaim for its clarity and taste. However the first attempt to press a commercial quantity of oil in 1864 was unsuccessful – the oil was rancid, according to a contemporary expert, because the olives were picked while still green – not an auspicious beginning for the company that eventually became Fauldings. The first commercially successful press began operations in 1870 at the Adelaide Gaol, employing prisoners in both the plantation and the press and by the 1890s there were at least five presses around Adelaide. By ¸ 1900 there were at least six companies established to manufacture and market olive oil in South Australia.

Production figures for this period have proven to be elusive. In 1870 the Adelaide Gaol produced about 300 gallons of quality olive oil. By about 1880, South Australia this had increased to 5000 or so gallons and 6000 gallons in 1890. At this time advocates such as Davenport claimed that domestic demand exceeded production and there was no reason to suppose that this would not continue to be the case in the future. This optimism seems to have been justified. By 1902 production had increased to approximately 12,000 gallons and to almost 18,000 gallons in 1907.

However, from the end of the First World War, production appears to have remained fairly constant for the next twenty years; the same number of presses processed olives from about the same number of trees and then declined until, in the 1950s and 1960s, the remaining olive oil companies ceased production and virtually all olive oil was imported.

The rapid increase in production from 1870 to 1910 perhaps disguises one of the major reasons for the apparent demise of the industry 50 years later. In 1880 approximately two thirds of the oil, at most about 3000 gallons, was consumed as ‘salad’ oil, the rest for other, non-culinary purposes.

This might well have saturated the market for consumable oil at that time and, without a revolution in the eating habits of South Australians, demand for ‘salad’ oil would have increased only at the same rate as the population. In 1902, for example, this would have meant a demand for roughly 6000 gallons, about half the production at that time! Colonial (South) Australians simply didn’t consume enough olive oil or other olive products to support these levels of production.

Of course, the culinary uses of olive oil around the Mediterranean were well understood by the pioneers of the industry: many had spent time travelling in Europe and they also read, wrote, corresponded about, and discussed at meetings most aspects of olive cultivation, propagation and the manufacture of olive oil. However, there is no direct evidence that olive oil was promoted as a significant food or as a viable alternative let alone as a replacement for animal fats in colonial kitchens. Even the health benefits of cooking with olive oil were known, in 1870 Davenport quoted George McEwin “that the workpeople employed in the manufacture of olive oil have never been known to be effected with pulmonary diseases” and in his address to the Sixth Congress of the Agricultural Bureau of South Australia in about 1880, Davenport refers to research into the medical benefits of olive oil. Similarly, he notes the virtues of the Italian workers’ staple diet of polenta, olive oil and wine. “In the countries where it is produced” wrote one enthusiast, also in 1875, olive oil “is used in place of butter, enters largely into the diet of the people, and is extremely wholesome and nutritious.”

Promoters of olive cultivation or oil production simply did not actively promote the consumption of their product. In the few contemporary recipe books that I have glanced at there are no references to olive oil and few even to vegetable oils. Barbara Stantich advises that the earliest reference to olive oil in an Australian cookery book is in 1890, written by a French author and recommending Italian olive oil! As Don Dunstan has pointed out on several occasions, until relatively recently white Australian cuisine has been characterised by butter and dripping rather than olive oil. And, of course, the protagonists in the early olive industry were all male and predominantly members of the colonial squirocracy; cooking and culinary matters were the domain of servants or wives. Even Davenport seems to have harboured the naïve and somewhat paternalistic view that, through some long-term natural evolution, the abundance and ready availability of olive oil would encourage future generations to incorporate olive oil into their everyday culinary experience, according to this evolutionary view, promotion of the consumption of olive oil was unnecessary, it would simply happen.

For nineteenth century South Australians, culinary olive oil was ‘salad’ oil and was generally referred to as such. Most writers lauded the ‘sweetness’, ‘delicacy’, ‘quality’ and ‘agreeability’ of the local oil – given the rest of their eating habits, they probably meant blandness. The term ‘virgin’ was used from the 1870s but seems to have applied to the process ie first-pressing rather than to acidity or other standards. Quality and testing were less than scientific; for example, at Cleland’s in the 1950s,

“Testing the olive oil was quite simple. A glass was filled with pure olive oil and handed to the tester who gulped it down. ‘How was it?’ [Sam] Carter would ask. ‘Ask me in half an hour’ would be the reply. And if it hadn’t repeated by then it was ‘OK’.”

I suspect that much of the ‘salad’ oil founds its way into mayonnaise rather than simple salad dressings. The early horticulturists might well have planted olives to emulate the Mediterranean environment; unfortunately they did not emulate the Mediterranean cuisine.

So, if colonial South Australians didn’t consume olives and olive oil, what were the other uses? A large and increasing proportion of local olive oil was not used for food at all. By the advent of the bigger companies in the 1890s, the major uses and markets for olive oil were not culinary, but ‘industrial’. Significantly olive oils were exhibited at the Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition of 1887 as ‘chemical manufactures’ along with superphosphate, mineral acids, liquid ammonia and paints, rather than as even ‘agricultural’ products! In the years before the petroleum revolution, olive oil was used as a light U industrial lubricant, and it was also used extensively in the textile industry for wool scouring. More than a third of Davenport’s production in the 1880s, the ‘hot pressed’, was sold as industrial oil. Even the label on ‘Davenport’s Virgin Olive Oil’ recommended it for both ‘medical and culinary purposes’. And two of the major oil producers/distributors were vertically integrated industries and absorbed much of the oil they manufactured in other products of the companies: Fauldings were and remain a large pharmaceutical company and Cromptons also owned Bunyip Soap.

In colonial South Australia, olive oil was not only foodstuff but also a general-purpose oil and emulsifier.

Consequently, the early olive oil producers – particularly those with sufficiently large and commercial operations that could have produced large volumes of inexpensive cooking oil – did not promote the culinary uses of olive oil beyond questionable ‘salad’ oil. These companies were therefore confronted with, at best, a relatively static market, threatened by new processes and alternative, petroleum-based products and then by cheap imports. To survive the industry needed to expand its market, to promote not only the growing of olive trees but also the consumption of olive oil. Paradoxically, the colonial olive industry ‘failed’ just at a time when waves of Southern European immigration and the slow tide of culinary multiculturalism could have been its salvation

A Brief History of Olives in Australia

(Adapted from the April 1997 issue of Australian Olive Grower)

The history of olive farming in Australia dates back to the early 1800’s. Olives were probably first planted in groves around 1805 in Parramatta near Sydney. Olives and olive oil have been traded among the civilizations throughout the world for centuries, so it seems probable that many of the ships arriving on our shores would have carried some olive trees for planting.

All the states and territories, excluding Tasmania were planted with some varieties of olive trees during the 1800s. During this period, South Australia and Victoria were the states where most of the planting was going on and they were considered the leaders at that time. South Australia began to lead the charge of the olive industry back in the 1830s. Between 1830 and 1850 trees had come in from France, Rio de Janeiro and Sicily. One company took delivery of five varieties from Marseilles. These trees went on to produce oil which won honourable mention at the London Exhibition of 1851. The Stonyfell Olive Oil Company of South Australia won Gold Export Medals in 1911 for its oil exported to Italy. Dr Michael Burr in his book “Australian Olives” details how by 1875 there were over 3,000 trees in the parklands around Adelaide.

By 1873 there was a grove of some 10,000 trees in the foothills of the Mount Lofty ranges. Groves continued to be planted around the Adelaide area until suburban housing took over the land in the 1920s. After World War II the southern European migrants planted groves in the northern suburbs and in the Riverland area. From South Australia, olives spread across the border to Victoria. There were plantings at Dookie, Sunbury, Wangaratta and Longerenong Agricultural College near Horsham.

In 1943 a Mr Jacob Friedman started planting what is still today the largest plantation in Australia. The plantation is located at the foot of the northern end of the Grampians near Horsham. By 1956 there were 38,000 trees in the grove. Olives were also planted at Mount Zero, Edenhope, and Dimboola. These were mostly dryland plantings but a company at Robinvale did plant 700 acres of irrigated trees and also had processing equipment on the farm. Most of these trees were pulled out in the 1970’s when the Mediterranean labour and production costs were low and olive products were being imported at unbeatable prices. It is interesting to note that the current owners are looking at planting large numbers of olives on the same property.

At the New Norcia Monastery in Western Australia, olives have been growing mainly for oil since the 1860’s. Dr Burr notes that the monastery’s oil won a silver medal at the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. Parliament house in Perth also has some very old trees in its front garden – some believe that they are the oldest in Australia.

Olives have been considered as a commercial industry quite a few times in Australia’s history. In 1883 a paper was written under the heading “Cultural Industries for Queensland.” One of the topics covered was the growing of olives in Queensland, primarily the Brisbane area. The author gives some insight into the way of thinking and the location of the nearest grove at the time in this quote from the paper.

“I think that in our early operations we shall do well to plant those kinds which have been proved by the nearest of our neighbours, (Camden Park, the estate of the late Sir W. Macarthur, in the county of Cumberland, N.S.W is the nearest locality to Brisbane where the olive has been grown to an extent sufficient for the manufacture of oil and for testing different varieties of the tree.) who have grown olives to be early and abundant bearers. After that, we may with great advantage avail of the experiences of South Australia, although with further experience we shall probably, sooner or later, select some kinds as better adapted to our warmer climates.”

The journal concludes that “The olive has fruited well on the coast near Brisbane and gives good promise on the Darling Downs. “It is interesting to note that the penal settlement on the tiny St Helena Island in Moreton Bay had a commercial grove of olive trees early in this century. Being a self funding settlement, the prisoners had to grow much of their own food and sell produce for the purchase of other goods and equipment. One of their saleable products was olive oil which they grew and processed on the island itself. The oil was then sold to, of all places, Italy!

The average daily temperature in July for the island is approximately 16 degrees Celsius! No wonder people retire to Queensland. Things have changed dramatically since those days and we are establishing an industry under completely different circumstances than 100 years ago.

Our Anglo Saxon population is discovering what Australia’s southern European migrants knew all the time. That is, that we do have large areas of well priced land with the perfect climate to grow olives, and that olive oil is a very healthy and necessary part of our diet. The olive oil that was produced back in those pioneering days didn’t have a market (other than for medicine), and consequently the price received for the product was very low. Now the demand in this country far exceeds the supply and technology along with modern orchard practices and suitable varieties is seeing the establishment of an internationally competitive industry.