Wrattonbully

The greater area of the south-eastern portion of South Australia—from the Lower Murray River watershed, to the coastline from Lake Alexandria south to Cape Jaffa—is the traditional land of the Ngarrindjeri Nation. The inland reaches of this First Nation are defined by and include stark rises in the topography. The calcareous dunes noted in the above graphic are stable and covered with vegetation, in this case scrub gum and grass lands. The stretch of the Kanawinka Fault line that runs from just north of Naracoorte, south to Penola, draws the interior reaches of the Meintangk language group, one of the 18 language groups that make up the Ngarrindjeri nation. The boundaries of the Meintangk land run from the interior hills to Cape Jaffa on the coast, and is met by the Bungandidj nation to the south and the Jardwadjali nation to the east.    

The lakes and waterways of the Lower Murray River – well north of Wrattonbully – were the most densely populated areas of the Ngarrindjeri nation, one of the most populated First Nations of all of Australia. The natural environment provided for a diverse and healthy diet, yielding the Ngarrindjeri as one of the stronger nations, both physically and through trade, with surrounding inland nations. Many of these nations lived and thrived along the Murray River all the way to its origin: a system of freshwater lakes in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. Archaeological studies show that the traditional lands of the Ngarrindjeri nation had been inhabited by humans for at least 8,000 years.

By 1790, sealers and whalers had set up a camp on Kangaroo Island, part of the Kaurna Nation, as well as on the entire eastern coast of the Gulf of Saint Vincent, where Adelaide is centered today. These men were commonly fugitives of the European jail colony setup in Tasmania. They would bring enslaved Tasmanian Aboriginal women with them, attack and capture Kaurna women that resided on Kangaroo Island, and by 1806 were raiding the mainland for more. They often targeted the Ramindjeri language group, whose settlement was located at Raukkan along the shores of Lake Alexandria. At the time, this was the most densely populated place in all of Australia.

In 1828, European colonizers in Sydney began to explore the rivers of western New South Wales. Some explorers were convinced that there was an inland sea that the rivers led to, and in 1830 a British captain named Charles Sturt sailed a whaling boat downstream along the Murrumbidgee River to the confluence of the Darling. He continued to the Lower Murray River until finally reaching Lake Alexandria and the Southern Ocean. This was the first known time that European Colonizers stepped onto Ngarrindjeri country. Sturt recorded that the Ngarrindjeri people were already familiar with firearms, likely from either trading with the Kaurna nation or dealing with whalers attempting to raid their lands.

The United Kingdom passed the South Australia Act in 1834 to empower the settlement of South Australia as a British province. As new settlements along the Lower Murray River and its watershed drew irrigation out of the river systems, the flow to the mouth of the Murray decreased substantially. Estuaries lost their freshwater inputs resulting in seawater creeping upstream, drastically changing ecosystems and causing staples of fish and other wildlife to disappear.

In 1835, the South Australia Company formed to start selling “wild land” to settlers planning to sail there. Note, that just five years prior, not a single European had touched the lands of South Australia with the aim of staying there. Four ships carrying a total of 117 passengers set sail for South Australia from Sydney in 1836. All landed on Kangaroo Island briefly before the mainland, landing at today’s Glenelg Beach in Adelaide. By this time, the Kaurna population had declined to about 700 people, and the Ngarrindjeri Nation to about 6000. Much of this population decline was a result of a smallpox epidemic that was brought from those travelling down the Murray River from the east, infecting First Nations along the way.

In the early 1840s, a “Protector of Aboriginals” post was created by the British to foster peaceful relationships between colonists and the Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri Nations. This included efforts to “educate” the Ngarrindjeri and Kauran people on religion, language, modern farming, and trade. They were employed to process whale oil, and would be paid in alcohol, tobacco and meat. A proclamation was made to the European colonizers that preserved the rights of “native inhabitants”. There was a clear effort to peacefully co-exist from the British government, but this was deeply seeded with assimilationist ideals, not ones of equality.

At Raukkan, a large settlement of the Ramindjeri language group on the banks of Lake Alexandria in the Ngarrindjeri nation, a missionary was established in 1859 that included a school, a church, and a trading post. Parts of the Bible and schoolbooks were translated into Ramindjeri language, and a western-style farm was built where Ramindjeri people learned to farm like the Europeans. This nearly 300-hectare farm was not considered “owned” by the Ramindjeri, though it was built on their traditional lands. The Ngarrindjeri nation was becoming “de-tribalized”, and there were mixed sentiments from European colonists about whether the dwindling size of this population was a positive or negative.

Raukkan has been an Aboriginal reserve since 1916, and the settlement has remained a part of the Ngarrindjeri Nation. It is the only Aboriginal Australian community within 100k of a current Australian capital city (Adelaide) that has been a constant traditional land of a First Nation. This is a result of both the sheer size the Ngarrindjeri Nation, and the interest of both British and local governments to co-exist with, rather than displace or kill, these First Nations.

In the years that followed, the Ngarrindjeri nation, like many First Nations of Australia, suffered incidents of violence and tragedy, legislation that resulted in loss of traditional lands, and economic hardships. There has been some progress made to right some of these wrongs, and to further acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land. The Ngarrindjeri nation in particular has been one of the more successful First Nations in working towards a fair and equitable co-existence, as well as garnering the acknowledgement they deserve as the first people of the land. But even they have suffered greatly at the hands of the colonizers.

The British Colony of South Australia was established as a free, non-convict colony, which attracted many farmers, businessmen, and artisans looking to prosper in an unsettled land. Victoria’s gold rush opened up Robe as a port: this modern-day Limestone Coast town allowed settlers to avoid Victoria’s tax for new arrivals. As they made their way across to Victoria, working and living in tent cities, they ended up building many of the stone woolsheds and limestone outposts that still speckle the landscape.  

The majority of colonists came from England, Wales, and Scotland, as well as some German emigrants fleeing religious persecution. The first vineyard of South Australia was planted in 1836 within the modern-day city limits of Adelaide – the same year the colony was formally established. The 1840s brought a surge of travel north to the Barossa, and many of the household wineries we know today established their first vineyards through the 1840s and 1850s.

The wine regions of Wrattonbully and Coonawarra have a similar origin story. Farmland was established as the South Australian colony expanded, and small attempts at viticulture were initiated. The Barossa was well established, however, by the time these experiments started in Wrattonbully and Coonawarra in the 1880s.