What should we talk about when we talk about Australian whisky? We could talk about history. The convict era and the early years of colonial spirit production. The fledgling distilleries established in New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) in the 1820s, none to survive.
We could talk about the first fully fledged whisky distilleries that emerged in the 1860s and the boomtimes of the Victorian gold rush that followed. We could talk about Melbourne’s Joshua Brothers Distillery, one of the largest malt whisky distilleries in the world in the 1920s, cranking out huge volumes of malt whisky for a thirsty Australian public. We could talk about Australia being the fourth-largest producer of whisky in the world back then.
Distillers Company Limited (DCL), the forerunner to Diageo, could get a mention. It built Corio, a behemoth malt and grain whisky distillery outside Melbourne, in 1929. DCL gobbled up its major competitors, dominated the local whisky market for decades, then closed Corio and abandoned Australia in the 1980s during that infamous decade for distillery closures.
We could talk about Brian Poke and Bill and Lyn Lark and the Tasmanian distillers who came along in the 1990s, pioneering a small-scale distilling
