When the Duke and Duchess of York visited Tasmania in 1927 they were greeted in Hobart by a huge street arch made from apples that proudly read: “Welcome to Apple Land”.
For about 100 years, Tasmania heavily marketed itself to the world as the “Apple Isle” — an idyllic English farming Utopia — to grow its apple exports and attract new residents.
But the export industry collapsed almost overnight in the 1970s when Tasmania was squeezed out of the European market.
The Apple Isle title sticks 50 years on, despite the state exporting only eight per cent of Australia’s apples last season and making up only 16 per cent of the domestic market.
So, can it keep its Apple Isle title?
Making Tasmania look like England
When University of Tasmania history and classics PhD candidate Carla Baker visited Tasmania in the 1990s, her first question was: “Where are all the apples?”
And since moving to the state a decade ago, it is a question that has turned into a thesis focusing on apples in the north of the state.
Ms Baker is looking into when the Apple Isle title came about, and how the industry collapsed.
“Tasmanian apples were a very big part of the empire marketing board campaign in the 1920s and 1930s,” Ms Baker says.
Apples were part of the ecological colonisation of Tasmania, by making it look like Britain.
She will look into areas like Lilydale, in the state’s north-east, that once had hundreds of hectares of apples, but today has none
Why apples?
Captain William Bligh planted Tasmania’s first apple trees in 1788 on Bruny Island at Adventure Bay.
Up north, the first site was at York Town in the Tamar Valley.
The climate was agreeable and the apples stored well. When steamships got refrigeration in the 1890s the industry took off.
“That’s when the real overseas market came to the fore, with frozen meat and then dairy and fruit being able to go,” Ms Baker said.
The Launceston apple exhibition of 1914 also sold Tasmanian apples to the world, with the advantage of being able to export into opposite seasons in Europe and South Africa.
It was not without challenges, with codling moth introduced in the 1870s threatening the industry.
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Third-generation orchardist Andrew Griggs says the heyday for apples was from the 1940s to the 1960s, before England joined the European Union in the 1970s.
“Nobody had worked out how to store apples so we could come in with fresh, new-season apples when they didn’t have any,” he says.
The government implemented a tree-pull scheme in the 1970s to get families out of the industry, and apple production in the state halved in just three years after peaking in the previous decade at seven million cases of export apples.
Mr Griggs said his family’s orchard at Lucaston in the Huon Valley shifted its focus from Europe to South-East Asia and the domestic market.
“Other countries were starting to produce more and more apples and our costs started to increase,” he says.
“It became harder to get a price that was needed.”
The introduction of controlled-atmosphere storage meant other countries could store apples longer and it was no longer a benefit to be counter-seasonal.
Labour costs went up and packing requirements priced some growers out.
Mr Griggs’ father went overseas in the 1990s and saw that other apple growers were also producing cherries and he started to try it out in 1996.
“All of a sudden we had something we could export again,” he says.
Is there a future for apple growers?
It’s estimated that in the 1960s there were 4,000 apple-growing families in Tasmania. Now there are about 20.
More restructures of the industry are expected this year and almost no Tasmanian growers export overseas.
“Last year was an absolute disaster; we had a big crop and low sales and a huge amount of apples left over at the end of the season,” Mr Griggs said.
Mr Griggs says some smaller growers have told him it is becoming too hard and too marginal to grow apples.
“We’re in the same category,” he says.
“We’re going to be taking out some less productive blocks and replanting cherries.
A good season two years ago was due to 30 per cent less crop being available, and Tasmania filled the gaps.
“That tells you if we were growing 30 per cent less, growers could make a living,” Mr Griggs said.
Apple Isle ‘shorthand for foodie’s paradise’
Tasmania is still growing apples, just on a small scale compared to local and interstate markets and has pivoted to ciders, juices and special varieties.
“The Apple Isle is much more a term we don’t refer to ourselves as,” Ms Baker says. “I think it’s more an imagined title.
“I like it. I think it’s a nod to our heritage and the importance of the agricultural economy down here still.
“The connotations it brings aren’t about apples … it’s about culinary tourism, it’s shorthand for a foodie’s paradise.”
Ms Baker says the title can stay, but people perhaps should not take it literally.
“It’s indicating a food and purity notion rather than specifically apples, as it was back in the day,” she said.
