A manual of plain directions for planting and cultivating vineyards and for making wine in New South Wales (facsimile edition)

Sydney : printed by R. Mansfield for the Executors of R. Howe (but Sydney : David Ell Press, 1979). Facsimile edition. Octavo, gilt-lettered buckram, pp. vi; 96; (3); bookseller’s label to front pastedown, very slightly marked on fore edge, a very good copy.

Facsimile of the first edition of one of the first Australian books on wine.

Regarded as the father of the Australian wine industry, James Busby arrived in Sydney from Scotland with his family in 1824. ‘As soon as Busby learned that his father would be moving to Sidney he “was induced to spend some months in the best wine districts of France, with a view of acquainting myself with the cultivation of the vine for the making of wine, and having the power to ascertain to what extent it might be profitably cultivated in New South Wales.”  Busby wrote part of his treatise while en route to Australia, and within a year of his arrival, he published A Treatise on the Culture of the Vine, and the Art of Making Wine’ (Gabler, Wine into words, 47).

Busby was appointed teacher of viticulture at the Male Orphans School at Bald Hills near Liverpool, and was granted 2000 acres of land. Following a trip to Europe in 1828 he brought back to Australia 678 varieties of vines, of which 362 were successfully grown in the Botanic Gardens of Sydney. It was those vines which were to propagate the vineyards of Australia.

‘While Busby was still in his twenties, he provided Australian growers and winemakers with the two essential ingredients required to produce wine: manuals on how to make it and a wide range of (usually suitable) vine cuttings.  Such a combination was unavailable to the winemakers of any other country or region for nearly a century. Through his combined activities, Busby towers over all other contributors to the theory and practice of winemaking in Australia to this day. Partly because Australia was one of the only two countries in the British Empire capable of producing wine (the other was its historic rival, South Africa), his books and those of Alexander Kelly were the only serious nineteenth-century works published in English on viticulture and winemaking’ (Nicholas Faith, Australia’s Liquid Gold, 1904).