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 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 colony. "In almost every one of the numerous gardens and orchards surrounding the city", wrote a 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 in disrepair and the industry was exhibiting symptoms of terminal decline. And within a century of Davenport's speech the old industry had all but disappeared, leaving just remnants of a suprising 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, asked at the launch of Karen Reichelt and Michael Burr's Extra Virgin last December: 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 'horticuturists' were more concerned with determiningmore by trial and error as by romantic association or semi-scientific 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 first 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 hermisphere, 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 purity. 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 as 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 all oil was imported. [See "The culinary uses..." for more information on oil production and consumption and an entirely different view!]

The rapid increase in production from 1870 to 1920 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 did not actively promote the consumption of their product. In the few contemporary recipe books which 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 a number of 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 haboured the naive and somewhat paternalistic view that, through some longterm 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 unncessary, 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 Meditarranean 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 oil was 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 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 multicultralism could have been its salvation.