Fast forward 175 years. It’s 2007 and I’m working on my Master of Wine Dissertation A Survey of the UK Wne Trade to Determine Current Attitudes to Australian Wine. At the time I was employed by a UK importer of Australian wine and had seen first hand how the category had fallen out of favour following the double digit growth of the 90s and early 2000s. My research paper found that not only were Australian wine styles out of step with current trends, but there was a disconnect between a younger generation of UK wine buyers and their Australian counterparts. In the late 2000s the generational baton had yet to be passed on. The survey also identified that the most effective way to get UK buyers to buy more premium, regional Australian wine was to take them out to visit the vineyards in person. But diminishing ecomonic returns meant that UK importers had stopped taking their customers out and Wine Australia had virtually given up on hosting inbound trade tours. The lessons of Hazel Murphy’s famous early 90s Wine Flights had been forgotten. When the Australian wine commuity needed it the most, the stream of visiting buyers had practically dried up.

Encouraged by the findings of my research, and passionate about Australia and it’s wine community, I decided to do something about it. James Busby Travel was born. I had always liked the idea of the name, as Busby had brought out grape vines so we were bringing out wine buyers, it seemed appropriate. It wasn’t easy getting an untried, disruptive, wholly original business plan off the ground, but luckily there were enough members of the Australian wine community who shared my vision and saw the potential. There was Steve Webber from De Bortoli, Phil Sexton at Giant Steps, William Downie and Mac Forbes in Victoria. In South Australia there was Penfolds’ Peter Gago, Chester Osborn at d’Arenberg, Stephen and Prue Henscke and Joch and Louise at Battle of Bosworth to name but a few. Where these led, others followed and after an exhaustive two years of plotting and planning, involving five separate research trips to Australia, the first James Busby Travel trip hit the road in October 2010.

From little things big things grow. What started out as a crazy idea has grown into a globally recognised initiative. Since 2010 we’ve taken over 150 of the world’s most influential wine buyers on the “trip of a lifetime”. In many export markets being invited on a Busby trip is seen as a badge of honour. The Australian wine community has joined us on this journey as we’ve developed and refined the tours from our experiences and feedback, adopting strategies from the experiential tourism industry to create what is now seen as the gold standard for inbound wine trade visits to Australia. Recognition comes in many forms, and we were honoured to be asked to project manage the visit of 44 Masters of Wine to Australia in 2015, followed by the Beyond Busby joint venture with Wine Australia in 2018.

Throughout this time we have remained fiercly independant and committed to the vision we set out with; to bring a precision and focus to the arena of educational wine travel, with a high degree of selection amongst both the wineries on the itinerary and the calibre of the guests in the group. What I never expected when starting out was the power of the friendships that would be forged not only between our guests and their winery hosts, but amongt the group themselves, many of whom established lasting professional and personal friendships during their two week tour.  Our Alumni Community now stands at 158 individuals in 14 different countries, all of who keep in touch with each other and the wineries they visited. Once the tasting notes are lost and the vintages are forgotten, those long term relationships are the lasting legacy of the Busby trips.

Future challenges for the Busby project are to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of the history, culture and stories of Australia’s Traditional owners of the land, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. There is a great deal of work to be done by the Australian wine community on Indigenous awareness and we hope in our own small way to contribute towards this in the years to come.

In September 2021 I wrote an article on this subject that was published in Australia’s Wine Business Magazine, which you can read here.  

Australia is the home to the oldest known continuous civilisation on Earth, The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The earliest scientific evidence of Indigenous occupation dates back over 60,000 years. At the time of European invasion in 1788 there were over 500 Indigenous nations, 250 languages and an estimated 800 dialects.

Aboriginal history has been handed down in ways of stories, dances, myths and legends for over 50,000 years. The Dreaming or Dreamtime is the cultural, environmental and spiritual lore of this ancient civilisation. Dreamtime stories embrace past, present and future, an holistic Everywhen, which are grounded in the land itself, or Country. They incorporate creation and other land-based narratives, social processes including kinship regulations, morality and ethics. The concept of the Dreaming is inadequately explained by the English language, or even the Western imagination. It has been described as an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for managing and interacting with the natural environment, it provides for a total, integrated, sustainable way of life. Modern Australians are coming to realise that there are lessons to be learnt from a civilisation that not only survived but thrived for tens of thouands of years on the hottest, dried contienet on Earth.

When British settlers began colonising Australia in 1788, between 750,000 and 1.25 million Aboriginal Australians are estimated to have lived there. Soon, epidemics ravaged the indigenous people, and British settlers seized Aboriginal lands. Up to 20,000 indigenous people died in violent conflict on the colony’s frontiers. 

Today, about three percent of Australia’s population has Aboriginal heritage. Despite progress in recent years with recognition and reconciliation, Australia is the only country in the British Commonwealth not to have ratified a treaty with its First Nations peoples.

Recently published books such as Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth have challenged established views on how Aboriginal society and agriculture was structured.

In Dark Emu Pascoe brings together historical journal entries of explorers, physical plant specimens from various Aboriginal lands, and insights from research experts. He includes Aboriginal Elders and community groups to bring thoroughly and thoughtfully established insights. By shifting the lense of Australian history from unproven opinion to researched fact, Dark Emu abolishes what many have grown to believe since the First Fleet – that all Aboriginal cultures in Australia were ‘hunter-gatherers’. Rather, Pascoe proves that the First Nations of Australia had agricultural farming and sustainable land management practices intertwined within complex societal systems.