STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION OH 692/36 Full transcript of an interview with PAM DUNSFORD on 3 December 2002 by Rob Linn Recording available on CD Access for research: Unrestricted Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library OH 692/36 PAM DUNSFORD NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT This transcript was donated to the State Library. It was not created by the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection and does not necessarily conform to the Somerville Collection's policies for transcription. Readers of this oral history transcript should bear in mind that it is a record of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The State Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the interview, nor for the views expressed therein. As with any historical source, these are for the reader to judge. This transcript had not been proofread prior to donation to the State Library and has not yet been proofread since. Researchers are cautioned not to accept the spelling of proper names and unusual words and can expect to find typographical errors as well. 2 OH 692/36 TAPE 1 - SIDE A AUSTRALIAN WINE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. Interview with Pam Dunsford on 3rd December, 2002. Interviewer: Rob Linn. Pam, where and when were you born? PD: Mount Barker Hospital on 25th March, 1951. And who were your parents, Pam? PD: Robert Gordon Dunsford and Yvonne Dunsford. Were they based at Mount Barker, or nearby? PD: Dad was a stock agent with Elders all of his life, and at the time he was in charge of a sub branch at Nairne. So he would have had a fair amount of the Hills to cover in those years. PD: Yes. And did it well. He actually has the record for yarding something like 26,000 sheep in one day in a sub branch. 26,000 sheep! PD: Yes. You wouldn’t get that many in the Hills today. PD: No. Pam, did you grow up in the Hills? PD: No. I was born, as I say, in Mount Barker Hospital, then my parents shifted to Minlaton and I came to Adelaide when I was about four and a half. And did you go to school in Adelaide? 3 PD: The first five years were at Colonel Light Gardens Primary, and then at Walford. And so you went right through? You matriculated from Walford? PD: Yes. And then did you go to Roseworthy after that? PD: No. Then I did ag science at the University of Adelaide at the Waite. And then I went to Roseworthy. And I guess the question is the linkage? Yes. PD: I was doing an animals major until the end of third year and then decided that I needed to understand wine, literally, because I was drinking it, and people were talking about it, and I just needed to understand whether what they were saying was fact or fancy. And so I changed at the end of third year into a horticulture stream, and then went to Roseworthy. Now prior to that, in your own home, did you drink wine as a family? PD: Very rarely. Special occasion stuff. I was the youngest daughter. I had two older brothers, and hence had to go out with my parents when, after the races, they went to the South for dinner, and Dad would always order Hardy’s Old Castle Riesling and used to humiliate me by smelling it, and sipping it, and telling the waiter that, yes, that would be okay. And I knew that he didn’t know what he was talking about. (Laughs) That was the in sort of thing. You know, an occasional bottle of wine for a birthday party or something like that. We used to drink more (couldn’t decipher word) liqueur than anything. Is that right? PD: Yes. Good taste. (Laughter) Very good taste. 4 But at Uni, you would have been there late 60’s probably? PD: ‘69 through to ‘72. So that’s just as wine’s becoming an acceptable drink in the cask, too. PD: It started as cask. It was still really flagon though. We were drinking flagon Penfolds red. Casks weren’t really developed properly, at least in South Australia I don’t think, until the 70’s. There was a large flagon market. I can remember as a kid retailing. It was a huge market. PD: Yes. Drumborg(?) flagons and Penfolds flagons. Yes. Leo Burings. PD: Didn’t used to drink the Leo Burings. (Laughs) Anyway, that’s how it happened. I started to drink red wine at Uni and then became really interested in it. You mean in the structure of wine, and the taste? PD: Well, when I was doing second year ag science, people like Brian Croser, Geoff Weaver, were doing fourth year. John Duval was in my year. Geoff Weaver was one year in front of us. And Robin Day. There were a lot of wine-interested people, and we didn’t stand around in clusters talking about the nuances of flavour but just knew that they couldn’t all be wrong when they were being alerted to something in the wine. You really felt driven then to transfer from your ag science course, where you would have been getting a grounding I guess in the science side of it, to pick up the winemaking stream, which the only place that you could do that was Roseworthy at the time. Is that right? PD: Well, it was a case where I probably would have gone on to do vet science after I finished ag science. But when I became interested in wine— my head is one of those that if I get interested in something I actually have to take it down to its building blocks. And when I realised that this thing 5 was sort of gnawing at me, I decided that it was more interesting than going on with animal majors. I mean, I could have ended up being a field officer in Wanbi or Loxton or something like that. That’s not a lot of appeal. (Laughs) There’s a lot of horizons. (Laughter) PD: I did not want horizons. So I just sort of thought that I don’t know where this is taking me but I think I’ll go and change. But my other major was biochemistry, so that was quite easy to slip into wine. Well, you make the jump to pick up the oenology course, and you don’t have to do the two years of ag because you would have already done it. PD: Yes. So what are you coming into at Roseworthy at the time, in the early 70’s? Who are the people involved and what’s the structure of the place? PD: Have you heard about this? (Laughs) Yes, a little bit. I’d like to hear some more. PD: At the time Roseworthy was an agricultural college and it was run by the Minister of Agriculture here in South Australia, a guy called Tom Casey. And the members of the Board included some of the professors at the Waite. This is all unbeknown to me. I just decided that I wanted to study winemaking. To take you back one step, I went to the professors in the horticulture course, one of whom was Brian Coombe(?), and said that this is what I’d like to do, would you let me come in without any prerequisite subjects? And they said that they’d think about it. A week later they said to me, yes, you can come in as long as you don’t hold the class up. What I didn’t understand was that some of these people at the Waite were actually actively trying to get women into Roseworthy. I only found that 6 out probably five or six years later. But Roseworthy itself was autonomous, only answered to the Minister of Agriculture, and was an all male school. At the same time, Malcolm Fraser was making all of the educational institutions autonomous. That meant that Roseworthy could no longer be an all male college. And so even though the Principal at the time, a guy called Herriot, didn’t want to have women, very strongly didn’t want to have women in the school, because I had a degree and all the related subjects, he just couldn’t not let me enter. And there were these other persuasive elements coming from the Waite, and I think even Tom Casey, to sort of say that you’d better let a women in. So were you the first? PD: Yes. Came in at fourth year. So not just the first in oenology, but the first in the school. PD: The only one in the year because there were no entries until the following year of women into first year. So 180 sort of just post pubescent boys, and I was twenty-two. Yes, I had a lot of fun. I got very bored. (Laughs) PD: Did you go to Roseworthy? No. So it was definitely a new start for you? PD: I used to say that it was the worst year of my life, but it’s so far away now that I can’t really relate to that. But it wasn’t a good year. It was at the time of all the moratorium against the Vietnam war and all that sort of stuff.