Wheat, wages and weapons

The story of the Sunshine Harvester Works

Featured in

  • Published 20200804
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-50-4
  • Extent: 304pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

TWELVE KILOMETRES WEST of Melbourne’s central business district lies Sunshine, a growing urban centre that once housed Australia’s largest manufacturing industry. [i] Sunshine’s history holds tales of Australia’s transformation from a colony providing raw materials to the British Empire to an exporter of quality manufactured goods – and innovative political ideals – back to Britain. The doorway to this history opens with a golden grain.

In the mid-­nineteenth century, most European countries were self-­sufficient grain producers. By the end of that century, industrialisation and the globalisation of trade combined with declining transport and handling costs to make a global wheat market viable. Wheat was a high-­value commodity crop capable of withstanding the long journey from a colonial frontier. Australia’s wheat production had previously been entirely for domestic consumption, but between 1875 and 1913 it effectively doubled to meet the growing export market. At the onset of World War I, three quarters of the wheat consumed in Britain was being imported from the colonies. [ii]

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

About the author

Lilian Pearce

Lilian Pearce is an early career researcher in the fields of geography and environmental history. Publications from her doctoral thesis Critical Histories for Ecological...

More from this edition

The art of the salon

Essay WE TYPICALLY THINK of the grandest, most impressive parts of European culture in terms of physicality: castles, palaces, libraries, gardens, food, cafés, galleries, museums...

Siege mentality

Essay I FIRST CAME to Hungary thirty years ago as a young Australian diplomat, witnessing its democratic transition and conversion to a market economy after...

Sous le soleil exactement

Memoir …AND WE FOUND ourselves in the old Anjou capital, Angers, in the Pays de la Loire, adrift in the wake of the Brexit referendum,...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.