Araluen is renowned for the quality of its stonefruit. People travelled down to the valley to get their Christmas peaches from Wisbey’s and Harrison’s, or looked out for them at the footpath stalls along the road in the valley or stalls and shops in Braidwood. If you stopped for petrol, you might well leave with a couple of boxes of peaches or nectarines too. For just a few weeks in summer, Araluen stone fruit was also sold off the back of a truck at a popular stop off point on the side of the road near the Clyde Mountain for travelers heading to and from the south coast.
This account of the history of fruit in Araluen is brought together from knowledge passed from one to another and remembered from times gone by: stories told to children and newcomers about the abundance of the valley and its capacity; from conversations with orchardists and farmers over the past 50 years and from personal knowledge and observation. For more information about native fruits and foods, we’d refer you to the work of A.B. and J.W. Cribb including Wild Food in Australia. Collins, 1974 as a starting point.
First perhaps, there were the bunya trees which grew in the gullies in the valley, and down to the coast, too far separated for such giant nuts to be carried by birds. They had been deliberately planted, possibly tens of thousands of years ago, as if you plant a fruit tree in exactly the right place, i.e., one that does not need humans watering and feeding it, and over time it’s seedlings will eventually replace the parent.
The Port Jackson and Sandpaper figs that only grow locally in Araluen were probably brought here from warmer areas than the tablelands above the valley, probably up from the coast. It’s also no coincidence that the emu berries are larger than usual and actually taste sweet if you pick the ones that grow at ancient campsites.
This was an area so rich in fruit that you could pick and eat and you walked, with kangaroo berries twining in the bushes – at least two species of native raspberry more flavourful than introduced raspberries, and their scrubby thorn ground cover stems often mistaken for young blackberry weeds – and native cherry trees. Add in the treasure of the waterlilies, every bit of which could be eaten, including the pollen made into cakes; fish, yabbies, mussels, and so many ducks that several sources mention ‘… shoot into the air and six fall down and you have a paradise of food’.
Even now, many kids that grow up in parts of the valley that weren’t destroyed by mining, know at least a few wild native fruits that can be picked as you wander the hills. You can also find fruit trees well over a hundred years old, still growing where farmhouses have been burnt down or lost to termites, or demolished with their timber and stones recycled into other buildings.
There are also the ‘ferals’ along roadsides, treasured for their often excellent fruit – peaches, apples and at least one fig tree.
The first white blokes brought sheep and cattle. Probably here, as in other colonial areas, it was the wives who brought fruit trees, either as seed or trees ordered from catalogues, sometimes imported from England (apples, pears, plums, damsons, quinces); or from the Cape (ungrafted orange trees that grew higher than a house, thorny citronelles planted as fences to keep animals out of the vegetable gardens); or even from China via Afghan or Chinese merchants (persimmons, loquat trees). You can sometimes find those trees still, where farmhouses once stood: a full dunny pit was traditionally planted with a pear tree, so it could send its deep roots down. If you find a line of pear trees, or other fruit trees, they probably show where the dunny was replaced each time the hole filled up.
Bill Mather claimed the first commercial orchard in Araluen were the damson plums planted in the 1890s on what became his place, but this may not be true. The earliest orchards and market gardens probably began decades before to feed the gold miners. As the mining population dwindled, fruit and vegetables were taken by cart to be sold in Goulburn, Queanbeyan and later Canberra.
The first large commercial fruit growing was probably grapes, grown near to what is now Del Ponte Lane by the Del Ponte family. The Goulburn Herald and Chronicle in edition on 1 March 1865, recorded:
‘A party of Italians are cultivating an extensive vineyard in Araluen, and the grapes which have been forwarded to Braidwood for sale are second in quality to none in the colony. The growers are making a fine thing of it, after a considerable outlay of money and labor; and it is rumoured that they intend to manufacture wine, as the grapes grow most luxuriantly in the genial climate of the Happy Valley, which appears to be particularly adapted for the purpose.‘
Sadly, ‘Happy Valley’ was also perfect for Downy Mildew, and the project was eventually abandoned.
There are several ‘apple tree flats’ marked on old maps, so almost certainly the first orchards included apple trees, likely French Crab, the ancestor of Granny Smith, which needs less chilling than many other old apple varieties. There are French Crab/Granny Smith like apples still growing wild scattered about the bush in some places, or were before the goats that are now a major feral pest were released in the late 1980s. Cider apple varieties were grown in the colder spots of Major’s Creek and Reidsdale, but don’t seem to have been popular in the valley.
These early orchards were watered by bucket and hand from the river and creeks, or from the kilometres of water races that had been built by the Chinese miners and were still used for irrigating crops into the twentieth century. Metal piping replaced them, with large overhead sprinklers. By the 1970s flexible polypipe had mostly replaced the metal, and from the 1980s onwards drip irrigation and microjets began to replace the overhead sprinklers.
In Ned Wisbey’s old age he’d sit outside the packing shed in the sun, in shorts and nothing else, and yarn for hours. He said he planted the first peaches in Araluen. He saw tourists eating the fruit up in Braidwood, and when they threw away the pits (seeds) he gathered them and planted them in pots, then put the young trees half way up the hill, hoping they’d be out of reach of heavy frosts and would survive.
They flourished, and peach orchards were planted by many families in lower areas of the valley, as the land turned over into sand and rock and mullock heaps by the miners and gold dredges was slowly regenerated into good farmland. For a while there were extensive plantings of apricots and almonds too, but disease (unnamed) wiped out most of the apricot trees, and the almonds weren’t as profitable as peaches and nectarines. Walnut orchards were planted, but no one worked out how to outwit the cockatoos, and they don’t seem to have ever been commercially successful. There was at least one paddock of passionfruit vines in the 1950s and 60s.
The peach and nectarine orchard heyday was probably the 1960s–1980s, with Harrisons and Wisbeys as the two main producers, with beans often grown between the rows of fruit trees to provide extra income.
Araluen was the second largest peach producer in Australia, and possibly the southern hemisphere, with exceptionally high quality fruit exported to Japan in the 1980s. Harrison’s apple orchard routinely produced the prize winning fruit at the Braidwood show. Many of the area’s young people spent the Christmas holidays picking or packing peaches. The bean crops provided employment for the women of the valley, as they could fit picking into school hours. Bess Wisbey provided excellent morning and afternoon teas to the bean pickers – it was a good trick to turn up for picking just before morning tea.
Dozens of people in the valley had smaller part time orchards, often combining peaches with apples, apricots or walnuts. A ‘drive to Araluen’ for a boot full of peaches was a popular weekend outing for Canberrans, and gate side or packing shed sales were common, as well as honesty boxes where tourists left money for the fruit they took. Boxes of tomatoes were sold side by side with the tree fruit, as were pumpkins.
Back then you could buy ‘firsts’ or the cheaper, slightly misshapen ‘seconds’ – Ned said ‘the more expensive the car, the more they’d haggle and try to pay less for a box of seconds’. Any unsaleable fruit was taken to the dump, where it fermented, leading to annual visits by a mob of cockatoos who’d get drunk every day for about three weeks, falling out of trees and muttering with hangovers till they flew – very slowly – back to the dump for another binge. They left when the apples began to ripen in Major’s Creek, for their health and recovery and some crunch. Drunk goannas found tree climbing difficult too. You don’t want to meet a two metre goanna with a hangover. Unsaleable peaches were also sometimes fermented and distilled and bottles sold, both legally and illegally, or truckloads taken down the coast to pig farms.
The late 1970s and early ’80s celebrated an annual peach festival, but when the chief promoter Keith Green moved away it lapsed, possibly because the festival took place when everyone was busy picking, packing and selling. Keith also organised an Araluen Peach Cook Book, with Helen Harrison and Jackie French the main contributors – they worked for him making damper with jam and cream for the gold panning tours, where a small patch of creek was carefully ‘salted’ with a little gold for the demonstrator to ‘find’ and carefully put back in his jar once the visitors had left.
Newcomers and the younger generation planted more varied orchards – kiwi fruit, hazelnuts, persimmons, avocado, asparagus and flowers – but most of them remained commercial for only a few years or remained as part time operations supplementing other farm or off-farm income.
Peach growing slowly declined from about 2000 onwards; drought, hailstorms, and poor prices or unreliable contracts from supermarket chains, and the (temporary) threat of cyanide processing upstream at Major’s Creek by the Dargues Mine all contributed.
Almost continuous drought from 2012, culminating in the severest drought of 2018 until January 2020 also meant the loss of many trees, especially those of the smaller part time orchards. Much of Harrison’s orchards were burnt in the 2019-2020 bushfires as they swept across the valley, as were orchards further down the valley towards Moruya. The floods that followed the bushfires also washed away the roads down to Moruya and up to Major’s Creek, as well as several areas of the main Araluen Road. The Araluen Road and the road to Moruya were still being repaired and often temporarily closed in 2023, making transport difficult for those who depend on the roads for access, both from home and fruit or flower sales, though determination and ingenuity meant some sales continued.
You can still buy Australia’s best peaches in Araluen, but it’s no longer known as ‘the valley of peaches’, nor any longer are they called ‘Araluen’s gold.’
But Araluen is still a valley of fruit trees. Newcomers to the valley are often attracted by its more protected growing climate. They’ve planted fruit trees for their own use, which invariably produce far too much for their household in good years, and are sold locally, given away, or made into marmalade, cordial, chutney, pickles and jams for local fund raising. You can now buy Araluen persimmons, oranges, lemons, citrons, walnuts, apples, plums, apricots, Tahitian limes, grapefruit, finger limes and avocados as well as peaches and nectarines – sometimes, depending on who can get around to picking them and selling them at local markets.
Growing fruit has always been easy in Araluen, except in drought, flood or bushfire. Selling fruit is harder.