Is Tasmania still the Apple Isle? Growers crunch the numbers as domestic and export markets shrivel – ABC News

When the Duke and Duchess of York visited Tasmaniain 1927they were greeted in Hobart by a huge street arch made from apples that proudly read:"Welcome to Apple Land".

For about 100 years, Tasmania heavily marketed itself to the world as the "Apple Isle" an idyllic English farming Utopia to grow its apple exports and attract new residents.

But the export industry collapsed almost overnight in the 1970s when Tasmania was squeezed out of the European market.

The Apple Isletitle sticks 50 years on, despite the state exporting only eight per cent of Australia'sapples last season and making up only 16 per cent of the domestic market.

So, can itkeep its Apple Isle title?

When University of Tasmania history and classics PhD candidate Carla Baker visited Tasmania in the 1990s, her first question was:"Where are all the apples?"

And since moving to the state a decade ago, it isa question that has turned into a thesisfocusing on apples in the north of the state.

MsBaker is looking into when the Apple Isle title came about, and how the industrycollapsed.

"Tasmanian apples were a very big part of the empire marketing board campaign in the 1920s and 1930s," Ms Baker says.

Apples were part of the ecological colonisation of Tasmania, by making it look like Britain.

"Apples were a very English kind of landscape."

She will look into areas like Lilydale, in the state's north-east, that once had hundreds of hectares of apples, but today has none

Captain William Bligh planted Tasmania's first apple trees in 1788on Bruny Island at Adventure Bay.

Up north, the first site was at York Town in the Tamar Valley.

The climate was agreeableand the apples stored well. When steamships got refrigeration in the 1890s the industry took off.

"That's when the real overseas market came to the fore, with frozen meat and then dairy and fruit being able to go," Ms Bakersaid.

"It changed the apple industry."

The Launceston apple exhibition of 1914 also sold Tasmanian apples to the world, with the advantage of being able to export into opposite seasons in Europe and South Africa.

It was not without challenges, with codling moth introduced in the 1870s threatening the industry.

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Third-generation orchardist Andrew Griggs says the heyday for apples wasfrom the 1940s to the 1960s, before England joined the European Unionin the 1970s.

"Nobody had worked out how to store apples so we could come in with fresh,new-season apples when they didn't have any," he says.

"There was picking of a daytime and packing of an evening and stackingonto trucks early the next morning, and we had boats coming into Port Huon and Hobart as well as up north."

The government implemented a tree-pull scheme in the 1970sto get families out of the industry,and apple production in the state halved in just three yearsafter peaking in the previous decade at seven million cases of export apples.

Mr Griggs said his family's orchard at Lucaston in the Huon Valleyshifted its focus from Europe to South-East Asia and the domestic market.

"Other countries were starting to produce more and more apples and our costs started to increase," he says.

"It became harder to get a price that was needed."

The introduction of controlled-atmosphere storage meant other countries could store apples longerand it was no longer a benefit to be counter-seasonal.

Labour costs went upand packing requirements pricedsome growers out.

Mr Griggs' father went overseas in the 1990s and saw that other apple growers were also producing cherriesand he started to try it out in 1996.

"All of a sudden we had something we could export again," he says.

It's estimated that in the 1960s there were 4,000 apple-growing families in Tasmania. Now there are about 20.

More restructures of the industry are expected this yearand almost no Tasmanian growers export overseas.

"Last year was an absolute disaster;we had a big crop and low sales and a huge amountof apples left over at the end of the season," Mr Griggs said.

"In Tasmania we've always got this disadvantage of freight costs across Bass Strait andwe're always going to be $90 a bin worse off than somebody growing them in Victoria."

Mr Griggs says some smaller growers have told him it isbecoming too hard and too marginal to grow apples.

"We're in the same category," he says.

"We're going to be taking out some less productive blocks and replanting cherries.

"Over time we will have more cherries than apples."

A good season two years ago was due to 30 per cent less crop being available, and Tasmania filledthe gaps.

"That tells youif we were growing 30 per cent less, growers could make a living," Mr Griggs said.

Tasmania is still growing apples, just on a small scale compared to local and interstate marketsand has pivoted to ciders, juices andspecial varieties.

"The Apple Isle is much more a term we don't refer to ourselves as," Ms Baker says. "I think it's more an imagined title.

"I like it.I think it's a nod to our heritage and the importance of the agricultural economy down here still.

"The connotations it brings aren't about apples ... it's about culinary tourism, it's shorthand for a foodie's paradise."

Ms Baker says the title can stay, but people perhaps should not take it literally.

"It's indicating a food and purity notion rather than specifically apples, as it was back in the day," she said.

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Is Tasmania still the Apple Isle? Growers crunch the numbers as domestic and export markets shrivel - ABC News