tobacco

Arthur Franz recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewIma...

Tobacco is not so much a luxury as an actual necessity to our men at the front – Lieut-Colonel Henry Paul Treeby, Commandant of the East Surrey Depot, 1916 You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco, as much as bullets – General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force, 1917 Cigarettes and tobacco were an integral part of army life during the First World War. Just two months into the war the British trade journal Tobacco claimed: it might almost be said that a man in the firing line first thinks of his cartridges and the very next thing he seems to worry about is ammunition for his pipe. The pipe itself is only less precious than the rifle. Source: www.centenaryww1orange.com.au/stories/smoking-in-the-firs...

Jonathan Raymond Wright and Elizabeth Jane Daley are my great grandparents.

Brief history Tobacco growing commenced during Australia's early years of settlement. Governor Macquarie experimented with plantings at Emu Plains in New South Wales in 1818, and by the 1820s tobacco was cultivated by farmers in the Hunter Valley. During the 1850s growing extended to Victoria and Queensland. It is likely that some proportion of the early crop was intended to supply the colony with the makings of pesticide for use in ridding sheep of parasites.9 Growing reached its peak in the early 1970s, when nearly 16 000 tonnes of leaf were sold annually,10 but by 2006 the crop yielded under 4000 tonnes.11 Prior to deregulation of the market, most Australian leaf was purchased by local manufacturers.12 Major influences contributing to the downturn in local tobacco growing included declining tobacco consumption in the Australian population, and successive reductions in the protective tariff on Australian leaf during the 1990s, which permitted manufacturers to purchase leaf more cheaply on the international market (see below).12 This led to an increase in diversion of Australian leaf into the illegal tobacco trade12 (see also Chapter 13, Section 13.7). Commercial tobacco farming no longer occurs in Australia. The industry began to wind down during the mid-1990s, with successive announcements at state and federal level for government-financed restructuring grants (exit grants) to tobacco farmers to assist them in leaving the industry. Source: www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-10-tobacco-industry...

trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/162064159# - an illustration drawn from this photo appeared in the Sydney Mail on 23rd November, 1889...in a pictorial on tobacco growing at Gocup, near Tumut, in Southern NSW.