Big Rivers Who's Who
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Kathy Henschke
Local ResidentSutra Tracing at a Japanese Buddhist Temple
Ikagai Workshops
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Distinguished and Famous people from Big Rivers
Across the Big Rivers wine zone of inland New South Wales, personal histories connect river-country communities with writing, agriculture and migration. Wagga Wagga and the Griffith district provide two particularly clear examples.
📚 Dame Mary Gilmore
Mary Gilmore spent formative childhood years in the Wagga Wagga district, attending schools including Brucedale and Wagga Public. She later returned to the latter as a pupil-teacher. Her writing and public advocacy developed alongside a continuing interest in rural life and social reform. For many years she edited the Women's Page of the Australian Worker, and her poetry included No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest. The Wagga connection is childhood and early employment; her birthplace was near Goulburn, beyond this zone.
🍇 Vittorio De Bortoli
Vittorio De Bortoli came from Italy to the Griffith district in the 1920s and established the family wine business at Bilbul in 1928. The winery's history recalls a surplus of shiraz grapes that he crushed and sold as wine to local European workers. A mixed fruit farm became the base of an enterprise that expanded across generations. His story is rooted in the district's irrigation agriculture and migrant communities, with a farm-based business growing into a much larger wine company.
