Most of the ANZAC Day stories we hear are about the men who went. Far fewer are about the women who stayed — and in the world of Australian wine, there are some remarkable ones. The women who kept the vines alive while the men were at war.

One of them was Eileen Hardy.

Before we get to her, a bit of family history. The Hardys had already paid their price in the Great War — Robert Cyril Hardy, grandson of the founder, was killed on the French battlefields, one of more than sixty thousand Australian men who didn’t come home. By the 1930s, the family had quietly rebuilt, and cousin Tom Mayfield Hardy was at the centre of the business.

Eileen, born in the Barossa in 1893, had met Tom through a shared love of sailing. In October 1938, Tom boarded a flight from Adelaide to Melbourne for a wine industry conference. The plane – the Kyeema – came down on Mount Dandenong. Every passenger was killed, including the heads of three of South Australia’s biggest wine companies, a disaster the industry has never quite stopped talking about. Eileen was 45, with four young children, and suddenly the face of Thomas Hardy & Sons.

She could easily have sold. Plenty of people assumed she would. Instead, she rolled up her sleeves and got on with it, travelling the country on behalf of the company right through the Second World War and long after. She was warm, she was sharp, and she was revered – people came to call her Auntie Eileen. In 1977, the Queen made her an OBE for her services to Australian wine. She was 84. Hardys still put her name on their flagship wine today.

And she wasn’t the only one.

A few years earlier and a few hundred kilometres north, Mary Knappstein had faced something similar. Her husband Joseph had died in 1918, at the tail end of the Great War, leaving her with a young family, the youngest barely two years old, and a controlling stake in one of the Clare Valley’s most important wineries, the Stanley Wine Company. The business was handed to trustees to pay her an annuity, and what followed was twenty years of quiet, determined work by Mary and her sons to wrestle it back into family hands. They finally did, in 1938. The story of how they held on is written into every Clare Riesling the company eventually went on to make.

These women weren’t unusual. They were simply the ones with names that survived in the record.

The Land Army

When Japan entered the war in December 1941 and Australian men were called up, the grape harvest was suddenly short of every hand it had. So in July 1942, the Australian Women’s Land Army was formed – a uniformed unit of mostly young women, many of them from the city, most with no experience of a vineyard at all. They arrived by the trainload at country stations, in uniform, and were billeted in hostels, halls and, sometimes, tents in school grounds. They were sent out to the Riverland, the Barossa, the Hunter, the Swan, and beyond. They learned how to prune in winter, pick in summer, load casks, and drive tractors nobody had got around to teaching them to drive.

They worked long hours for wages well below what the men they replaced had earned. There was no enlistment, no military rank and when the war ended they were simply sent home.

For three vintages in a row -1943, 1944, 1945 – those women were the backbone of the Australian grape harvest. Most were never formally recognised for any of it at the time; it took more than fifty years before they were awarded the Civilian Service Medal, in 1997. By then, many of them were gone. Without them, plenty of the wineries we love to visit today simply would not exist.

Walk into a cellar door now and it’s easy to think of wine as a story of men. Founding fathers, master blenders, sons who took over from their dads. But scratch a bit below the surface and, almost every time, there’s a woman who held the whole thing together while the world was falling apart around her. The Hunter Valley, the Barossa, McLaren Vale, the Clare – every region has its version. Most of these women weren’t named in the ledgers; some of them weren’t named anywhere. Their work shows up only in what survived: vineyards still in the family, cellar doors still trading, vines still in the ground a century on.

A year like this one, with so many people once again caught up in conflict around the world, makes stories like these feel especially close to the bone. Our thoughts are with all of them.

So this ANZAC Day, alongside the better-known stories, let’s raise a glass to the women who kept Australian wine alive.