Batlow is a small New South Wales town nestled in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. It’s famous for apples. There’s an Apple Blossom Festival, a Cider Fest and, of course, a Big Apple. And it was for apples that Batlow’s Mountain Maid brand was first used.

The brand’s beginnings date back to 1923, when the Batlow Co-operative Packing House was formed through a merger between two recently established enterprises: the Batlow Cool Store and the Co-operative Packing Company. The new cooperative’s shareholders were local apple and pear growers, and the packing company adopted three labels for their produce. The first-grade fruit was labelled “Mountain Maid”, the second was called “Black Cockatoo”, while the third grade carried a plain label.

By 1925, the cooperative was exporting significant quantities of pears and small consignments of apples to England. Among the pear varieties exported were the familiar  Beurre Bosc and Packham’s Triumph, but also the less familiar Winter Cole, Vicar of Winkfield, Glou Morceau, Howell, and La Conte. The apple varieties, Adams’ Pearmain and London Pippin, have long since vanished from fruiterers’ shelves, although the trees are still available from specialist heritage nurseries.

In the late 1920s, hail damage to fruit crops led the Batlow cooperative to open a by-products division, processing the badly marked fruit to produce apple concentrate and cider under the Mountain Maid brand. The packing house also began to handle potatoes.  The next expansion was into dehydrated vegetables, with the cooperative becoming a major supplier to the armed forces during World War II.

Then, in 1945, came the cannery. The Batlow cannery produced a wide range of Mountain Maid products, including corn, asparagus, peas, green beans, tomatoes and various fruits. The company developed its own vegetable farms, as well as handling crops from the region’s growers. In 1948, the Batlow cooperative diversified further, producing frozen products for Birdseye.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the cannery handled only fruit and vegetables. But over the following decades, meaty products carrying the Mountain Maid name joined the range. They included Corned Beef, Beef Stew with Vegetables, Lamb and Green Peas and the ever-popular Sheep Tongues. Other tasty options were canned fried rice and an “Italian” spaghetti sauce.

In 1977, the Batlow cannery was subsumed into the Letona cooperative cannery at Leeton. But worldwide demand for canned goods was decreasing.  When Letona went into receivership in 1993, the Batlow operation also closed down and Mountain Maid became another of Australia’s forgotten brands. The factory, long disused, was obliterated by bushfires in the summer of 2019-20.