Auburn's most famous export is not riesling but verse. C.J. Dennis, the laureate of the larrikin, was born in the town in 1876 - and Auburn still remembers him.
Auburn trades these days on stone cottages and celebrated cellar doors. But its most famous export is neither: it is verse, written in the broadest Australian slang ever set to rhyme.
A publican's son
Clarence Michael James Dennis was born in Auburn on 7 September 1876, the first of three sons of Irish-born parents. His father kept hotels, and young Dennis spent his early years amid the front-bar life of a country coaching town - an education that would later serve him remarkably well.
The Sentimental Bloke
Dennis found his fame in 1915 with The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, a verse novel about a larrikin won over by love. It sold in numbers Australian poetry had never seen, went on to stage and screen, and earned Dennis the title of the laureate of the larrikin, his name spoken alongside Lawson and Paterson. He died in 1938, mourned nationally.
What Auburn keeps
The town has not forgotten him. In 1953 a memorial fountain of blue granite, with a birdbath at its foot, was unveiled on land opposite the Auburn Institute - near the site of the former Auburn Hotel where the poet was born. The C.J. Dennis Memorial is a quiet thing, easily missed, which feels about right for a writer who made art out of the unnoticed.
It slots naturally into the Auburn Heritage Walk, which strings together the town's 1850s stone buildings, and no literary pilgrimage is complete without browsing the shelves at Mostly Books - the kind of secondhand bookshop where a copy of the Sentimental Bloke does not stay long on the shelf.
Make an afternoon of it
Finish the way Dennis senior would have approved: with a counter meal at the Rising Sun Hotel, one of the old coaching inns that gave the poet his earliest material. Auburn is compact, walkable and generous with its history - more ideas in our guide to the best free things to do in the Clare Valley.