Australian Dictionary of Biography

Claudio Alcorso, 1999, photographed by Paul County

Courtesy of Paul County

Claudio Alcorso (1913–2000), textiles manufacturer, winemaker, and arts patron, was born Claudio Piperno in Rome, Italy, on 5 October 1913, second of four children to Italian-born parents Amilcare Piperno, businessman, and his wife Delia (Niny), née Coen, Genovese artist. The Pipernos were wealthy and moved in influential circles that included the Mussolini family and conductor Arturo Toscanini. Claudio’s appreciation of art and music was fostered by his mother, who oversaw his education and ensured he became fluent in French and English. After leaving school, he studied economics at the University of Rome, served a period of compulsory military service (1935–36) in the Italian Royal Air Force, and worked in his father’s textile business. While at university, he began to embrace anti-fascist views and socialist philosophies.

With rising anti-Semitism and the alliance between Italy and Germany, the family added Alcorso to their name to obscure their Jewish heritage. The family also began smuggling capital out of the country in the late 1930s. In September 1938 Claudio travelled to England, where he spent several months studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Identifying a gap in the Australian market for printed fabrics, he moved to Sydney with his younger brother Orlando and business manager Paulo Sonnino in early 1939. Within the year they had established the textile agency French, Italian, Swiss Manufacturers, Australia (FISMA) and registered Silk and Textile Printers Ltd (STP). They also built a factory at Rushcutters Bay, which employed art students from the Darlinghurst Technical College to create new designs that were printed on imported greige fabrics.

When Italy entered World War II in 1940 Claudio Alcorso tried to get permission to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force, but was arrested and interned as an enemy alien in July. Despite repeated appeals, he remained imprisoned for over three years, first at Sydney’s Long Bay gaol, and then at Hay, New South Wales, and Loveday, South Australia. During his internment, he was sent to cut timber along the Murray River, where he ‘grew to love … the Australian bush’ (Alcorso 1994, 47). He also became active in the anti-fascist movement Italia Libera as the editor (c. 1944–46) of the Australian-Italian bilingual communist newspaper Il Risveglio. On 24 May 1944 he married seventeen-year-old Diana Zavattaro, Queensland-born daughter of a Piedmontese migrant, at the District Registrar’s Office at Paddington, Sydney. They had two sons: Julian and Adrian.

In 1946 Alcorso collaborated with Sydney Ure Smith and Hal Missingham, director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, to commission local modernist artists to reproduce their designs on fabrics for clothes and soft furnishings. (Sir) Russell Drysdale, (Sir) William Dobell, and Margaret Preston were among those involved. The venture, though innovative, was a commercial failure and Alcorso later regretted not exporting the range directly to Europe, where he felt it would have been successful.

Together with his brother and Sonnino, Alcorso relocated STP to Tasmania in 1947. Their factory in Hobart’s north capitalised on access to cheap hydroelectricity and a female workforce that was being displaced from other occupations by soldiers returning to their jobs after the war. It became a major employer in the city and acquired an excellent reputation for its treatment of workers, which included providing housing for immigrant workers, a profit-sharing system, and the introduction of the first forty-hour week in Tasmania. Alcorso travelled to Japan and Communist China to establish supply lines and would later employ John Kaldor, a textile designer whose parents managed Sekers Silks, the Australian branch of the British firm West Cumberland Silk Mills Pty Ltd. STP launched technologically advanced lines under various brands, and in 1956 began printing Sekers Silks in Australia. (STP subsequently purchased Sekers from the Kaldors in 1965.) In 1967 STP merged with Tennyson Textiles based at Gladesville, Sydney, and was renamed Universal Textiles Australia (UTA). During the late 1960s Alcorso also introduced a premium range of coloured printed sheets and soft furnishings under the name Sheridan Textiles. In 1969 UTA was acquired by Dunlop Australia Ltd and Claudio resigned from the company in 1970. Earlier that year, his son Adrian had died by suicide.

In 1948 Alcorso had purchased of a small peninsula of land on the Derwent River. He named it Moorilla and commissioned the architect (Sir) Roy Grounds to build a distinctive modernist neo-Tuscan villa known as the Courtyard House (completed in 1957). In February 1958, after divorcing Diana two years earlier, Alcorso married Lesley Jean Slipper, a Melbourne-born kindergarten teacher, in Hobart. They had a daughter, Caroline, and established Moorilla Estate (both 1958). Beginning with cuttings provided by the winemaker David Wynn, they defied agricultural sceptics who claimed that wine could not be grown in Tasmania’s cool climate, later producing award-winning cabernet sauvignon and Rhine riesling varieties. Alcorso also joined with emerging Tasmanian winemakers to form the Vineyards Association of Tasmania.

On the encouragement of H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, Alcorso accepted an appointment as a committee member with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1966. This led to a position as foundation chairman (1970–74) of the Australian Opera and board member of the Australian Ballet. He championed the importance of artists with his motto ‘artists are always right’ and later declared: ‘I’m not a Patron of the Arts … I love the Arts’ (1994, 83).

In the mid 1970s Alcorso became the inaugural chair of the Tasmanian Theatre and Performing Arts Council (later Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board). With Peter Byers and Sir James Plimsoll, he lobbied to turn the industrial waterfront and historic warehouses at Salamanca and Hunter Street in Hobart into public arts spaces. He also helped establish the Salamanca Arts Centre and from 1980 used his position as inaugural chair of the Sullivans Cove Development Authority to pursue his vision of a community arts precinct.

By the 1980s Alcorso had turned to environmental and social justice causes, including the campaign to save the Franklin River from a hydroelectricity dam. Protestors were billeted at Moorilla Estate, and Claudio and Lesley were arrested at the Crotty Road protest (1983). He also joined campaigns for a treaty to recognise Aboriginal people as the original owners of Australia.

Alcorso’s formidable involvement in the cultural and intellectual life of his adopted country also included service on various advisory bodies such as the Australian Universities Commission (1975–77), Tasmanian State Council of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (1967–78), Australian Peace Award Committee, and Council of the University of Tasmania. For his service, he was appointed commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1973) and OA (1984), and also received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Tasmania (1995). In 1993 he published a memoir, The Wind You Say, which was launched by the former prime minister Gough Whitlam.

By the early 1980s Alcorso’s eldest son Julian had taken over management of Moorilla Estate. Under his stewardship, commercial production increased and they acquired more vineyards, but the business struggled under a growing burden of debt. Julian and his father fell out over the situation. In late 1995 the property was repossessed by the bank and sold to the professional gamblers David Walsh and Zeljko Ranogajec. The Alcorsos were allowed to remain in their home, and they did so until Claudio became ill with cancer. He died on 28 August 2000 in Hobart and a memorial service was held at Moorilla.

A radical democrat and humanist, who had a strong civic conscience, Alcorso was once described as ‘a man for all seasons’ (Tas. HOA 2000, 99). Though a devoted republican and variously a member of both the Australian Labor Party and the Greens, he was remembered fondly by Liberal politician and Opposition leader Sue Napier as having ‘a magic feel for language’ and ‘a very erudite way of presenting a very forthright point of view’ (Tas. HOA 2000, 101). Besides enjoying tennis and golf, he maintained a lifelong love affair with Rome, returning to visit many times. The Claudio Alcorso Foundation (2001–18) was established by his wife and close friends to support the arts as well as viticulture, environment, and social justice initiatives. The Courtyard House became the Museum of Antiquities and, following a substantial renovation of the entire property, the Museum of Old and New Art, which opened to the public in 2011. The Alcorso Arts and Nature Fund was founded in 2017.