made in – the new colony in its early years was anything but carefully distilled.
Firewater also got its name because strong alcohol can taste exactly like it’s scorching your nostrils and your lips and your tongue when you take a sip, especially if you have no experience of tasting anything like it before.
In the Meriam language of the eastern Torres Strait Islands, writes Maggie Brady, alcohol is kaomal nguki, or uweri ni – ‘hot water’. On Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Lardil people call spirits ‘hot stuff’ and beer ‘sea water’ or mela. ‘Anyone who drinks a lot of beer’, writes anthropologist David McKnight, who spent many years on Mornington Island, ‘is known as melamerr, i.e. crazy or mad for beer, just as drinking large quantities of sea water will cause craziness.’ Other coastal groups reached similar conclusions, from the Wadjiginy people in the Northern Territory who chose ngatjur – ‘salty, sour’ – to describe grog to the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains whose word for alcohol is kurpula, ‘sea water’: something that doesn’t taste pleasant.
Maggie Brady says the words Aboriginal people historically chose to describe alcohol also reflect the community’s response to its introduction and attitudes to it over time. Some groups, she says, use warning words: the Kuninjku people in Kakadu, for example, called alcohol kun-bang, which means ‘dangerous, poisonous, sleek, deadly one’. And in the Pitjantjatjara Western Desert language, one term for alcohol is kapi kura, ‘bad water’.
But there’s another word for alcohol in Pitjantjatjara that tells a different story. Wama. It means ‘sweet’. There are similar words for alcohol in other desert languages: ngkwarle in Kaytetye means ‘honey or nectar’, and pama in Warlpiri means ‘sweet delicacy’.
This is the heart of the difficult relationship we can have with alcohol. On one hand, we know about the pain that often comes with intoxication – and on the other, we crave the pleasure. The pleasure usually wins. In the same way, we know the perils of alcohol, the problems it brings to people, communities and society. But we also know there are profits to be made from the business of selling grog. So we sanction, we legislate, we license.
In 1812, Governor Macquarie put forward another plan to stem the tide of spirits flowing into Sydney. Acknowledging that ‘The Nature of the Inhabitants of this Country is such that Spirits Must be had’ – in other words, people are going to drink no matter how hard you try to control it, so you might as well get in on the action yourself – he suggested the government should build a large distillery. Not only would this provide a market for the colony’s grain farmers, but also, writes Tom Gilling, ‘it would keep wealth from being sucked out of the colony to pay for imported grog’.
It took another decade of arguing, but in 1822 it finally became legal to make spirits in the colony, in distilleries licensed by the government.
‘I’m really excited that we finally get a chance to taste these old bottles,’ says bar owner Seb Costello. ‘We’re drinking history. Because when you open a bottle of whisky and share it with people, it’s not a product, it’s a moment in time.’
Costello’s bar, Bad Frankie, is up a side street behind a kebab shop in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. When it opened in 2014, it was one of the first places in the country to specialise in the emerging new wave of Australian craft spirits. Back then, Seb found eighty gins, whiskies, rums and other drinks to fill his shelves. Now there are well over 500, and he doesn’t have enough space in his tiny bar to stock everything that’s out there.
A group of Seb’s customers and a smattering of drinks-industry people – distillers, media, hospitality – have gathered in the bar on this fine Saturday afternoon to taste a couple of rare bottles of historic Australian whisky. They’re from the long-defunct Corio distillery north of Geelong. One of the bottles is from the 1960s, the other from the 1980s. Luke McCarthy, author of The Australian Spirits Guide, has come along to guide us through the whiskies as we taste: he has spent a lot of time researching Corio, because the rise and fall of the big distillery tells a broader boom-bust-boom story of Australia’s postcolonial spirits production.
After distilling was made legal in the 1820s, new stills popped up all over the country. Most were small operations, and they often struggled to survive. Distillers realised that to succeed, you needed scale, and from the 1860s – helped by a rapidly growing post–gold rush population – a number of very large operations opened. Robert Dunn’s Mount Warrenheip distillery near Ballarat, for example, was turning out 2000 gallons (9000 litres) of gin a year by 1864.
By the turn of the 20th century, Australian distilling was being conducted on an even larger scale. A few operations from that era still exist. South Australia’s St Agnes brandy distillery, established by winemaker William Angove in 1910 to make spirit for fortifying his port and sherry, is enjoying a renewed interest in its brandies. And the Bundaberg distillery in south-east Queensland still produces 3 million litres of rum a year.
Bundaberg was established in 1888, when a group of local cane growers decided the best thing to do with the enormous quantities of thick molasses left over from sugar refining was to ferment and distill it. When I visited the home of Bundy rum in 2017, curious to see why 70,000 tourists make the pilgrimage each year, I was struck by how ‘19th century’ the place looked. Huge wads of steam billowed from the chimneys of a sugar-cane mill next door. The warm air was thick with a sweet, vegetal smell of silage and treacle. Soot and bagasse – the fibres left after sugar milling – lay in a fine layer over all the old distillery buildings, including the molasses well: a huge rectangular covered concrete pit, like a sunken warehouse, its low corrugated-iron roof supported by Oregon-pine beams.
The distillery manager took me inside the dark molasses warehouse. During the six-month sugar-cane harvest, from June to December, thousands of tonnes of rich, gloopy ‘blackstrap’ molasses are pumped over from the mill into this well, so that the distillery can draw on the raw material throughout the year to make rum. It was warm and muggy inside. Gloomy, too, apart from a shaft of skylight sunshine being sucked into the molasses and humming back out into the room as a dark golden glow. It was a close, unforgettable atmosphere; all that energy embodied in the pit. I felt I could easily topple off the wooden walkway that stretches out over the molasses only to sink into the ooze, never to be seen again. The perils of being a drinks journalist.
Bundaberg and St Agnes may be thriving, but most of Australia’s other large early-20th-century distilleries have either disappeared or are now shells of their former selves.
The Federal Distillery overlooking the bay in Port Melbourne was established in the 1880s. In its heyday, it was one of the biggest spirits manufacturers in the world, producing over 4 million litres of whisky, brandy and gin a year, not going out of production until the 1970s. The refurbished building is now home to luxury apartments, the only remnant of its former life being large murals on the outside wall of the various brands of spirits once made there.
The huge Corio distillery outside Geelong hasn’t had such a lucky second life. Opened with great fanfare in 1929, the big four-storey brick building closed down in the 1980s and is now mostly empty.
I have travelled from Melbourne to Geelong countless times over the last twenty-five years on the way to wineries or the Great Ocean Road on holiday. And as the car or train I’m in has sped through the suburb of Corio, north of the city, I’ve glanced at that big brick building and been intrigued by the words ‘Distillers Corporation Ltd’ emblazoned on it. One day, I decided to turn off the main road and have a closer look.
This part of Corio is flat and industrial, with wide
