Incense? Wax? Nothing in this pungent burning water is familiar.
It’s as though I’m tasting alcohol for the very first time.
A DRINK TO TRY AT HOME
Blow My Skull
Van Diemen’s Land, 1815
Colonel Thomas Davey, lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, was a notorious pisspot.
Davey had sailed as a young marine with the First Fleet in 1787, staying in Port Jackson for a few years before returning to England. Rising through the ranks, he arrived back in the colony in 1813 to take up the position of lieutenant governor in Hobart. He was described as ‘dissipated and profligate’ by New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie, who wrote to his superiors in England regularly about Davey’s ‘drinking and depravity’. Davey developed a formidable reputation among the colonists, too, when it came to the grog, as one particularly colourful account written years later by cookbook author Edward Abbott makes clear.
Fourteen-year-old Abbott had arrived in Hobart just after Davey, in 1815. The Sydney-born son of the colony’s deputy judge advocate, Abbott became a clerk before rising to prominence in Tasmanian society as a pastoralist, publisher and politician. In 1864 he wrote what is considered to be the first cookbook compiled by an Australian, The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as Well as for the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’. It’s a remarkable insight into mid-19th-century attitudes to eating, and includes thirteen pages devoted to mixed drinks – recipes for the ‘punches’ and ‘cups’, the ‘juleps’ and ‘cobblers’ then fashionable in Australia. To put this into context, Jerry Thomas, the American ‘father of the cocktail’, had written his Bar-Tender’s Guide, the first drinks manual to be published in the US and today seen as the ‘blueprint’ for cocktail culture, only two years before.
In his book, Abbott depicts the ‘eccentric’ Colonel Davey hosting epic drinking sessions in a ‘wattle hut … improvised within a mile of the capital’. Davey would install himself at the head of a makeshift table in this dingy grog den, a ‘barbecued pig’ for sustenance laid out before him and a barrel filled with a punch of his own invention off to one side, ready to be tapped.
Davey’s concoction was a blend of beer, rum and brandy, sugar syrup and lime juice. He called it ‘Blow My Skull’. The lieutenant governor would welcome visitors into his shack and hand them a tin mug filled with a generous pour of his punch. ‘A challenge to liquor from the representative of majesty in a roomy pannikin’, Abbott wrote, ‘could not be declined.’ Especially when Colonel Davey then bellowed, ‘No heeltaps!’ (meaning ‘Drink it all; don’t leave any dregs’), and you both sculled the brimming cupful of the potent brew in one gulp. Abbott wrote that the unfortunate visitor would immediately be ‘hors de combat’ – out of action – while the lieutenant governor, ‘having an impenetrable cranium, and an iron frame, could take several goblets of the alcoholic fluid, and walk away as lithe and happy as possible’.
Blow My Skull. It sounds lethal. I just had to make some.
Abbott gives us a recipe: dissolve loaf sugar in two pints of boiling water, add some lime or lemon juice, a pint of ale or porter, a pint of rum and half a pint of brandy. My 21-year-old son Riley was particularly keen to help: it has become a tradition in our house for him to try out new cocktails on Sophie and me at the end of the day, as we get dinner ready. So while I barbecued some pork chops (Colonel Davey’s choice of accompaniment for his Blow My Skull), Riley found a big jug and started blending. The result was … surprisingly palatable. The sugar and lime help to mask the boozy hit of the rum and brandy, and the beer (we used porter) brought a malty, almost cola-like flavour.
Then Soph suggested adding some sparkling water to dilute the alcohol content even further. This wasn’t very ‘authentic’ – there was no SodaStream in that wattle hut in 1815 – but it was a revelation: the now-fizzy sweet brown drink tasted just like rum and Coke. And it was delicious with the barbecued chops.
So, if it actually tastes good, how did Davey’s drink get its fearsome reputation?
By the time Abbott was writing about the original Blow My Skull in the 1860s, a bastardised version of the drink, called Blow My Skull Off, had become notorious on Victoria’s goldfields. It was sold at sly-grog shops and varied in its composition. One account lists the ingredients as methylated spirits, rum, cayenne pepper and opium, while another says the ‘devil’s potion’ also included Cocculus indicus, or Levant nut, an Indian plant used by unscrupulous brewers in mid-19th-century beers to enhance the effects of intoxication – and used by everyone else as a pesticide and poison.
Cocktail historian and distiller Sebastian Reaburn has found mentions of Blow My Skull Off in police gazettes of the era, where officers are warned: ‘If you find a group of men up in the goldfields of Ballarat drinking this, don’t try to arrest them. In fact, don’t even get off your horse. You just need to club them into unconsciousness because they’re mad. There’s no reasoning with them.’
I didn’t try re-creating this later version of the drink. I do have some limits.
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