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Why don’t we know more about this? Why has the myth persisted for so long that Aboriginal people had no experience of fermented, alcoholic drinks before the arrival of the First Fleet? Why haven’t we been asking the right questions?
Much of the knowledge was eradicated early on by colonisation, dispossession and the frontier wars. Killing people, moving the survivors off their land to live in unfamiliar country, and banning traditional practices in the new forced communities were all dreadfully effective ways of erasing a culture.
‘In the early 1900s, anthropologist Daisy Bates wrote of annual feasts of mangaitch [before the arrival of Europeans],’ writes Brady. ‘She [also] described the terrible impact of white settlement on Western Australian Aborigines … how the fences, the sheep, horses and cattle all affected their sources of food. She told how the “mungaitch honey-groves” were cut down to make way for flocks and herds.’
Even where the practices or knowledge did survive and were recorded, those records have often been wilfully ignored by the dominant culture over the last 200 years. As Pascoe writes in Dark Emu, accounts of organised agriculture detailed by the explorers and early settlers challenge white Australia’s deep-seated preconception of Aboriginal people as ‘mere hunter-gatherers … simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in hapless opportunism’. Accounts of the organised, seasonal ceremonial production and enjoyment of fermented drinks is equally challenging to this preconception. In both cases, ignoring or actively supressing acknowledgement of Aboriginal agency has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession. ‘No grog’ is another form of ‘terra nullius’.
Brady argues that the idea of Aboriginal people having no previous experience of alcohol prior to European colonisation has become an easy, sweeping way of explaining that Aboriginal drinking is wrong. She says that the ‘dry continent’ myth has been used as an explanation for the ‘scourge’ of alcohol abuse in Aboriginal communities – ‘that because there was no alcohol before, Aboriginal people must have some biological “weakness” that makes them more vulnerable to its effects, and to addiction itself’ – and as justification for the repressive prohibition and control that has been imposed on Aboriginal people’s drinking over many decades.
Reading the old accounts of Aboriginal fermented drinks, it’s clear that these drinks were perceived as having little to no exploitable commercial value to Europeans, and that they were, therefore, unworthy of being studied in detail. It’s the same for many Indigenous foods and farming practices. The explorers and early settlers looked at the country through a European lens: cultural ignorance and a deep lack of understanding of the landscape and climate blinded them to the potential or importance of the resources and ceremonies being observed.
In his 1843 account of the cider gums, for example, Ronald Gunn said, unequivocally, that ‘[the sap] has never been obtained in any quantity or applied to any useful purpose’ – despite describing in detail how shepherds and stockmen had learned how to tap the trees and harvest the liquid, and despite being aware that it produces an alcoholic drink. Contrast this with how white settlers and explorers responded to pituri, the ‘native tobacco’ common across central and eastern Australia.
When Joseph Banks first saw Aboriginal people chewing ‘the leaves of an herb’ in 1770, he drew easy comparisons with how a European person might chew ‘tobacco’ or ‘East Indian’ betel leaves. The sight was familiar to him and he could place it in a global cultural context. A century later, when stories emerged of Central Australian Aboriginal people helping exhausted explorers on the Burke and Wills expedition by feeding them fish, bread and a ‘stuff they call bedgery or pedgery [which] has a highly intoxicating effect when chewed even in small quantities’, it inspired a flurry of scientific investigation.
Intrepid explorers soon set out to brave the mysterious outback in search of this intoxicating plant and recorded all sorts of remarkable claims about its effects, from enabling old men to act as seers to allowing Aboriginal people to walk hundreds of kilometres without food or water, and giving them courage in warfare.
The heroic lore surrounding pituri has survived to the present day and is familiar to many Australians – unlike the historical stories of ceremony surrounding fermented drinks, which have mostly faded into obscurity.
If the way-a-linah trees hadn’t been so remote, if the mangaitch forests hadn’t been razed to make way for stock, if the drinks observed by Gunn and Bunce and Roth had been more abundant, less seasonal, less tied to ceremony and place – and if they’d been stronger, more alcoholic, more like the tradeable, transportable commodities of wine and port and spirits the colonists had brought with them – then perhaps they would have attracted more attention and acknowledgement. And appropriation.
One of the centres of pituri culture is the Channel Country of south-west Queensland, between Birdsville and Windorah, traditional land of the Karuwali/Mithaka people. This wide-open red-dirt landscape was scarred by waves of violent frontier warfare in the 1870s and 1880s, as Aboriginal people fiercely resisted the arrival of white pastoralists and their herds of cattle. By the end of the century, an uneasy truce hung over the country as it became clear to the Aboriginal people that the Europeans weren’t going away, and to the pastoralists that they had come to rely on the local people for knowledge of country and as workers on their stations, mustering stock, looking after children.
One pastoralist who had a more enlightened view of Aboriginal culture than most was William Duncan, who arrived to manage Mooraberrie station, near the present-day infamous Betoota Hotel, in 1891, and became the owner in 1900. Historian Tom Griffiths writes that Duncan ‘respected Aboriginal ownership and traditions, and Mooraberrie became a refuge for the remaining Aboriginal people of the region’. The station had also been the site of a ‘peace ceremony’ conducted in 1889, attended by more than 500 Aboriginal people from across the Channel Country, that helped to bring about an end to the more violent period of frontier conflict in this part of the world.
Alice Duncan was born one of four children at Mooraberrie in 1901, and grew up immersed in the Aboriginal world. The children’s Aboriginal nurse, Mary Ann, and her stockman brother, Moses Yoolpee – who himself had been educated by a previous station owner, at Scotch College in Melbourne – taught Alice Karuwali culture. The young girl spent many years travelling through the country with ‘the blacks’, learning their bushcraft and stories and spirituality. Later, as an adult, when she was married and running a station of her own, Alice Duncan-Kemp wrote four books: rich, detailed memoirs of her early life at Mooraberrie. And in the first of the series, Our Sandhill Country, she described what she observed on one trip through country:
A familiar sight is the bauhinia (tree) with its twin leaves and red-tipped blossoms resembling honeysuckle … From the honey-filled blossoms the blacks make a semi-intoxicating drink. When the bauhinias for miles round come into bloom the gins pick the blossoms off in coolamonfuls. These are pounded, and the sweet golden liquid drained off into a larger, deeper coolamon, then mixed with sugar-bag or ant honey and set aside to ferment, a process which takes eight or ten days.
Although Duncan-Kemp’s memoirs have been dismissed by some in the past as romantic ‘tall stories’ – her own mother described Alice as being ‘fairly “cracked” on the blacks’ – anthropologists and historians increasingly regard them as reliable accounts of traditional Aboriginal culture.
Pearl Eatts is a descendant of the Karuwali people of the Channel Country. She now lives in Winton, a day’s drive north on the other side of the Diamantina Lakes, and works on preserving – and educating people about – her culture and ancestry.
‘Alice
