history with theirs has been one of respect and admiration. She is buried here in the Winton cemetery and some of her sources [for her books] are our ancestors.’
Pearl tells me her great-great-grandfather was Moses Yoolpee, Alice’s teacher and guide, and that her mother, Joslin, now in her eighties, knew Alice. And she says she knows about the production of a drink made from bauhinia flowers and sugarbag (honey from native bees).
‘Yes, that practice did occur in my mother’s and grandmother’s lives,’ she says.
But then she hesitates.
‘I’m reluctant to give too much away,’ she says. ‘I’ve had food companies, pharmaceutical companies in the past ring me up asking about plants, looking for secrets, wanting our intellectual property. So one thing I won’t tell you is the method of how to make it. I’m worried people will look at your book and think, hey, let’s give this a bit of a squiz, and run off with it.’
She sighs. There is a long pause.
‘There are predators out there,’ says Pearl. ‘The alcohol industry is big-money business. But this isn’t just a drink, it’s not just a beverage, it’s medicine. It needs to be written up at the right time, in the right way and for the right purposes. It’s not some top-shelf liquor.’
The vivid flavour image painted by Duncan-Kemp of honey being mixed with pounded blossoms and allowed to ferment isn’t the only example of Aboriginal people using sugarbag to produce a ‘semi-intoxicating drink’.
In The Aborigines of Victoria, Robert Brough Smyth repeated an account from the 1840s of wild honey, produced by the small stingless native bee, being collected and consumed by Aboriginal people in New South Wales.
‘The honey’, he wrote, ‘is of delicious flavor, after it has been carefully separated from the comb, the cells of which are generally filled with small flies. The natives, however, devour it just as they find it, and are very fond even of the refuse comb, with which they make their favorite beverage called Bull, and of this they drink till they become quite intoxicated.’
After spending years researching the history of Aboriginal drinking culture, Maggie Brady says we need to be careful jumping to conclusions about such references. As with Brough Smyth’s report of the banksia drink, beal, we can’t be absolutely sure that the ‘intoxication’ mentioned here refers to the effects of alcohol or whether it’s a description of people enjoying an energetic sugar hit.
Michael Bock, a botanist who has written about Indigenous fermentation, also points out the difficulty of ascertaining exactly how far back the process of making fermented drinks goes in Australia. ‘It is not proved, although it is highly likely, that some tribes such as the Tasmanian Aborigines discovered this process before the European invasion,’ he writes. ‘Other tribes are more likely to have developed the techniques for converting sugar-rich, sweet drinks into alcoholic drinks after the Europeans had introduced alcohol to the Aborigines.’
But it’s equally possible that it is alcoholic inebriation being described when writers across three centuries, from Brough Smyth to Duncan-Kemp to Neville Collard, use the word ‘intoxication’. There’s no doubt, for example, that these drinks could have contained alcohol. I have mixed sugarbag with water and watched it spontaneously start to ferment after a couple of days. I have tasted fermented way-a-linah collected from a hollow in a cider-gum tree. It’s impossible to believe that people could live for millennia in an environment where sugary liquids come naturally into contact with wild yeasts and not have experienced some form of even mildly alcoholic drinks – and then thought about how they could repeat the experience.
We need to do more research in this area. We need to keep asking questions, to stop blindly accepting the ‘dry continent’ myth. We also need to consider the tantalising possibility that the Karuwali practice of fermenting honey with other local ingredients – and the other practices – may well date back at least as far as other examples of ancient honey fermentation around the globe, such as the 9000-year-old Neolithic Chinese rice/honey/fruit drink analysed by Patrick McGovern. We need to consider, too, that this bauhinia sugarbag drink – and mangaitch and kambuda and beal and way-a-linah – may well be some of the oldest fermented drinks known to humanity.
Firewater: Rum and other ardent spirits
The English sailor brought the cup to his lips and took a sip. The alcohol was warm as it trickled down his throat. He gestured to the two Aboriginal men standing a few feet away from him on the beach at Botany Bay, held out the cup, signalled for them to drink too.
The Dharawal men were wary. They were suspicious of the big white bird that had sailed in to Gamay, their bay, suspicious of the men with ghostly white skin that clambered about the giant bird like possums, suspicious of the boat full of strangers that had landed on their shore. The women of the tribe had told the two men not to drink anything the white men were handing out to them. It could be poison, they said.
The sailor took out a tomahawk and showed the men how it could be used to cut down bushes. Then he indicated he would give them the tomahawk if they would have a drink with him.
The Dharawal men knew the women were right to be cautious. But the drink didn’t appear to be having any bad effect on the white man. He hadn’t fallen down dead. In fact, the drink seemed to be making him merry. So, they signed for him to pour more in his cup, drink some himself and they would drink the rest.
The sailor did as he was directed, handing over the tomahawk and the cup to one of the men, who brought the grog to his lips and took a sip.
The man felt his face go up in flames. ‘Guwiya!’ he shouted. ‘Fire!’ He spat out the liquid in shock and disgust, yelling, in language – ‘Fire in eyes, fire in nose and fire all over!’ – as he ran into the water to stop the burning.
There are two accounts of this pivotal moment in 1788, when the English introduced strong drinks to Aboriginal people at Botany Bay. Anthropologist Maggie Brady puts them side-by-side in her book First Taste to show how the same historical event can be remembered in different ways by different people.
The first account was written by Philip Gidley King, second lieutenant on the Sirius. It takes up only a few words in King’s long journal entry for 20 January, describing how he and a party of marines met a group of Aboriginal men on the southern shore of Botany Bay. The men were armed with spears and made a ‘vociferous’ display of their displeasure at being invaded. King appeased them by offering gifts, including ‘a glass of Wine which they had no sooner tasted then they spit it out’. Just like that. Matter-of-fact.
The Aboriginal version of the story was recorded in 1833 by a Catholic priest in Sydney. It was told to him by ‘a Botany Bay man’ whose father had told it to him. This was the detailed, evocative story of the big white bird, of the sailors ‘like possums’, of the tomahawk and of the drink that tasted like fire. Much more dramatic, burned into the memory.
This event has become part of our national legend: the moment when a huge wave of potent alcohol that had kept much of Europe intoxicated for centuries – rum and brandy and gin, port and sherry and wine
