is flawed. Clearly, in many parts of the country, Aboriginal people were already familiar with fermented drinks. The difference was that these drinks were rare, mild, seasonal and ceremonial, unlike the huge quantities of strong, constantly available alcohol that the invaders brought with them. It’s also not true that, when the Dharawal man spat out King’s wine in 1788, this was the first time people living on this continent had encountered strong drinks. Spirits had arrived in other parts of Australia long before the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay.
Macassan sailors had been visiting the northern Australian coast since at least the mid–17th century. Every December they left their homes in Sulawesi in Indonesia and sailed on the monsoon winds to the Kimberley and Arnhem Land. Here they harvested and processed trepang – bêche-de-mer, sea slug, sea cucumber – which they then sold to Chinese merchants. The Macassans brought goods to trade with the local Aboriginal people, who in turn welcomed the visitors for their six-month annual stay, helping them collect and dry the trepang. Among the many things the Macassans brought with them was a strong spirit from Java called arrack.
Drinks historian David Wondrich says this spirit was made in Chinese-run distilleries in Java, using traditional Chinese distillation techniques and ingredients such as fermented rice – much as the Chinese white spirit, baijiu, is made today. Over time, other ingredients – palm wine, introduced from India, and molasses, introduced by the Dutch – were also incorporated into the process. This, says Wondrich, gave arrack a ‘true hybrid’ flavour, combining the fire of baijiu, the softness of Indian palm spirit and the sweetness of rum.
The arrack the Macassans brought with them also tasted of something else: anisi, pronounced ‘aahnich’. Aniseed. Maggie Brady says this refers to the aniseed often used by distillers in Java to flavour the spirit. And she says that the Yolŋu people of Arnhem Land borrowed the word, transliterated as nganitji, and have applied it to all strong drink ever since: ‘Nganitji’, she says, ‘means “grog” now.’
The word for alcohol wasn’t the only thing adopted by the Yolŋu over centuries of interaction with the Macassans. As well as incorporating lots of other words into their language – rrupiya for money, buthulu for bottle – Yolŋu also made paintings of the visitors’ sailing vessels, learned skills that changed the way they made tools and built their canoes, composed songs that echoed Macassan melodies and created dances that told the history of nganitji, including the ‘drunken Macassan’ dance.
In the mid–19th century, Filipino sailors also brought their own version of arrack, a distilled palm wine they called tuba, when they visited the Torres Strait Islands in search of shells and trepang. Islanders learned how to make the drink from the Filipinos: they called the juice of the coconut-palm buds tuba and drank it fresh like a soft drink, or fermented it to about 4 per cent alcohol, or distilled it to make a stronger drink called steamed tuba.
Brady writes that Islanders used the fresh tuba like a sauce, dipping slices of mango into it. The fermented tuba was more like a yeasty beer; Islander women used it as a raising agent in breadmaking. And the steamed tuba was often drunk, according to accounts from Elders, ‘like white people drink wine at dinner’, in moderation.
The way the Macassans and Filipinos introduced alcohol in northern Australia and the Torres Strait influenced the way people responded to it and how they incorporated it into their own culture. These visitors were also temporary, not interested in occupation. They gave alcohol in a ‘good manners’, respectful way, and it was given to reinforce ‘trading friendships’.
The ways of drinking that the English brought with them in 1788 were very different.
A crowd of convicts, settlers and marines gathers in the heart of the new colony to watch the latest flogging. A convict has been caught stealing a bottle of illicit rum, a serious breach of public order. It is a hot, harsh morning. Clear blue sky, burning sun, the crack of musket fire in the distance. Red-coated soldiers nursing hard hangovers tie the convict in his grubby rags to a wooden frame and the lashing begins, much to the delight of the hordes of assembled schoolchildren.
It’s 1977, and I’m one of those kids, visiting Old Sydney Town, a colonial theme park that had just opened near Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast. The place was populated with actors in period costume, all embracing their part by swigging from thick glass bottles and stoneware jars, singing sea shanties in the town’s tavern, carousing through the streets in a mock-drunken swagger. We were told these bottles and jugs and tankards were filled with rum. It was an experience that burned its way into my memory. Even now, I can’t help thinking of rum whenever I think of that time in the early years of the colony.
When the First Fleet arrived, it was carrying 12,000 gallons – 54,000 litres – of rum on board. That’s almost 9 gallons or 40 litres of rum for each of the 1373 men, women and children who had survived the journey. Considering 1000 of these people were convicts – and convicts were officially prohibited from drinking – it’s more like 12 gallons or 54 litres of rum per head.
All the First Fleeters, whether labourer or landed gentry, came from a culture where strong drinks like gin, brandy and rum were easily accessible, constantly available and almost universally consumed. Binge drinking was common and communal.
From the beginning of the settlement there was an official imbalance between those who had access to grog and those who didn’t. But as author Tom Gilling puts it in Grog, his history of colonial Sydney, this disparity didn’t last: by the end of 1788, he writes, ‘smuggled and stolen liquor was already rippling through the colony’s cashless economy’, with the free settlers bartering with the convicts and the convicts trading among themselves.
The Second Fleet brought both more spirits and a specially commissioned unit of soldiers called the New South Wales Corps. From then on, a steady stream of ships arrived at Port Jackson, each carrying more and more barrels of booze. This new ‘influx of liquor’, writes Gilling, kicked off a flourishing trade in alcohol – and ‘the most avaricious exponents of this trade would turn out to be the officers of the New South Wales Corps themselves.’
The officers of the Corps bought the bulk of the spirits as it arrived, and then onsold it or bartered it with the rest of the colony. Within a couple of years, liquor had become, Gilling says, ‘an indispensable cog in the colonial economy’. Labourers were paid in rum, a ship could be bought for £50 and 150 gallons of rum, and land was swapped for spirits, with 4 gallons being worth 25 acres. The settlement of 400 or so people on the Hawkesbury River, out of the constant purview of the authorities, was described as ‘one continued scene of drunkenness … the Settlers selling their crops for Liquor’. And illicit stills started popping up everywhere, with the distillers often operating their sly-grog operations in cahoots with the local constables.
At first, Aboriginal people were wary of the invaders’ alcohol. Some found its taste repulsive – but some enjoyed it. When Governor Arthur Phillip decided to kidnap some Aboriginal people both to learn about their culture and to introduce them to English customs such as ‘civilised’ drinking, they reacted very differently to the wine offered to them. Some refused. Some, including the most famous of those Aboriginal captives, Bennelong, not only accepted the drinks but soon participated in toasts.
‘[Bennelong] became at once fond of our viands,’ wrote Watkin Tench, one of the most candid chroniclers of the early years of the settlement, ‘and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight and enjoyment … Nor was the effect of wine or brandy upon him more perceptible than an equal quantity would have produced upon one of us, although fermented liquor was new to him.’
Despite
