Aboriginal population were ‘left to themselves to interpret the meaning of alcohol, and what happens after imbibing it. They “learned” by looking around at the motley collection of Europeans and were often puzzled by what they saw.’ As disease and dispossession took their toll on the Aboriginal population and they moved closer to the settlement, they ‘acquired a taste for the firewater of the whites’.
‘Alcohol usually had a devastating effect on those who drank it, and rendered them susceptible to racist caricature,’ writes Marcia Langton in her influential study of this period, Rum, Seduction and Death. Langton highlights the ‘role of the British men who deliberately provided the alcohol to trick and debilitate those Aborigines who had survived the smallpox and the destitution into which they were forced’, despite the fact that ‘their addiction to liquor was in no way out of character with the general mores of the settlement’.
A succession of governors tried to crack down on the drunkenness taking hold of the colony. In the late 1790s Governor John Hunter introduced hotel licensing, tried turning away speculative grog ships and proposed taking over the purchase and supply of alcohol to keep the price down and make it less attractive to trade. It didn’t work. Hunter put his finger on the problem when he wrote: ‘Since 1792 … the Public Interest & that of private individuals [have] been … in direct opposition to each other.’ ‘As usual,’ writes Gilling, ‘where grog was concerned, the profits outweighed the deterrents.’
Things came to a head in 1808, with the arrival of William Bligh as governor. Bligh was appalled by how the New South Wales Corps had developed such a stranglehold on the supply of alcohol. But when he started attempting to dismantle the trade, the Corps responded by mounting a rebellion and arresting him. Rum wasn’t the only factor behind the rebellion, but, as Gilling writes, ‘Bligh had stirred up some of the most vengeful men in the colony by clamping down on the traffic in spirits.’
Bligh’s successor, Lachlan Macquarie, had more success at breaking the Corps’ near monopoly – by replacing it with another one. In 1810, he granted a group of entrepreneurs, including the principal surgeon D’Arcy Wentworth, the ‘Exclusive Privilege’ of being the colony’s sole importers of rum for a period of three years. In return, the group agreed to use some of the profits to build a major hospital in the heart of the fledgling city. This irony set the tone for much of Australia’s regulatory history with booze: a hospital that treated many patients for their alcohol-related problems, funded by the sale of alcohol.
The Rum Hospital, as it became known, opened in 1816, and much of the building still stands. Its rooms can be hired out for functions, and 200 years after it was built, I hosted a wine-tasting there. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t start – or end – the night by raising a glass of rum to toast its history.
‘Rum’ was the first word that leapt to the lips of most people when I told them I was working on a history of drinking in Australia. ‘You’ll definitely be writing about rum,’ they told me. ‘The Rum Corps, the Rum Rebellion, the Rum Hospital. I learned about all that at school.’ They’re right, of course. I am writing about rum. It’s a very important component of the history of drinking in this country.
Late one evening a couple of years ago, after a day in Sydney’s Mitchell Library researching the history of rum, I walked into a bar at Circular Quay, the place where Governor Phillip famously raised the British flag in January 1788 to establish the new colony. This time, I decided a toast was in order, and I asked for a shot of the best rum they had. It turned out to be from Jamaica: deep bronze in colour, full of the warm smell and mellow taste of molasses and oak. How appropriate, I thought, to be sitting in such a historic spot, sharing the same flavour the very earliest settlers had experienced right here, 230 years previously.
Except I discovered that it didn’t taste like that back then. The rum that arrived in 1788 was from Brazil, taken on board when the First Fleet stopped at Rio de Janeiro in August the previous year en route to the new colony. This wasn’t sweet, golden rum made from molasses. It was a pale-coloured, rough-tasting spirit called aguardente – ‘burning water’ in Portuguese – distilled from sugar-cane juice. This aguardente was similar to modern-day Brazilian cachaça, but it tasted bad. Really bad.
James Campbell, captain of marines on the First Fleet, complained that the drinks ration given to the officers was ‘half a Pint [per day] of vile Rio Spirits, so offensive both in Taste and Smell, that he must be fond of drinking indeed, that can use it’. Tench agreed: ‘The staple commodity of [Brazil] is sugar,’ he wrote. ‘That they have not, however, learnt the art of making palatable rum, the English troops in New South Wales can bear testimony; a large quantity, very ill flavoured, having been bought and shipped here for the use of the garrison of Port Jackson.’
In the first few decades of the new colony, rum was imported in huge quantities along with other wines, beers and spirits, such as brandy and gin. But again, most of this rum wasn’t the sweet golden stuff we’re used to drinking today. It was ‘Bengal rum’, which was a different drink altogether.
During the period in which most of the famous rum-related events occurred in Australia, many of the ships arriving in Port Jackson came from India, and most were laden with spirits. In early 1800, for example, a ship chartered by officers of the New South Wales Corps arrived bearing moderate quantities of essentials such as cloth, tea and coffee – and a whopping 9000 gallons (41,000 litres) of Bengal rum. At that time, distilleries in Calcutta were using both sugar cane to make rum and the juice of the more widely planted date palm to make arrack. Maritime archaeologist Mark Staniforth argues that it’s likely the terms ‘spirits’ and ‘Bengal rum’ were ‘applied indiscriminately to any alcohol’ made from either cane or date palm.
This changes things a bit. The Arrack Corps, the Arrack Rebellion and the Arrack Hospital don’t quite have the same ring, do they? It also brings the taste of the grog of Port Jackson to life in a different way when you imagine rough arrack in your mouth instead of rich rum. It’s certainly a better fit with contemporary descriptions of the stuff.
In 1800, Philip Gidley King – who, twelve years before, had given the Dharawal men their first taste of grog at Botany Bay – replaced John Hunter as governor. King, who had been away from Port Jackson for many years, was scathing about the damage that spirits had done to the young colony. ‘Vice, dissipation, and a strange relaxation seems to pervade every class and order of people,’ he wrote, complaining there was so much alcohol available that everyone, ‘from the better sort of people in the colony to the blackest characters among the convicts, are full of that fiery poison’.
Burning water. Fiery poison. There are good reasons why strong, distilled alcoholic spirits are described this way.
The process of distillation entails heating a fermented liquid until the alcohol in it evaporates, and then condensing the vapour to capture the alcohol in concentrated form. For centuries, the simplest way to heat a liquid was to place a container over an open fire. The aguardente on the First Fleet, the Macassans’ arrack, the tuba in the Torres Strait, the rum from Bengal – all were made this way. European spirits were also made this way: the word ‘brandy’ comes from the Dutch brandewijn – burnt wine.
Ethyl alcohol – ethanol – is what spirits makers want to capture when they distil a fermented liquid. It’s the ‘good’ alcohol, the one that our bodies can process if we drink it slowly (although, yes, if we drink too much of it, it can kill us). But it’s not the only thing captured by distillation: a whole bunch of less desirable and even dangerous compounds, such as nasty-tasting acetone, highly toxic methanol and bitter fusel oils, are produced at the beginning
