As well as the trees being threatened by climate change, the knowledge of way-a-linah has been in danger of disappearing. Some people, like Mick Quilliam, are lucky enough to have been shown the right trees and introduced to the taste of the drink. But most modern Tasmanians are unaware of its existence.
‘Not many people had been to trawtha makuminya in recent times,’ says Andry Sculthorpe of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, which manages the property. ‘We knew there were some cider-gum trees around but we only found out exactly where they were after the property was purchased.’
And even when they were located, it wasn’t clear at first what to do with them.
‘We could see that there were marks all over them,’ Andry says. ‘But it was hard to tell what’s natural and what’s been manmade.’
Andry says Aboriginal people are now tapping the cider gums successfully again, adding to knowledge they’ve gleaned about the trees through the historical record.
‘They know the history,’ he says. ‘They know the importance, they know how they feel about it, and they know what happened to the people who should have been passing on this knowledge directly.’
When I was growing up, I was told that Aboriginal people had no experience of alcohol before Europeans arrived in 1788. No knowledge of drinking. That this whole huge continent was bereft of booze. Nothing but water, scooped from billabongs in cupped hands.
This probably sounds familiar. Almost everyone I’ve told about way-a-linah is surprised to learn that Aboriginal people not only enjoyed fermented drinks in pre-colonial days but also continued to do so after Europeans arrived. (A few people I’ve told were even still shamefully harbouring the misconception that all Aboriginal people in Tasmania had been ‘wiped out’.) ‘Oh!’ they’ll say. ‘I thought Aborigines didn’t make alcohol.’ This has been the conventional, accepted wisdom in Australia – and around the world – for a very long time.
Patrick McGovern is the acknowledged global expert on historical early drinking. A biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, McGovern has made a career out of unearthing ancient evidence of alcohol production and consumption – and, in some cases, re-creating those drinks for tasting and even for sale. Notably, he’s the person who helped identify the earliest known example of an alcoholic beverage from residues found in a 9000-year-old Neolithic earthenware pot in the Yellow River valley in China: the drink was made from fermented rice, honey, and either grapes or hawthorn berries (both fruits leave a similar chemical trace).
In a discussion on the global prevalence of alcoholic drinks in his 2003 book, Ancient Wine, McGovern wrote: ‘only the Eskimos, the peoples from Tierra del Fuego … and the Australian aborigines [sic] apparently lived out their lives without the solace and medical benefits of alcohol.’ In 2009’s Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages, he qualified that opinion: ‘Signs of indigenous fermented drinks are also so far noticeably absent from Australia, perhaps owing to limited excavation there.’ Even as recently as 2017, in Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-created, he was still yet to include any mention of Aboriginal fermentation – although he did acknowledge he hadn’t been to Australia, and a trip here may yield more knowledge.
If the ‘dry continent’ myth of Aboriginal Australia has persisted even in the scholarly writings of someone as experienced as McGovern, it’s no wonder some people find it hard to accept anything to the contrary.
The myth started to dissolve for me in the autumn of 2013, when I visited a small cider orchard in southern Tasmania planted on a hill sloping down to the cold, choppy waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Orchardist and cider maker Clive Crossley showed me dozens of heritage English and French trees he had planted there – cultivars with evocative names such as Yarlington Mill and Kingston Black and Frequin Rouge, originally grown in the cider-producing regions of Somerset and Herefordshire and Normandy. The apples grown on these trees are more bitter and mouth-puckering than eating apples such as Pink Lady or Granny Smith. We strolled from tree to tree in the orchard, crunching into the red and green and yellow fruit, experiencing their kaleidoscope of different flavours.
As we walked, Clive mentioned he’d also planted a few different species of eucalypts around the property, including one he referred to as a ‘cider gum’. The two words hung in the air. I’d never heard of it. Cider gum? It was obvious why he’d wanted to plant this particular tree. But how did it get that name?
‘I’d noticed a mention of the Aboriginal use of the cider gum in an old book,’ he said. ‘It sounds as though the sap can be drawn and fermented. It may be a myth, but I thought we’d give it a go. Haven’t seen any sap yet, though.’
Cider gum. Fermented sap. Having seen the tree, I couldn’t shake the image. And I began to imagine what its fermented sap would taste like. I started researching the history of the tree, looking for references to fermentation, and found the work of Dr Maggie Brady, a social anthropologist at the Australian National University.
Brady has worked for many years with Aboriginal communities across Australia, and has extensively researched the social history of alcohol and other drugs. In The Grog Book (1998) and First Taste (2008), she lists a number of examples of Aboriginal fermentation, including way-a-linah. Reading about them opened my eyes. The landscape came to life. Plants turned into flavours. As well as the cider gums and way-a-linah in Tasmania, I learned about kambuda, made from the pounded nuts of the spiral pandanus in the Northern Territory; mangaitch, made from steeping banksia flowers in water in Western Australia; and tuba, made from the fermented juice of palm-tree buds in the Torres Strait.
Then I read Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe’s groundbreaking book about Aboriginal agriculture as revealed through the journals of early white explorers and settlers: firsthand early-19th-century written accounts of Indigenous people sowing and harvesting and preserving food – a history that none of us were taught at school. I learned about the cultivation of staples such as murnong (yam daisies). I learned about the development of extensive aquaculture such as the eel traps at Budj Bim in western Victoria. I learned about the production of bread and cake from kangaroo grass and native millet.
And I realised that I had come across a few fleeting references to Aboriginal fermentation in a couple of books before standing under Clive Crossley’s cider gum in that Tasmanian apple orchard in 2013. But I had overlooked them, not registered their importance, just not made the connections. I was, back then, still seeing through the dust of the ‘dry continent’ myth. Reading and talking to Maggie and Bruce changed that. Their work fundamentally shifted the way I think about, look at, listen to – and, importantly, smell and taste – the country where I live.
I have travelled to Margaret River on the south-west coast of Western Australia many times over the last quarter of a century to visit wineries and taste wine. Often, I’m lucky enough to be there when the magnificent tall forests are in bloom: gum trees dusted with white and orange and red blossoms, spiky banksia trees daubed with upstrokes of yellow flowering cones.
One evening recently in spring, at dusk, after a day of winery visits, I followed a path into a thicket of trees fringing a vineyard. As I walked into the forest the violet light slipped away behind me. Ahead in the gloom I could make out the distinctive zigzag banksia leaves sharp against the dark. And glowing faintly, perched on the branches, the big fat candles of giant banksia flowers. A decade ago this scene would have barely registered: I would have been too preoccupied thinking about the European vines I’d just walked past, introduced plants trellised in neat long rows, trained to produce reliable crops of sugar-rich grapes for winemaking.
Now,