Large quantities of the flower-bearing cones were taken to the side of some swamp, in the close proximity of which several holes were dug into the ground, each in the form of a trough about a yard [1 metre] long and 18in. [46 cm] deep. Particularly sound sheets of ti-tree bark were next stripped from the trees, each piece of bark being tied up at the ends with fibre into a sort of boat-shaped vat, the sides of which were kept apart by sticks stretched across; the shape of the vat lent itself to that of the trough, and there was one vat for each trough. The Vat was next filled with these cones and water, in which they were left to soak. The cones were subsequently removed and replaced by others until such time as the liquid was strongly impregnated with the honey, when it was allowed to ferment for several days. The effect of drinking this ‘mead’ in quantity was exhilarating, producing excessive volubility. The aboriginals called the cones and the fermented liquor produced therefrom both by the same – the man-gaitch.
This is not the only reference to mangaitch. In First Taste, Brady writes about a party of Dutch sailors sailing up the Swan River in 1697 to where the city of Perth is now: ‘At one point they found what they thought were “herbs” soaking in a shallow trench, with the footprints of many people around it; it’s thought that this might have been mangaitch.’
More recently, in a series of radio programs produced by the Aboriginal Alcohol Service in Perth in the 1990s, Aboriginal author Doris Pilkington spoke about mangaitch. ‘Our people knew about fermentation and used alcohol on special occasions,’ she said. ‘We made it by soaking blossom of banksias and eucalyptus, and by dissolving the nectar and allowing it to stand. But the alcoholic content was slight and the use of these drinks was limited to special occasions and certain times of the year. In other words, we exercised our own restraints.’
And in a 2011 publication on the uses of traditional plants in the country north of Perth, Noongar (also written ‘Nyungar’) Elder Neville Collard described the process in a similar way, not only placing it in the present rather than portraying it as past practice, but also giving the drink a different name: ‘Banksia flowers produce an abundance of honey-like nectar, which is why the early colonists called this plant the Honeysuckle. Nyungar people drink the honey straight out of the flower cone, or soak the flower in water to produce a sweet drink. This beverage is either drunk fresh or fermented to produce Gep, an intoxicating liquor.’
There are numerous historical references to sweet drinks being made by steeping various nectar-rich flowers in water across Australia. In most cases, the drinks were consumed straight away, but sometimes, as with mangaitch and gep, they were also left to ferment. And not just in Western Australia. In 1878, Robert Brough Smyth wrote of similar drinks produced by Aboriginal people in western Victoria:
The natives used also to compound liquors – perhaps after a slight fermentation to some extent intoxicating – from various flowers … The liquor was usually prepared in the large wooden bowls (tarnuks) which were to be seen at every encampment. In the flowers of the dwarf species of Banksia (B. ornata) there is a good deal of honey, and this was got out of the flowers by immersing them in water. The water thus sweetened was greedily swallowed by the natives. This drink was named Beal by the natives of the west of Victoria, and was much esteemed.
After reading Dark Emu, I visited Bruce Pascoe at his home at Gipsy Point, near Mallacoota in East Gippsland. I travelled there to learn about – and taste – the murnong Bruce was growing and studying. In passing, he told me about the enormous quantity of nectar that flowed from the large banksia cones that flower every three years in this part of the world: each bloom, he said, yielded enough delicious ‘honey’ to fill a small Vegemite jar.
I had just read Maggie Brady’s description of mangaitch, and I have a one-track mind, so I suddenly yearned to taste this ‘honey’ drink. I asked Bruce if he knew whether anyone has ever fermented this banksia honey.
‘Aboriginal people,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘A lot of plants were used like that, across the country. Many flowers were used to make slightly fermented drinks.’
The particular banksia Bruce was referring to wasn’t flowering at that time. But when I got home to Melbourne, I noticed for the first time (after living there for fifteen years) that my next-door neighbour has a banksia tree growing in his front yard. And it was covered in emerging, rather than fully ‘ripe’, cones. This was Banksia integrifolia, not the Banksia grandis of Margaret River, or the Banksia ornata of western Victoria, or the Banksia serrata of East Gippsland. But I was keen to try it out. I pilfered a few cones off my neighbour’s tree (he’s a vicar, he’ll forgive me) to see what would happen if I steeped them in water.
The results were disappointing. After a day, the water began to smell and taste faintly of banana bread, and it reminded me of the taste of a honey-flavoured breakfast cereal I ate as a child. But it wasn’t all that sweet, and there was no sign of fermentation. The cones obviously weren’t ripe enough, there wasn’t enough nectar in them, and it’s probably not the best type of banksia to use.
Other attempts to make mangaitch have been more successful. Perth anthropologists Ken Macintyre and Barb Dobson, who have written about the use of banksias in traditional Noongar culture, once tried soaking ripe cones in water for two days; it resulted in what they described as a ‘crude concoction with a honey-scented odour, which tasted something like a light mead’.
‘It was not unpleasant to drink and gave a mild feeling of euphoria,’ they wrote. ‘When we discussed our experiment with some Noongar Elders, one of them explained that they already knew about this and that they called the fermented concoction geber (or giber).’
The knowledge was there. It was simply a matter of asking the right questions.
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