Reading the old accounts of Aboriginal fermented drinks, it’s clear that these drinks were perceived as having little to no exploitable commercial value to Europeans, and that they were, therefore, unworthy of being studied in detail. It’s the same for many Indigenous foods and farming practices. The explorers and early settlers looked at the country through a European lens: cultural ignorance and a deep lack of understanding of the landscape and climate blinded them to the potential or importance of the resources and ceremonies being observed.
In his 1843 account of the cider gums, for example, Ronald Gunn said, unequivocally, that ‘[the sap] has never been obtained in any quantity or applied to any useful purpose’ – despite describing in detail how shepherds and stockmen had learned how to tap the trees and harvest the liquid, and despite being aware that it produces an alcoholic drink. Contrast this with how white settlers and explorers responded to pituri, the ‘native tobacco’ common across central and eastern Australia.
When Joseph Banks first saw Aboriginal people chewing ‘the leaves of an herb’ in 1770, he drew easy comparisons with how a European person might chew ‘tobacco’ or ‘East Indian’ betel leaves. The sight was familiar to him and he could place it in a global cultural context. A century later, when stories emerged of Central Australian Aboriginal people helping exhausted explorers on the Burke and Wills expedition by feeding them fish, bread and a ‘stuff they call bedgery or pedgery [which] has a highly intoxicating effect when chewed even in small quantities’, it inspired a flurry of scientific investigation.
Intrepid explorers soon set out to brave the mysterious outback in search of this intoxicating plant and recorded all sorts of remarkable claims about its effects, from enabling old men to act as seers to allowing Aboriginal people to walk hundreds of kilometres without food or water, and giving them courage in warfare.
The heroic lore surrounding pituri has survived to the present day and is familiar to many Australians – unlike the historical stories of ceremony surrounding fermented drinks, which have mostly faded into obscurity.
If the way-a-linah trees hadn’t been so remote, if the mangaitch forests hadn’t been razed to make way for stock, if the drinks observed by Gunn and Bunce and Roth had been more abundant, less seasonal, less tied to ceremony and place – and if they’d been stronger, more alcoholic, more like the tradeable, transportable commodities of wine and port and spirits the colonists had brought with them – then perhaps they would have attracted more attention and acknowledgement. And appropriation.
One of the centres of pituri culture is the Channel Country of south-west Queensland, between Birdsville and Windorah, traditional land of the Karuwali/Mithaka people. This wide-open red-dirt landscape was scarred by waves of violent frontier warfare in the 1870s and 1880s, as Aboriginal people fiercely resisted the arrival of white pastoralists and their herds of cattle. By the end of the century, an uneasy truce hung over the country as it became clear to the Aboriginal people that the Europeans weren’t going away, and to the pastoralists that they had come to rely on the local people for knowledge of country and as workers on their stations, mustering stock, looking after children.
One pastoralist who had a more enlightened view of Aboriginal culture than most was William Duncan, who arrived to manage Mooraberrie station, near the present-day infamous Betoota Hotel, in 1891, and became the owner in 1900. Historian Tom Griffiths writes that Duncan ‘respected Aboriginal ownership and traditions, and Mooraberrie became a refuge for the remaining Aboriginal people of the region’. The station had also been the site of a ‘peace ceremony’ conducted in 1889, attended by more than 500 Aboriginal people from across the Channel Country, that helped to bring about an end to the more violent period of frontier conflict in this part of the world.
Alice Duncan was born one of four children at Mooraberrie in 1901, and grew up immersed in the Aboriginal world. The children’s Aboriginal nurse, Mary Ann, and her stockman brother, Moses Yoolpee – who himself had been educated by a previous station owner, at Scotch College in Melbourne – taught Alice Karuwali culture. The young girl spent many years travelling through the country with ‘the blacks’, learning their bushcraft and stories and spirituality. Later, as an adult, when she was married and running a station of her own, Alice Duncan-Kemp wrote four books: rich, detailed memoirs of her early life at Mooraberrie. And in the first of the series, Our Sandhill Country, she described what she observed on one trip through country:
A familiar sight is the bauhinia (tree) with its twin leaves and red-tipped blossoms resembling honeysuckle … From the honey-filled blossoms the blacks make a semi-intoxicating drink. When the bauhinias for miles round come into bloom the gins pick the blossoms off in coolamonfuls. These are pounded, and the sweet golden liquid drained off into a larger, deeper coolamon, then mixed with sugar-bag or ant honey and set aside to ferment, a process which takes eight or ten days.
Although Duncan-Kemp’s memoirs have been dismissed by some in the past as romantic ‘tall stories’ – her own mother described Alice as being ‘fairly “cracked” on the blacks’ – anthropologists and historians increasingly regard them as reliable accounts of traditional Aboriginal culture.
Pearl Eatts is a descendant of the Karuwali people of the Channel Country. She now lives in Winton, a day’s drive north on the other side of the Diamantina Lakes, and works on preserving – and educating people about – her culture and ancestry.
‘Alice Duncan-Kemp is a trusted source,’ says Pearl when I ask her about the bauhinia sugarbag drink. ‘Our family’s 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