Michael Bock, a botanist who has written about Indigenous fermentation, also points out the difficulty of ascertaining exactly how far back the process of making fermented drinks goes in Australia. ‘It is not proved, although it is highly likely, that some tribes such as the Tasmanian Aborigines discovered this process before the European invasion,’ he writes. ‘Other tribes are more likely to have developed the techniques for converting sugar-rich, sweet drinks into alcoholic drinks after the Europeans had introduced alcohol to the Aborigines.’
But it’s equally possible that it is alcoholic inebriation being described when writers across three centuries, from Brough Smyth to Duncan-Kemp to Neville Collard, use the word ‘intoxication’. There’s no doubt, for example, that these drinks could have contained alcohol. I have mixed sugarbag with water and watched it spontaneously start to ferment after a couple of days. I have tasted fermented way-a-linah collected from a hollow in a cider-gum tree. It’s impossible to believe that people could live for millennia in an environment where sugary liquids come naturally into contact with wild yeasts and not have experienced some form of even mildly alcoholic drinks – and then thought about how they could repeat the experience.
We need to do more research in this area. We need to keep asking questions, to stop blindly accepting the ‘dry continent’ myth. We also need to consider the tantalising possibility that the Karuwali practice of fermenting honey with other local ingredients – and the other practices – may well date back at least as far as other examples of ancient honey fermentation around the globe, such as the 9000-year-old Neolithic Chinese rice/honey/fruit drink analysed by Patrick McGovern. We need to consider, too, that this bauhinia sugarbag drink – and mangaitch and kambuda and beal and way-a-linah – may well be some of the oldest fermented drinks known to humanity.
Firewater: Rum and other ardent spirits
The English sailor brought the cup to his lips and took a sip. The alcohol was warm as it trickled down his throat. He gestured to the two Aboriginal men standing a few feet away from him on the beach at Botany Bay, held out the cup, signalled for them to drink too.
The Dharawal men were wary. They were suspicious of the big white bird that had sailed in to Gamay, their bay, suspicious of the men with ghostly white skin that clambered about the giant bird like possums, suspicious of the boat full of strangers that had landed on their shore. The women of the tribe had told the two men not to drink anything the white men were handing out to them. It could be poison, they said.
The sailor took out a tomahawk and showed the men how it could be used to cut down bushes. Then he indicated he would give them the tomahawk if they would have a drink with him.
The Dharawal men knew the women were right to be cautious. But the drink didn’t appear to be having any bad effect on the white man. He hadn’t fallen down dead. In fact, the drink seemed to be making him merry. So, they signed for him to pour more in his cup, drink some himself and they would drink the rest.
The sailor did as he was directed, handing over the tomahawk and the cup to one of the men, who brought the grog to his lips and took a sip.
The man felt his face go up in flames. ‘Guwiya!’ he shouted. ‘Fire!’ He spat out the liquid in shock and disgust, yelling, in language – ‘Fire in eyes, fire in nose and fire all over!’ – as he ran into the water to stop the burning.
There are two accounts of this pivotal moment in 1788, when the English introduced strong drinks to Aboriginal people at Botany Bay. Anthropologist Maggie Brady puts them side-by-side in her book First Taste to show how the same historical event can be remembered in different ways by different people.
The first account was written by Philip Gidley King, second lieutenant on the Sirius. It takes up only a few words in King’s long journal entry for 20 January, describing how he and a party of marines met a group of Aboriginal men on the southern shore of Botany Bay. The men were armed with spears and made a ‘vociferous’ display of their displeasure at being invaded. King appeased them by offering gifts, including ‘a glass of Wine which they had no sooner tasted then they spit it out’. Just like that. Matter-of-fact.
The Aboriginal version of the story was recorded in 1833 by a Catholic priest in Sydney. It was told to him by ‘a Botany Bay man’ whose father had told it to him. This was the detailed, evocative story of the big white bird, of the sailors ‘like possums’, of the tomahawk and of the drink that tasted like fire. Much more dramatic, burned into the memory.
This event has become part of our national legend: the moment when a huge wave of potent alcohol that had kept much of Europe intoxicated for centuries – rum and brandy and gin, port and sherry and wine – inundated the great dry southern land.
But we know that legend 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