Intoxicating. Max Allen

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      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 to its effects, and to addiction itself’ – and as justification for the repressive prohibition and control that has been imposed on Aboriginal people’s drinking over many decades.

      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.