LITMIR.BIZ

      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.’