LITMIR.BIZ

      A crowd of convicts, settlers and marines gathers in the heart of the new colony to watch the latest flogging. A convict has been caught stealing a bottle of illicit rum, a serious breach of public order. It is a hot, harsh morning. Clear blue sky, burning sun, the crack of musket fire in the distance. Red-coated soldiers nursing hard hangovers tie the convict in his grubby rags to a wooden frame and the lashing begins, much to the delight of the hordes of assembled schoolchildren.

      It’s 1977, and I’m one of those kids, visiting Old Sydney Town, a colonial theme park that had just opened near Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast. The place was populated with actors in period costume, all embracing their part by swigging from thick glass bottles and stoneware jars, singing sea shanties in the town’s tavern, carousing through the streets in a mock-drunken swagger. We were told these bottles and jugs and tankards were filled with rum. It was an experience that burned its way into my memory. Even now, I can’t help thinking of rum whenever I think of that time in the early years of the colony.

      When the First Fleet arrived, it was carrying 12,000 gallons – 54,000 litres – of rum on board. That’s almost 9 gallons or 40 litres of rum for each of the 1373 men, women and children who had survived the journey. Considering 1000 of these people were convicts – and convicts were officially prohibited from drinking – it’s more like 12 gallons or 54 litres of rum per head.

      All the First Fleeters, whether labourer or landed gentry, came from a culture where strong drinks like gin, brandy and rum were easily accessible, constantly available and almost universally consumed. Binge drinking was common and communal.

      From the beginning of the settlement there was an official imbalance between those who had access to grog and those who didn’t. But as author Tom Gilling puts it in Grog, his history of colonial Sydney, this disparity didn’t last: by the end of 1788, he writes, ‘smuggled and stolen liquor was already rippling through the colony’s cashless economy’, with the free settlers bartering with the convicts and the convicts trading among themselves.

      The Second Fleet brought both more spirits and a specially commissioned unit of soldiers called the New South Wales Corps. From then on, a steady stream of ships arrived at Port Jackson, each carrying more and more barrels of booze. This new ‘influx of liquor’, writes Gilling, kicked off a flourishing trade in alcohol – and ‘the most avaricious exponents of this trade would turn out to be the officers of the New South Wales Corps themselves.’

      The officers of the Corps bought the bulk of the spirits as it arrived, and then onsold it or bartered it with the rest of the colony. Within a couple of years, liquor had become, Gilling says, ‘an indispensable cog in the colonial economy’. Labourers were paid in rum, a ship could be bought for £50 and 150 gallons of rum, and land was swapped for spirits, with 4 gallons being worth 25 acres. The settlement of 400 or so people on the Hawkesbury River, out of the constant purview of the authorities, was described as ‘one continued scene of drunkenness … the Settlers selling their crops for Liquor’. And illicit stills started popping up everywhere, with the distillers often operating their sly-grog operations in cahoots with the local constables.

      At first, Aboriginal people were wary of the invaders’ alcohol. Some found its taste repulsive – but some enjoyed it. When Governor Arthur Phillip decided to kidnap some Aboriginal people both to learn about their culture and to introduce them to English customs such as ‘civilised’ drinking, they reacted very differently to the wine offered to them. Some refused. Some, including the most famous of those Aboriginal captives, Bennelong, not only accepted the drinks but soon participated in toasts.

      ‘[Bennelong] became at once fond of our viands,’ wrote Watkin Tench, one of the most candid chroniclers of the early years of the settlement, ‘and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight and enjoyment … Nor was the effect of wine or brandy upon him more perceptible than an equal quantity would have produced upon one of us, although fermented liquor was new to him.’

      Despite enjoying the governor’s hospitality, Bennelong soon returned to his own people. After that, relations between black and white deteriorated and, writes Maggie Brady, the Aboriginal population were ‘left to themselves to interpret the meaning of alcohol, and what happens after imbibing it. They “learned” by looking around at the motley collection of Europeans and were often puzzled by what they saw.’ As disease and dispossession took their toll on the Aboriginal population and they moved closer to the settlement, they ‘acquired a taste for the firewater of the whites’.

      ‘Alcohol usually had a devastating effect on those who drank it, and rendered them susceptible to racist caricature,’ writes Marcia Langton in her influential study of this period, Rum, Seduction and Death. Langton highlights the ‘role of the British men who deliberately provided the alcohol to trick and debilitate those Aborigines who had survived the smallpox and the destitution into which they were forced’, despite the fact that ‘their addiction to liquor was in no way out of character with the general mores of the settlement’.

      A succession of governors tried to crack down on the drunkenness taking hold of the colony. In the late 1790s Governor John Hunter introduced hotel licensing, tried turning away speculative grog ships and proposed taking over the purchase and supply of alcohol to keep the price down and make it less attractive to trade. It didn’t work. Hunter put his finger on the problem when he wrote: ‘Since 1792 … the Public Interest & that of private individuals [have] been … in direct opposition to each other.’ ‘As usual,’ writes Gilling, ‘where grog was concerned, the profits outweighed the deterrents.’

      Things came to a head in 1808, with the arrival of William Bligh as governor. Bligh was appalled by how the New South Wales Corps had developed such a stranglehold on the supply of alcohol. But when he started attempting to dismantle the trade, the Corps responded by mounting a rebellion and arresting him. Rum wasn’t the only factor behind the rebellion, but, as Gilling writes, ‘Bligh had stirred up some of the most vengeful men in the colony by clamping down on the traffic in spirits.’

      Bligh’s successor, Lachlan Macquarie, had more success at breaking the Corps’ near monopoly – by replacing it with another one. In 1810, he granted a group of entrepreneurs, including the principal surgeon D’Arcy Wentworth, the ‘Exclusive Privilege’ of being the colony’s sole importers of rum for a period of three years. In return, the group agreed to use some of the profits to build a major hospital in the heart of the fledgling city. This irony set the tone for much of Australia’s regulatory history with booze: a hospital that treated many patients for their alcohol-related problems, funded by the sale of alcohol.

      The Rum Hospital, as it became known, opened in 1816, and much of the building still stands. Its rooms can be hired out for functions, and 200 years after it was built, I hosted a wine-tasting there. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t start – or end – the night by raising a glass of rum to toast its history.