LITMIR.BIZ

      Burning water. Fiery poison. There are good reasons why strong, distilled alcoholic spirits are described this way.

      The process of distillation entails heating a fermented liquid until the alcohol in it evaporates, and then condensing the vapour to capture the alcohol in concentrated form. For centuries, the simplest way to heat a liquid was to place a container over an open fire. The aguardente on the First Fleet, the Macassans’ arrack, the tuba in the Torres Strait, the rum from Bengal – all were made this way. European spirits were also made this way: the word ‘brandy’ comes from the Dutch brandewijn – burnt wine.

      Ethyl alcohol – ethanol – is what spirits makers want to capture when they distil a fermented liquid. It’s the ‘good’ alcohol, the one that our bodies can process if we drink it slowly (although, yes, if we drink too much of it, it can kill us). But it’s not the only thing captured by distillation: a whole bunch of less desirable and even dangerous compounds, such as nasty-tasting acetone, highly toxic methanol and bitter fusel oils, are produced at the beginning and end of the process. Careful distillers will ensure none of these compounds make it into the bottle. But much of the booze shipped to – or made in – the new colony in its early years was anything but carefully distilled.

      Firewater also got its name because strong alcohol can taste exactly like it’s scorching your nostrils and your lips and your tongue when you take a sip, especially if you have no experience of tasting anything like it before.

      In the Meriam language of the eastern Torres Strait Islands, writes Maggie Brady, alcohol is kaomal nguki, or uweri ni – ‘hot water’. On Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Lardil people call spirits ‘hot stuff’ and beer ‘sea water’ or mela. ‘Anyone who drinks a lot of beer’, writes anthropologist David McKnight, who spent many years on Mornington Island, ‘is known as melamerr, i.e. crazy or mad for beer, just as drinking large quantities of sea water will cause craziness.’ Other coastal groups reached similar conclusions, from the Wadjiginy people in the Northern Territory who chose ngatjur – ‘salty, sour’ – to describe grog to the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains whose word for alcohol is kurpula, ‘sea water’: something that doesn’t taste pleasant.

      Maggie Brady says the words Aboriginal people historically chose to describe alcohol also reflect the community’s response to its introduction and attitudes to it over time. Some groups, she says, use warning words: the Kuninjku people in Kakadu, for example, called alcohol kun-bang, which means ‘dangerous, poisonous, sleek, deadly one’. And in the Pitjantjatjara Western Desert language, one term for alcohol is kapi kura, ‘bad water’.

      But there’s another word for alcohol in Pitjantjatjara that tells a different story. Wama. It means ‘sweet’. There are similar words for alcohol in other desert languages: ngkwarle in Kaytetye means ‘honey or nectar’, and pama in Warlpiri means ‘sweet delicacy’.

      This is the heart of the difficult relationship we can have with alcohol. On one hand, we know about the pain that often comes with intoxication – and on the other, we crave the pleasure. The pleasure usually wins. In the same way, we know the perils of alcohol, the problems it brings to people, communities and society. But we also know there are profits to be made from the business of selling grog. So we sanction, we legislate, we license.

      In 1812, Governor Macquarie put forward another plan to stem the tide of spirits flowing into Sydney. Acknowledging that ‘The Nature of the Inhabitants of this Country is such that Spirits Must be had’ – in other words, people are going to drink no matter how hard you try to control it, so you might as well get in on the action yourself – he suggested the government should build a large distillery. Not only would this provide a market for the colony’s grain farmers, but also, writes Tom Gilling, ‘it would keep wealth from being sucked out of the colony to pay for imported grog’.

      It took another decade of arguing, but in 1822 it finally became legal to make spirits in the colony, in distilleries licensed by the government.