in January 1788 to establish the new colony. This time, I decided a toast was in order, and I asked for a shot of the best rum they had. It turned out to be from Jamaica: deep bronze in colour, full of the warm smell and mellow taste of molasses and oak. How appropriate, I thought, to be sitting in such a historic spot, sharing the same flavour the very earliest settlers had experienced right here, 230 years previously.
Except I discovered that it didn’t taste like that back then. The rum that arrived in 1788 was from Brazil, taken on board when the First Fleet stopped at Rio de Janeiro in August the previous year en route to the new colony. This wasn’t sweet, golden rum made from molasses. It was a pale-coloured, rough-tasting spirit called aguardente – ‘burning water’ in Portuguese – distilled from sugar-cane juice. This aguardente was similar to modern-day Brazilian cachaça, but it tasted bad. Really bad.
James Campbell, captain of marines on the First Fleet, complained that the drinks ration given to the officers was ‘half a Pint [per day] of vile Rio Spirits, so offensive both in Taste and Smell, that he must be fond of drinking indeed, that can use it’. Tench agreed: ‘The staple commodity of [Brazil] is sugar,’ he wrote. ‘That they have not, however, learnt the art of making palatable rum, the English troops in New South Wales can bear testimony; a large quantity, very ill flavoured, having been bought and shipped here for the use of the garrison of Port Jackson.’
In the first few decades of the new colony, rum was imported in huge quantities along with other wines, beers and spirits, such as brandy and gin. But again, most of this rum wasn’t the sweet golden stuff we’re used to drinking today. It was ‘Bengal rum’, which was a different drink altogether.
During the period in which most of the famous rum-related events occurred in Australia, many of the ships arriving in Port Jackson came from India, and most were laden with spirits. In early 1800, for example, a ship chartered by officers of the New South Wales Corps arrived bearing moderate quantities of essentials such as cloth, tea and coffee – and a whopping 9000 gallons (41,000 litres) of Bengal rum. At that time, distilleries in Calcutta were using both sugar cane to make rum and the juice of the more widely planted date palm to make arrack. Maritime archaeologist Mark Staniforth argues that it’s likely the terms ‘spirits’ and ‘Bengal rum’ were ‘applied indiscriminately to any alcohol’ made from either cane or date palm.
This changes things a bit. The Arrack Corps, the Arrack Rebellion and the Arrack Hospital don’t quite have the same ring, do they? It also brings the taste of the grog of Port Jackson to life in a different way when you imagine rough arrack in your mouth instead of rich rum. It’s certainly a better fit with contemporary descriptions of the stuff.
In 1800, Philip Gidley King – who, twelve years before, had given the Dharawal men their first taste of grog at Botany Bay – replaced John Hunter as governor. King, who had been away from Port Jackson for many years, was scathing about the damage that spirits had done to the young colony. ‘Vice, dissipation, and a strange relaxation seems to pervade every class and order of people,’ he wrote, complaining there was so much alcohol available that everyone, ‘from the better sort of people in the colony to the blackest characters among the convicts, are full of that fiery poison’.
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.
‘I’m really excited that we finally get a chance to taste these old bottles,’ says bar owner Seb Costello. ‘We’re drinking history. Because when you open a bottle of whisky and share it with people, it’s not a product, it’s a moment in time.’
Costello’s bar, Bad Frankie, is up a side street behind a kebab shop in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. When it opened in 2014, it was one of the first places in the country to specialise in the emerging new wave of Australian craft spirits. Back then, Seb found eighty gins, whiskies, rums and other drinks to fill his shelves. Now there are well over 500, and he doesn’t have enough space in his tiny bar to stock everything