A Groggy History

“Buffalo were feeding ravenously. Beaver were damming and storing with strange vigour. Horses and dogs were becoming shaggy-haired as never before. And it could be sensed in the booming, bustling mining town of Denver. Most historians agree that the events leading to the Battle of Whiskey Hills and the subsequent disaster at Quicksand Bottoms began here at a miners’ meeting …” So begins the opening narration of the 1965 film The Hallelujah Trail, a spoof on an imagined 1867 battle between the hard-drinking miners of Denver, Colorado, and the hard-hitting gals of the Denver Temperance Union.

The miners, fearing a shortage of whiskey over the winter months, follow the advice of Oracle Jones and organise a mass shipment of forty wagon-loads of firewater. The miners are determined to get the whiskey safely to Denver. The temperance gals are determined to stop it. The Sioux Indians, headed by Chief Five Barrels and Chief Walks-Stooped-Over, are determined to steal it. The Irish wagon-drivers are determined to sample it—as often, and as much of it, as possible. The cavalry are caught in the middle.

It is the sort of film that Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor L. Jordan, authors of Under theInfluence: A History of Alcohol in Australia, would probably hate. In their new book they attempt to lay bare the history of alcohol in Australia, but their real, underlying purpose, is to put the case for temperance. The writers have very little sympathy for the drinking of alcoholic beverages in all of their various forms, variations, flavours and indeed participants. A history of alcohol in Australia this book is not. It’s too wobbly on its feet to be that!

Towards the end of the introduction the writers state:

Finally, we will assess whether the social tolerance of alcohol consumption, the fine balance between freedom and regulation in a liberal democracy, is coming to an end. How will the future of alcohol consumption be affected by the relative demise of tobacco and the emerging politics of health?

So there’s a whiff of “prohibition-dreaming” in the air by the time you get to page 10.

Fitzgerald and Jordan have every right to present their case about the evils of alcohol, and indeed to push a political agenda in support of the Rudd government’s tax plans for alcopops, but what is questionable is to promote their book as “a history”. As with other skirmishes in the history wars, the mixture of history and a political agenda usually ends up as a cocktail of misinformation and stereotyping, and the political agenda as some sort of accepted truth.

Chapter 1 (“A Groggy Start”) gets off to a groggy start indeed with the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip on January 26, 1788: “The officers drank a toast to the health of the royal family and the new colony: the first recorded alcoholic drink by European settlers on Australian soil.” Actually the first recorded drinking of alcohol by Europeans on Australian soil was most likely that done by the crew—who later became the drunken murderous mutineers—from the wreck of the Batavia, in 1629, on Western Australia’s Abrolhos Islands. But they were Dutch, not English, so perhaps they don’t count.

From the toast at Sydney Cove we move forward twelve days to when, the authors tell us:

the last of the fleet’s eleven ships, carrying the female convicts, disembarked. It rained heavily, and a large tree struck by lightning fell and killed five sheep and a pig. A night of debauchery followed—a mixture of drunkenness, sexual excess and, in some cases, sexual assault. Alcohol had begun playing its part in bringing European civilisation, with all its many contradictions, to Terra Australis.

We are not told whether the trigger for this celebration was the heavy rain, the disembarkation of the female convicts, the lightning, the death of the sheep and pig, or the sheer relief of those present who had survived the nine-month voyage on which sixty-nine of their fellow travellers had perished or disappeared. What Fitzgerald and Jordan seem to be implying is that “European civilisation” can be partly summed up in the form of debauchery, sexual excess (whatever that is), sexual assault and drunkenness.

If Australia’s Twelfth Night is going to be established as the birth-date of the nation’s “addiction” to grog (and sex), then at least we need to spend some time getting the story straight. Manning Clark’s History of Australia paints a slightly different picture. He quotes from the journal of Lieutenant Bowes and states, “That night the sailors asked for some rum to make merry upon the women quitting the ships.” One “observer” puts it that “they began to be elevated and all that night there were scenes of debauchery and riot, that beggared description”.

Twenty-five years later Robert Hughes, in The Fatal Shore, repeated Manning Clark’s interpretation of Lieutenant Bowes’s journal, with a tad more colour and invention: “Out came the pannikins, down went the rum, and before long the drunken tars went off to join the convicts in pursuit of women, so that Bowes remarked ‘it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night’.” Hughes then goes on, “As the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun.”

Of the about 1483 people who landed at Sydney Cove in the First Fleet only 189 were female convicts. Bowes says the women were in general dressed “very clean and some few amongst them might be said to be well dressed”. Fitzgerald and Jordan write, “Why had this settlement, whose purpose was to control and rehabilitate felons, fallen so swiftly under the influence?” Did it?

The clue to what might have happened, or didn’t happen, can be found by looking at Lieutenant Bowes’s journal, something the authors of Under the Influence apparently did not do. Bowes was the surgeon aboard the Lady Penrhyn, the First Fleet ship carrying the female convicts. His account of the incident is worth reading in full:

“At five o’clock this morning, all things were got in order for landing the whole of the women, and three of the ship’s longboats came alongside us to receive them; previous to them quitting the ship, a strict search was made to try if any of the many things which they had stolen on board could be found, but their artifice eluded the most strict search, and at six o’clock p.m. we had the long wished for pleasure of seeing the last of them leave the ship.

“They were dressed in general very clean, and some few amongst them might be said to be well dressed. The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed, and it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night. They had not been landed more than an hour, before they had all got their tents pitched or anything in order to receive them, but there came on the most violent storm of thunder lightning and rain I ever saw. The lightning was incessant during the whole night and I never heard it rain faster.

“About 12 o’clock in the night one severe flash of lightning struck a very large tree in the centre   of the Camp, under which some places were constructed to keep the sheep and hogs in. It split the tree from top to bottom, killed five sheep belonging to Major Ross, and a pig of one of the Lieutenants. The severity of the lightning this and the two preceding nights leaves no room to doubt but many trees which appear burnt up to the tops of them were the effect of lightning.

“The sailors in our ship requested to have some grog to make merry with upon the women quitting the ship, indeed the Captain himself had no small reason to rejoice upon their being all safely landed and given into the care of the Governor [Phillip], as he was under the penalty of 40 pounds for every convict that was missing. For which reason he complied with the sailor’s request, and about the time they began to be elevated the tempest came on.

The scene which presented itself at this time and during the greater part of the night beggars every description. Some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing—not the least regarding the tempest, though so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeded anything I ever before had a conception of. I never before experienced so uncomfortable a night, expecting every moment the ship would be struck with the lightning. The sailors almost all drunk, and incapable of rendering much assistance had an accident happen and the heat was almost suffocating.

So what we know from Lieutenant Bowes’s journal entry is this:

• The female convicts were all disembarked by 6 p.m.

• The seamen requested grog after the female convicts had left the ship.

• The all-night violent storm started at about 7 p.m.

• The male convicts ashore “got to them” (the women), whatever that means.

• The drunken crew never left the Lady Penrhyn.

• Lieutenant Bowes never left the Lady Penrhyn.

• It was a hot, humid, night.

Lieutenant Bowes was writing about events at two locations: aboard ship and the tented camp site. The obvious reason Bowes found it “beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued that night” was because he wasn’t ashore. He was in fear, experiencing “so uncomfortable a night, expecting every moment the ship would be struck with the lightning”.

The only drunkenness personally sighted by Bowes was aboard the Lady Penrhyn, and what “beggars every description” was not anything he saw ashore but the “swearing, quarrelling and singing” of the crew aboard the Lady Penrhyn. While there may be other accounts of the Twelfth Night, Fitzgerald and Jordan (and Clark and Hughes) only cite Bowes’s journal.

One of the problems with this book is that generalised statements are made that jolt the reader (or at least this reader) into stopping and wondering where on earth the writers are going, or where they have been. Take this sentence: “The immiseration of workers, social dislocation and a moral order in transition, for example, have all contributed to making drunkenness a social symptom of modernity.” Just where do you start with a sentence like this? (Reach for a drink?)

Starting at the end: “drunkenness a social symptom of modernity”. Since when has the state of drunkenness been a symptom of modernity? For thousands of years writers have recorded the delights of wine and the dire straits people can find themselves in if they consume too much. Drunkenness was known in biblical times, in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, through the Dark and Middle Ages, to the Reformation and the Enlighten-ment, continuing through the Industrial Revolution to the present. Homer knew: “The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken.” The young Greek general Alcibiades, friend of Socrates, liked a drink or two at the local symposium and in one night of drunkenness smashed the penises off the statues of Hermes in the streets of Athens. Alexander the Great was often partial to a drunken orgy, as were Mark Antony and Attila the Hun. Judging from the number of surviving amphora from the ancient world, “a jug of wine and thou” was a fairly regular event. So Australia’s “on the Twelfth Night they celebrated” seems no more than part of a tradition going back thousands of years. The issue in question is the drinking, not the sex.

Chapter 1 of Under the Influence moves on to provide an overview of the early colonial experience in alcoholic beverages. Of course the Rum Rebellion stands out.

Unfortunately, this style of historical writing—ignoring what is going on generally in society and concentrating only on the subject matter at hand—can give a false impression of that society. For all his defects, Manning Clark’s account of the early days of New South Wales provides a fairly well-rounded picture of early-colonial Australia.

At the time of Arthur Phillip’s departure in December 1792, Clark reveals a whole set of forces in place and at work. He tells us:

When Major Grose arrived on February 1892 to take up his duties as Lieutenant Governor, he found to his great comfort and astonishment that there was neither scarcity, that had been represented to him, nor barren sands … and saw the whole place as a garden in which fruit and vegetables grew in the greatest luxuriance.

Wishing to increase the quality of foods and goods, Grose, says Clark, offered land to every officer who asked for it. He also offered land to privates, emancipists and expirees. Clark then says:

Grose … had succeeded on one point where all of Phillip’s efforts had failed. He had found an incentive to induce the convicts to work on farms of the officers by permitting the latter to pay the convicts in rum … during those hours when they were not employed on government work.

According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Grose should be credited with the expansion of food-producing farms into the Hawkesbury River region. It adds: “Behind these moves lay the conviction that the community stood to benefit far more from the exertions of private individuals than from government enterprise.”

Fitzgerald and Jordan, writing in a very different tone and for a different purpose, take a slightly different view of Grose and his impact and policies. They cite the control of alcohol in the free-settler society of Georgia, founded in 1732: “To encourage hard work and reward enterprise, ‘no drunkards, or other notoriously vicious Persons’ would be taken [allowed], and the drinking and sale of rum was to be prohibited.” Comparing convict Sydney in 1792 with a free-settler colony founded sixty years earlier is a bit of a stretch.

We all know from school lessons that rum became a sort of currency in the infant years of New South Wales, owing to the shortage of coin and government notes. But how did this work? If rum is currency, and you have people drinking it, you end up with less currency with each drink. For it to work as a currency, rather than a barter tool, it needs to stay in circulation.

Fitzgerald and Jordan claim that in January 1800, 12,000 gallons of spirits were landed in Sydney, equalling “four gallons for every man, woman and child”. But it’s only a problem if they drank it and didn’t use it as currency.

What is needed is some sort of Ross Garnaut report on the Rum Rebellion with a few tables, graphs and statistics as to how the system worked and how much drinking was actually done. Are we talking about a colony blind drunk on rum, or was the Rum Rebellion something like the 2008 financial crisis with the big end of town playing with “liquid derivatives” in an out-of-control sub-prime market?

Chapter 1 concludes with a number of “alcoholic moments” such as the 1918 “bloodless revolt” by a mob in the Northern Territory. The administrator, John Anderson Gilruth, had refused to grant time off to women in the hotel industry to celebrate the end of the First World War. There were lock-outs, protests, marches and finally a riot when the crowd broke through the fence of Darwin’s Government House when it looked as if a cargo of 700 crates of Melbourne Bitter might be sent back south. Then we have the part alcohol played in the Eureka Stockade and the burning down of Bentley’s Eureka Hotel by an angry mob after the publican was cleared of the murder of John Scobie. A photograph of Sir John Kerr delivering what the authors entitle an “inebriated speech” at the 1977 Melbourne Cup rounds off chapter 1. Historians concentrating on a one-sided aspect of history tend to produce a one-sided history.

In chapter 2 the book becomes more interesting, particularly when the authors describe the change from spirits to beer as the nation’s preferred alcoholic beverage. The problems with the local barley and brewing beer in a warm climate are well explained. But what is lacking is any sympathy or explanation, or indeed humour, regarding why the demon drink was, is, and will stay so popular. The human side of the lives of the convicts, drovers, squatters, shearers, miners and city and factory workers and the odd bored housewife is not examined, nor their drinking justified, nor their pleasure gained from drink considered.

A quote or two from Henry Lawson or C.J. Dennis would have been handy to lighten things up a bit. The book’s illustrations are well chosen, but as with the photograph showing the S.S. Walrus (a floating distillery plying its trade in 1871 on the Logan and Albert Rivers near Brisbane), many illustrations are not explained in the text, just given a short caption. The reader craves more information about the lads on the Walrus.

Missing in the book is the story of “soft drinks”, and the part they played in the temperance movement. Soft drinks end up joining forces with alcohol in the form of the mixed drink. Initially the mixed drink allowed the crafty to slip a little alcohol into the innocent-looking glass of refreshment, but as with alcopops, the soft drink has, in part, become part of the system rather than the cure or an alternative.

In chapter 6 the authors get caught up in a bit of Orwellian double-think. From the problems of the white population and their inability to handle drink we flip to the problems of discrimination, and the denial, starting in 1838, of freedom for Aborigines to imbibe. The authors say that “prohibition based on race was clear discrimination”. Clearly, for Aboriginal people, temperance is gazumped by discrimination. They go on to say:

“Unfortunately, the association of “drinking rights” with citizenship has had a negative impact on Aboriginal drinking culture, becoming one of the factors that led to significant violence and child abuse in Aboriginal communities. Arguably, it wasn’t alcohol itself but the combined effects of alcohol and European civilisation that devastated many Aboriginal communities.”

There’s that darn European civilisation rearing its ugly head again.

Finally Fitzgerald and Jordan confront us with some statistics. We learn that alcohol causes “over 70,000 alcohol-related” hospital admissions at the cost of $7.5 billion. (That’s $107,000 per patient, per visit?) But the real beaut is the statistic on page 282 where we are told that a total ban on alcohol advertising would reduce the cost of road accidents “by $960 billion”. As Australia’s 2009 GDP is nominally $1055 billion, that would be quite an achievement.

Fitzgerald recently admitted on ABC radio that he has been a non-drinker for thirty-nine years, having shaken off a problem of heavy drinking in his youth. This admission appears to explain, to some degree, the air of “temperance” that pervades this book.