by Haynes, Jim
Rose again and reached Marengo, just as easy as could be!
‘“But,” says I, “If you went westward, just as simple as you say,
How did you get back?” He answered, “Oh, I came the other way!”
So, in six-and-twenty hours, take the yarn for what it’s worth,
Jock McPherson and the Oozlum had been right around the Earth!
‘It’s a curious bird, the Oozlum, and a bird that’s mighty wise,
For it always flies tail-first to keep the dust out of its eyes.
And I heard that since McPherson did that famous record ride,
They won’t let a man get near ’em, couldn’t catch one if you tried!
‘If you don’t believe my story, and some people don’t, yer know,
Why the blinded map will prove it, strike me fat!’ said Ginger Joe.
‘Look along the Queensland border, on the South Australian side,
There’s this township, christened “Birdsville” to commemorate the ride!’
DRINKING YARNS
The Australian character seems to be inextricably linked to alcohol. ‘Easy-going’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘fond-of-a-drink’ are qualities, indeed clichés, that occur again and again when Australian stereotypes are being portrayed both at home and overseas. Did this develop as a result of the large percentage of Irish and Cockney migrants, who already had a drinking culture, in those early years of British settlement here? Or was it more to do with the male-dominated nature of Australian frontier society in the nineteenth century?
It is possible to argue quite simplistically that, with a population consisting entirely of convicts, soldiers, sailors and children born out of wedlock in prison hulks, the First Fleet set a national trend for drunkenness and tolerance of boozing that could never be entirely reversed.
It should be realised that the British settled this continent at a time when there was an extraordinarily widespread acceptance of alcohol throughout British society, especially in the navy. You have only to read accounts of British naval and merchant voyages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to understand the huge role played by ‘grog’—chiefly rum, or brandy for officers—in the daily life of a British vessel.
Of course, alcohol and drunkenness have been around almost as long as human beings. Appreciation of alcohol is one blessing, among many, passed down to other Western civilisations by the Ancient Greeks. The American writer and observer of human behaviour Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) described Bacchus as ‘a convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk’.
It was the British, largely accepting of alcoholic excess, who established colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1836 and it was the British navy and merchant fleet, with their easy acceptance of drunkenness as part of everyday life, that provided the only real link between Europe and those colonies.
So it’s little wonder that many of our best yarns, in prose or verse, are about drinking.
RUM, BY GUM!
Although our national day is 26 January, the day the ships of the First Fleet moved from Botany Bay to Port Jackson, the male convicts were disembarked and the British flag was raised, perhaps we should spare a thought for 6 February 1788. On the evening of that day, following the disembarkation of the female convicts and extra rations of rum all round, there developed, in the words of historian Manning Clark, ‘a drunken spree that ended only when the revellers were drenched by a violent rainstorm’.
Early in 1793, just after Arthur Phillip had returned to Britain and left Major Francis Grose temporarily in charge of the fledgling colony, an American ship with the ironic name of the Hope sailed into Sydney with a cargo that included 7500 gallons of rum. The captain, one Benjamin Page, refused to sell his cargo except in one lot, including the rum.
The colony had almost starved three years earlier and all supplies were scarce. In light of this and partly to prevent the captain from charging extortionate prices and holding the colony to ransom, the officers of the New South Wales Corps banded together with Grose’s blessing to purchase the entire cargo. This gave them a monopoly on rum, which they exploited whenever a new ship arrived in the colony.
Until 1814, rum was the accepted currency in New South Wales. Soldiers were paid in rum, as were convicts who worked on officers’ land. According to historian George Mackaness, in 1806, ‘The population of Sydney . . . was divided into two classes, those who sold rum and those who drank it.’
This monopoly by the officers of what became known as the Rum Corps led eventually to the corruption that caused the so-called Rum Rebellion of 1808, when the Corps successfully rose up against the governor of the day, William Bligh.
In order to maintain a more usual style of authority, Bligh’s successor Lachlan Macquarie arrived with his own regiment in 1810 and the Rum Corps was disbanded.
A canny Scot, Macquarie cleverly established a currency by purchasing a cargo of 10,000 Spanish dollars in 1814 and having the centre cut out of every coin. This had the double purpose of providing two coins of different denominations and rendering the coins useless outside the colony, so the currency remained in New South Wales. This strange coin, known as the ‘holey dollar’ (the bit in the middle, of much less value, was known as the ‘dump’) replaced rum as the official currency.
Macquarie was to write another chapter in the alcoholic history of New South Wales. In order to further control the rum trade, he gave the monopoly to import spirits to a group of businessmen. In exchange, they built Sydney’s first hospital, which still exists. So, Sydney’s first major public institution was built in exchange for rum, and was known for years as the Rum Hospital.
JH
JAMES SQUIRE
Who Stole Nine Chooks and Was Given a Cow
The name James Squire is a famous and popular one in Australia today as a brand name for a range of beers, but just who was James Squire?
He is remembered and revered by many Australians as the first man to grow hops and brew beer commercially in the colony of New South Wales. Apart from that, most Australians know nothing about his story, which is a shame because it is a remarkable and fascinating yarn.
Transported on the First Fleet to serve seven years for stealing, James Squire had an unusual background. He was from a family of gypsies; in fact, his parents were from the two Romany families involved in one of Britain’s most scandalous court cases, the Canning Case, in which public outrage and prejudice against gypsies, or Romanies, or ‘Egyptians’, caused a major miscarriage of justice in 1754.
Squire’s maternal grandmother, Susannah Wells, was convicted of abducting a young domestic servant, Elizabeth Canning, and keeping her imprisoned for a month. His other grandmother, Mary Squire, was also accused of taking part in the assault and the theft of Elizabeth Canning’s corsets which Mary Squire was alleged to have ‘forcibly removed’.
Susannah Wells was found guilty, branded on the arm and imprisoned, but she was later exonerated when the maid, Elizabeth Canning, was convicted of perjury.
James Squire’s uncle was sentenced to death for the alleged kidnapping, but later pardoned.
As a Romany, or gypsy, Squire grew up to a life of crime as a fringe dweller, smuggling and stealing. Romanies were feared and persecuted and denied civil rights in eighteenth-century Britain. They did, however, have good knowledge of hop cultivation as they provided the itinerant workforce for the hop planting and picking.
The transformation of James Squire from a despised criminal from the lowest social rank imaginable in England to a respectable and revered citizen of Sydney is an amazing story. It shows how the convict system could achieve amazing social reform by simply putting people in a place where their past was irrelevant to what they might achieve.
Squire was lucky to be alive to be sent to New South Wales. He had been found guilty previously of highway robbery after he ran from a house he had broken into and was arrested. The sentence, if he had been arrested inside the house, was death. He was sentenced to transportation to the
American colonies but served the sentence in the army instead and was running a tavern at Kingston near London when he was found guilty of stealing nine chooks. The tavern he ran was, by all accounts, a den of thieves, smugglers, prostitutes and gypsies.
For stealing nine chooks, James Squire was transported on the First Fleet to what was to become a totally different life in New South Wales.
Old habits die hard. It took a while before James Squire, gypsy and thief, was able to transform himself into Mr James Squire, Esquire, respectable and successful business man, philanthropist and local constable.
In March 1789, Squire was sentenced to 150 lashes for the theft of medical supplies from Surgeon John White’s store. It is not certain that the full sentence was ever carried out. He claimed at the time the herb he stole, ‘horehound’, was a tonic for his pregnant girlfriend, Mary Spencer. He admitted years later that he stole the herb because it was a substitute for hops in the brewing process. Squire had been making beer and selling it at fourpence a quart to the officers of the New South Wales Corps since the establishment of the colony.
His punishment was a slight one in the circumstances; normally such a theft was punished by hanging. No doubt the fact that he was already supplying beer to the officers had some effect on the leniency of the sentence. When Mary Spencer gave birth to a son, Francis, in 1791, James, aware that he could not support a child, enlisted him in the New South Wales Corps as an infant and he went on the payroll on his seventh birthday, as a drummer boy.
James Squire was a paradox as far as caring for his offspring was concerned. He left a wife and three children behind in England and fathered another eight in Sydney, seven with his second mistress, his convict servant Sarah Mason.
His cunning Romany ways were apparent in his land dealings. He added twelve other land grants to his own 30 acres (12 hectares) at Ryde and eventually had an estate of over 800 acres (40.5 hectares) along the Parramatta River. He cleverly complained to the Colonial Secretary about neighbouring land grants not being taken up and consequently purchased several of them for a shilling each.
James cultivated hops and grain and was the first successful brewer in Australia. He obtained a licence to sell liquor in partnership with another emancipist, Simeon Lord, in 1792, and set up the Malting Shovel Tavern on the river at Kissing Point, near Ryde. It was at the halfway point on the river between the two settlements of Sydney and Parramatta and proved a great success.
Oddly enough, the brewing of beer was seen as a good thing for a colony which was corrupted by the trade in rum. Rum had become the currency of the colony and led to a rebellion and massive military corruption.
It was considered a sobering influence to get the inhabitants of New South Wales to drink beer rather than rum, and Squire was much praised for his efforts in growing hops and grain and producing and selling a decent brew.
He was a very canny businessman with a gypsy’s nose for horse-trading, but what I like about him is his egalitarian spirit and support of the underdog, which I have no doubt came from his Romany background. He set up a credit union for emancipated convicts and helped many less fortunate than himself. He was a friend to the Aborigines and especially to Bennelong, the Aborigine who was befriended by Governor Phillip and had been to Britain and back.
When Bennelong fell on hard times later in life, he spent much of his time on Squire’s farm and he was buried there, with a memorial erected by James Squire.
The noted artist (and forger) Joseph Lycett said of him, ‘Had he not been so generous, James Squire would have been a much wealthier man . . . his name will long be pronounced with veneration by the grateful objects of his liberality.’
Squire was an industrious and successful farmer. One hop vine he cultivated in 1806 covered 5 acres (2 hectares) by 1812 and produced 700 kilograms of hops. As a brewer he was similarly successful; by 1820 his brewery was producing 40 hogsheads (about 10,000 litres) of beer a week.
When he died in 1822, his funeral was the largest ever seen in the colony up to that time. His grandson, James Squire Farnell was premier of New South Wales from 1877 to 1878.
There are two delightful ironies in the story of James Squire.
The first is that he was one of only a few ex-convicts to be ever appointed a constable. After half a lifetime of thieving and stealing as a way of life, he applied to be made a constable for the district of Eastern Farms on the grounds that there was too much stealing and thieving going on in the area, especially from his properties!
When he managed to cultivate a hop vine in 1806, from plants he had been given a few years before, he took the first small crop to Governor King. The Governor’s joy was unbounded at this sign of hope that the rum trade might one day be a thing of the past in New South Wales.
Governor King was so overjoyed at Squire’s achievement, in fact, that he gave a directive that the gypsy, transported for stealing nine chooks, would have surely appreciated in more ways than one. The Governor ‘directed that a cow to be given to Mr Squire from the Government herd’.
JH
BLUEY BRINK
ANONYMOUS
There once was a shearer, by name Bluey Brink,
A devil for work and a demon for drink;
He’d shear his two hundred a day without fear,
And drink without blinking four gallons of beer.
Now Jimmy the barman who served out the drink,
He hated the sight of this here Bluey Brink,
He stayed much too late, and he came much too soon,
At evening, at morning, at night and at noon.
One morning as Jimmy was cleaning the bar,
With sulphuric acid he kept in a jar,
In comes Old Bluey a’yelling with thirst:
‘Whatever you’ve got Jim, just hand me the first!’
Now it ain’t down in history, it ain’t down in print,
But that shearer drank acid with never a wink,
Saying, ‘That’s the stuff, Jimmy! Well, strike me stone dead,
This’ll make me the ringer of Stevenson’s shed!’
Now all that long day as he served out the beer,
Poor Jimmy was sick with his trouble and fear;
Too worried to argue, too anxious to fight,
Seeing the shearer a corpse in his fright.
When early next morning, he opened the door,
Then along came the shearer, asking for more,
With his eyebrows all singed and his whiskers deranged,
And holes in his hide like a dog with the mange.
Says Jimmy, ‘And how did you like the new stuff?’
Says Bluey, ‘It’s fine, but I ain’t had enough!
It gives me great courage to shear and to fight,
But why does that stuff set my whiskers alight?
‘I thought I knew drink, but I must have been wrong,
For that stuff you gave me was proper and strong;
It set me to coughing, you know I’m no liar,
And every cough set my whiskers on fire!’
A LETTER TO THE BULLETIN
HENRY LAWSON
Dear Bulletin,
I’m awfully surprised to find myself sober. And, being sober, I take up my pen to write a few lines, hoping they will find you as well as I am at present. I want to know a few things. In the first place: Why does a man get drunk? There seems to be no excuse for it. I get drunk because I’m in trouble, and I get drunk because I’ve got out of it. I get drunk because I am sick, or have corns, or the toothache: and I get drunk because I’m feeling well and grand. I got drunk because I was rejected; and I got awfully drunk the night I was accepted. And, mind you, I don’t like to get drunk at all, because I don’t enjoy it much, and suffer hell afterwards. I’m always far better and happier when I’m sober, and tea tastes better than beer. But I get drunk. I get drunk when I feel that I want a drink, and I get drunk when I don’t. I get drunk because I had a row last night and made a fool of myself and it worries me, and when t
hings are fixed up I get drunk to celebrate it. And, mind you, I’ve got no craving for drink. I get drunk because I’m frightened about things, and because I don’t care a damn. Because I’m hard up and because I’m flush. And, somehow, I seem to have better luck when I’m drunk. I don’t think the mystery of drunkenness will ever be explained—until all things are explained, and that will be never. A friend says that we don’t drink to feel happier, but to feel less miserable. But I don’t feel miserable when I’m straight. Perhaps I’m not perfectly sober just now, after all. I’ll go and get a drink, and write again later.
HOW O’LEARY BROKE THE DROUGHT
JACK SORENSEN
Men seek not for sandalwood at Dargaminder Bay,
The shanty stands forsaken and the jetty’s swept away.
Beyond the far, foam-crested reef, outlined against the sky,
Regardless of ‘the passageway’, the ships of trade go by.
Grim drought had cast its shadow over Dargaminder Bay,
Where close beside the jetty Tim O’Leary’s shanty lay.
Sad men who sought the sandalwood were moping down the creek,
For the shanty hadn’t functioned as a shanty for a week.
For harassed by a hurricane the steamer had gone by,
Upon its way to Derby with the shanty’s month’s supply.
So O’Leary sent McSweeney with his lugger further down,
To bring a small consignment from the nearest coastal town.
The man who kept the shanty was himself a trifle dry,
As he gazed beyond the jetty where the ocean met the sky.
And, as the sun was setting, to the settlement’s relief,
They saw the lugger coming in the passage through the reef.
The thirsty population of the drought afflicted place
Were gathered at the landing with a smile on every face,
While McSweeney berthed his lugger, but they looked a little glum
