Grog by Tom Gilling: building a boozy nation

The records of the early years of the British colony of NSW are a litany of complaints about alcohol. Official orders against the trade in drink were routinely ignored, free colonists were repeatedly arrested for smuggling or distilling spirits, convicts were constantly found drunk, ruining public order and public health, and their insatiable desire for alcohol was the main cause of crime. Tom Gilling's new book frames the familiar history of Australia's origins around the struggle to control grog, illustrating the challenge of building a new society.

This is a highly entertaining story. The book is packed with anecdotes made for the bar-room: from the convicts sent to salvage stores from a wreck who instead broached a cask of spirits and set fire to the ship; to the tale of Charles Williams, who mourned the drowning of his wife in a drunken accident by pouring a bottle of rum over her grave.

Grog is also shown to have played a significant role in colonial politics. Gilling argues that it was central to the rise of the notorious Rum Corps, whose illegal monopoly on spirits made the fortunes of most of the officers and created a rival power-base to the civilian officials. Two of the first four governors of NSW were called home in disgrace, and a third was placed under military arrest in Australia's only successful rebellion – and in each case, their efforts to control the rum trade were a significant cause of their failure.

Two lives in particular shape the narrative. James Squire, transported for stealing chickens, grew to respectability through his mastery of brewing and died a wealthy man, illustrating the potential for reform, which was both the aim and the undoing of the convict system. Baneelon or Bennelong, the Wangal leader, whose imitation of gentlemanly drinking rituals helped to secure his status as a cross-cultural broker, was later remembered as a drunken savage, a metaphor for the brutal impact of colonisation on indigenous peoples. These twin tales symbolise the paradox of Australian history: the redemption of Britain's criminals and their transformation into free citizens of a prosperous democracy depended upon their forced labour upon stolen land.

But Grog fails to fully explore such larger historical arguments and the book suffers from a lack of an overall explanation of colonial society and the role of alcohol within it. Good history is always grounded in the record, and Gilling has mined the published accounts of early officials and the official paperwork of the governor's office for a wealth of lively detail. But he fails to tie these details together, except in the terms offered by contemporary observers like the first Judge-Advocate, David Collins.

For Collins and his fellow gentlemen-chroniclers of the colony, the insatiable desire for grog and the drunkenness that it caused were the leading cause of crime, poverty and ill health. But such men – and they were all men – were members of a governing elite, who viewed the convicts as irredeemably stained by their crimes, and saw their public drunkenness as a symbol of idleness and depravity. The views of our sources on early Australia cannot be taken at face value, least of all on the subject of grog.

It is important to appreciate the context in which grog became such a wicked problem. Eighteenth-century Britain was a society centred on alcohol, in which drinking accompanied every significant ritual from toasting the King to sealing a business deal. The British also drank substantially more than the first colonists in Australia – largely because their access to alcohol was not artificially constrained by the tyranny of distance and the regulations of a penal experiment. At the same time, drunkenness was widely seen as the cause of moral degradation, poverty and crime, condemned from the pulpit and in the published tracts of social reformers. The attempts to control the spirit trade and prevent convict drunkenness in NSW were without precedent in Britain, and their failure was unsurprising. But for chroniclers of the colony, salacious stories of a drunken society were too entertaining to ignore and became a staple of the public image of Australia.

Gilling's book provides a lively introduction to early NSW and contains a wealth of detail about the problems posed by grog. But, like the sources he relies upon, he has little to tell us about the broader role, positive and negative, that alcohol played in this society – and for that matter in contemporary Australia. The full story of grog must balance the hangover against the celebration that caused it.

Matthew Allen is a lecturer in historical criminology at the University of New England.