Australia’s initial booze problem.

>Exactly when the first attempts at homebrewing [**in Australia**] were made is a vexed question, but we can conservatively estimate that it was on day one. It was certainly recorded by 1795. Australia’s landscape was (and is) an unfriendly place where all the plant and animal life was (and is) designed by a venomous and vengeful God. But to imagine the true horror of New south Wales you have to remember that there was at this time no such thing as refrigeration or air-conditioning. This was Australia without a cold beer. For the early years, everything is down to rum. >The good stuff still had to be imported. In 1792 a ship called the *Royal Admiral* arrived in Sydney Cove loaded with rum and beer. [Phillip](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/ArthurPhilip.jpg) [**the first Governor of New South Wales**] said that they could sell the beer, but not the rum. So the captain sold the beer legally, and the rum illegally. The jolly results were recorded by the chaplain. >*Much intoxication was the consequence. Several of the settlers, breaking out from the restraint to which they had been subject, conducted themselves with the greatest impropriety, beating their wives, destroying their stock, trampling on and injuring their crops in the ground, and destroying each other’s property.* >In 1792, Phillip gave up and went home. He was replaced by [Francis Grose](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Francis_Grose_%28British_Army_officer%29.jpg), who had a slightly better answer to the booze question. If you couldn’t stop the flow of spirits into the colony, you might as well take control of it. Spirits *were* still illegal, and back in Britain the government still fondly dreamed that New South Wales was a sober hive of morally improving industry. So when, in 1793, another rum ship turned up in the cove, Grose announced that he didn’t want to buy the rum, really didn’t want to buy it, but felt that he was “forced” to do so in order to keep it from the convicts. Grose then distributed it to his fellow soldiers, who sold it to the convicts at a markup of around 1,200 percent. __________________________ **Author’s Note:** >I’ve not been able to establish for certain, but so far as I can tell New South Wales’s first building was a secure booze-bunker. __________________________ **Source:** Forsyth, Mark. “Australia.” *A Short History of Drunkenness*. Three Rivers Press, 2017. 171-72. Print. __________________________ **Further Reading:** [Admiral Arthur Phillip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Phillip) Lieutenant-General Francis Grose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Grose_(British_Army_officer)