Bingo Row 2 – culture
Before Matt Murphy’s Rum: a Distilled History of Colonial Australia, I knew very little about Australia. And since most of that was from that Simpsons episode, it would be more accurate to say I knew of Australia.
But I did know a decent amount about rum because I am interested in it (I drink it sometimes too), so I knew a large gap in my rum knowledge was in Australia’s history. Because everything else I knew about Australia was rum trivia.
Did I learn anything about rum? Not really. I knew Australia used rum as currency in the early colonial days. I knew they had a rum rebellion that might not have been about rum. From a booze perspective, it’s trivia. But from a cultural perspective, it’s a drinking problem.
Did I learn anything about Australia? Yes.
I learned that colonial Australia was blackout drunk for years. As I was reading, I looked up the symptoms of alcoholism (or alcohol use disorder on the Mayo clinic site) and the colony had about all of them. They could not cut back, they failed to fulfill obligations due to drinking, etc. I’m sure anyone reading this knows alcoholism can be sad, no matter how much or little personal experience you might have with it. I want to stress, I am talking about Australia itself, not just the people in it. They also had drinking problems. And human rights problems. And government problems.
Eventually, drinking dropped and the county turned to beer.
The book ends with some sobering (heh?) statistics about drinking in the world and Australia. The author concluded that Australia’s drinking legacy is tied with violence. If Australia has more alcohol related violence than countries that drink more, then there is a cultural issue that goes beyond alcohol.