we touched on this topic so I thought some would be interested in this article
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4697104a27162.html
Aboriginal drinking myths debunked
By JOEL GIBSON - SMH | Thursday, 18 September 2008
Is there anything particularly Aboriginal - or un-Aboriginal - about alcohol?
Why are indigenous people more often teetotallers than non-indigenous people, according to statisticians?
Why do those who drink consume more, more often?
These were some of the questions that confronted Maggie Brady as she researched the history of Australia's first people and one of the nation's first loves - grog.
The resulting publication,
First Taste: How Indigenous Australians Learned About Grog, is the first account of its kind.
It will, she hopes, separate fact from fiction about Aborigines and alcohol, for indigenous drinkers, health workers, policymakers and the general population.
The myths are many and the facts are often surprising.
Dr Brady writes, for example, that it was probably not Europeans who introduced alcohol to Australia, but Makassan traders from Indonesia on their annual fishing trips, from about 1720.
Nor was alcohol only introduced: in at least three areas - Tasmania, south-west West Australia, and Borroloola - indigenous brewers fermented light alcohol from banksia cones, gum sap and pandanus nuts.
In the Sydney region, she found that the first documented offering of a drink to a native - by the future governor Philip Gidley King in 1788 - was promptly spat out. "Fire in eyes, fire in nose, fire all over!" was the unnamed taster's critical review.
Each of these discoveries added to a body of evidence that indigenous drinkers did not have a biological "weakness" for alcohol - a colonial misconception that survives today, she said.
They learned how to use it and abuse it from the best in the business - the English, who arrived fresh from the London "gin craze" of the early 1700s and who drank at breakfast, lunch and dinner. By the 1820s, they had built 13 breweries in the Sydney area and by 1850 there were 500 hotels.
But segregation and pub bans for more than a century fostered an indigenous drinking culture unchecked by the niceties of licensed establishments, and drinking grog eventually came to symbolise equality and civil rights.
Missionaries also planted the seed for a strong indigenous temperance movement that lives on in the high proportion of teetotallers and anti-alcohol lobbies in indigenous communities.
Dr Brady, a veteran of 30 years of drug and alcohol research, does not prescribe a course of action for health workers or communities ravaged by alcohol. But she hopes they will understand that drinking habits are learned and can be changed, and that historical baggage still clouds modern debates. "The message is that prohibition can mean many things and that it needs to arise from the grassroots up rather than be imposed. Restrictions work very well if they have [a critical mass in] the community," Dr Brady said.
First Taste is funded by the Alcohol Education & Rehabilitation Foundation and will be released at Parliament House today.
