I did a little bit of googling but wondering if anyone else might know, what kind of alcohol would they have drunk in pubs around the 1890s? It appears it was mostly beer and rum - which is a bit wild to me. I don’t associate rum with Australia at all and I think of that time, I think of American westerns and drinkin’ whiskey yeehaw!
Didn’t Sydney/NSW colony have a whole coup and military dictatorship over rum in the 1800’s? My history is a little hazy, but I remember the Rum Rebellion being a thing from school.
Yep! And I wanna say Rum was essentially currency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Rebellion
Rum, bathtub gin, beer (often adulterated). Rum meaning strong alcohol distilled from fruit rather than grain. Humanity has always looked to fermented drinks if only for oblivion, and there was little to no regulation of quality or quantity. Refer one of my favorite books ‘The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva’. And the let down after the boom years of the 1880s (in Melbourne at least) was severe and very damaging for a lot of people. For litry source material for 1890s, try C J Dennis (poet and journalist who died of the drink). His famous poems were collected as The Sentimental Bloke. The real gem is his take on Romeo & Juliet, titled Her Name’s Doreen, which cracks me up to this day. @Nath’s comment below is pertinent, but largely outdated by 1890. It’s true that the first military detachment to the new colony in Port Jackson was known as the Rum Corps, and deserved it. Not only for the widespread corruption and use of rum as currency, but also referring to the cockney english usage of ‘rum’ meaning suspicious or shonky dealings in general. This had largely been sorted by the ever present Governor Macquarie by the 1850s. The 1890s were post the largest gold rushes. There was a minor gold rush on Goodman’s Creek near Bacchus Marsh in that time period and the bigger gold rushes to the Palmer River in FNQ, but these didn’t really create much change in the drinking culture as such as far as I know. The gold rushes in the Victorian & NSW alpine areas were after that - more early 1900s. I’m looking forward to your next volume.
EDIT: the name of the Romeo & Juliet poem is The Play.
