As I post this, it is 3:00 pm on New Year’s Eve day in 2019, but it is already January 2020 in Australia, so here we go with another month of British beer.
Inspired by Trent Y’s check-ins on Untapped, I decided to take my nonsense to the Land Down Under for the 2020 installments of January is British Beer Month.
It is well known that Australia was colonized by the British who overran the indigenous population pretty much the way they and others did in the Americas. It is also well known that Australia was originally a penal colony for Great Britain – or was it? Upon careful (10 minutes) research it appears that Britain’s original penal colony was the Nifty Fifty – or, at the time, the Tenacious Thirteen. It seems that prior to the American revolution, Britain sent more than 50,000 of the worst of the worst criminals (largely Irishmen charged with being Irish) to North America. After the revolution they needed somewhere else to take out the trash, so the convicts were sent literally halfway around the world to Australia; an estimated 164,000 inmates were shipped from the British Islands to the Land of Oz. After all, what better way to build the infrastructure in a harsh environment than with forced labour?
You have no doubt heard of Samuel Adams – brewer and patriot. “Sam the Maltster” was born in Boston so we know that he was not one of the convicts sent to the colonies. He was however a rabble rouser and the most independent minded of the founding fathers and signers of the Declaration of Independence according to James Koch, founder of the Samuel Adams Brewery, so the British were probably keen to convict him. Adams’s counterpart in Australia was another brewer named James - James Squire – convict, brewer and constable. You might call him the Sam Adams of Down Under.
JamesSquire.com.au tells the story of James Squire, a convict on the First Fleet, who turned his life around and rose to be one of the governor’s guards, the father of 11 children and, perhaps most significantly, the colony’s first and most sought-after brewer. Squire was born in Kingston upon Thames outside of London. In 1774, at the age of 20, he was arrested for highway robbery and sentenced to seven years of servitude in America. He was given the option of serving in the English army, which he elected to do, and was back in Kingston two years later. Apparently, James was not one to learn from his mistakes and at the age of 30 was convicted of stealing five hens and four cocks from his neighbor’s yard and was sentenced to two years in Southwark Gaol https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol25/pp9-21 and then shipped to Australia.
In short order after his arrival, James was brewing beer. This found him favor with the local authorities who gave him a relatively lenient sentence for a transgression that could have earned him a trip to the gallows. In 1795, eight years after arriving in Australia, Squire became a free man. He managed to acquire 1000 acres of land by 1806 on which he grew his own hops. That year he built his brewery on the shore of Parramatta River at Kissing Point. James became a wealthy man, banker and philanthropist, and yes, ironically a district constable.
A few other notable convicts sent to Australia:
Francis “Frank the Poet” McNamara - Composer of various oral convict ballads, including The Convict’s Tour to Hell.
Jorgen Jorgensen - Declared himself the ruler of Iceland and became a spy in Britain.
Alexander Pearce - Cannibal escapee
Moondyne Joe - Notable for his awesome name and appearance.
It is from this historic point that we will begin our month of exploring Australian brewing. I might even have a Fosters, since that seems to be the only Australian beer available in the US Outback.
