"Indigenous people are alcoholics who can't handle their grog"
Drinking alcohol is a well-entrenched Australian tradition. In fact, settled Australia began as a rum-colony and rum was the currency that paid for our hospitals and built our churches.4 Alcohol abuse is a thread throughout Australian colonial history and remains a problem for many communities, black and white. But it is the notion of the ‘drunken black’ that remains one of the most pervasive stereotypes of Indigenous Australians.5
As a proportion of each population, more Indigenous (37%) than non-Indigenous (22%) people do not drink alcohol at all. Though it has been found that those Indigenous people who do drink, do so in more dangerous quantities than non-Indigenous Australians.6 Lending weight to the perception of high levels of Indigenous alcohol use is the fact that Indigenous social drinking, unlike non-Indigenous drinking, is also often highly visible, conducted in public places like parks.
The popular belief that Indigenous people are genetically unable to tolerate alcohol because they did not drink until Europeans settlement is another myth. Indigenous people have long fermented drinks into alcohol from a range of sources such as the sap of some gum trees, bauhinia flowers and wild honey, banksia cones, pandanus plants and in the Torres Strait, the juice of coconut tree buds.7
There is no scientific evidence of a genetic variance that would predispose any racial or ethnic group to alcohol or make them less tolerant. In fact, humans are very genetically similar, sharing 99.9% of their genomes in common.8
LINKS
- Mt Theo-Yuendumu Substance Misuse Program
Check out the innovative ways in which Indigenous people are managing alcohol and other substance misuse in their communities. - Indigenous Health Infonet: Summary of alcohol use among Indigenous peoples
The Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet is an innovative web resource that makes knowledge and information on Indigenous health easily accessible to inform practice and policy. - Indigenous people can, and do, address their own problems
An article by Ted Wilkes.
4 Willey When the sky fell down 1972 p212.
5 Paraphrasing Marcia Langton ‘Rum, seduction and death’ in Cowlishaw & Morris (eds.) Race Matters p86
6 National Drug Strategy 1994 Household survey. Urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Supplement. Dept. Human Services and Health. Canberra. (or p14 of The Grog Book)
7 Maggie Brady, The Grog Book Revised edition. p. 5-6
8 Paradies, Y. Racialized Genetics and the Study of Complex Diseases: the thrifty genotype revisited in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 50, number 2 (spring 2007):203–27
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