Ebook: Alcohol in the Outback : Two Studies of Drinking

It has long been popular in accounts of Aboriginal contact with
European Australians to characterise Aboriginal societies as ones that have
suffered irremediable cultural collapse, disintegration and the breakdown
of tribal authority (see Eates 1972:95; Sharp 1968). Excessive drinking,
as we shall note, was seen as a mechanism through which the disinherited
vainly attempted to forget their physical suffering and social decay.
Drink was a panacea that numbed an unpleasant and oppressive reality and
thereby made it a little easier to accept.