Glen Humphries - The Slab: 24 Stories of Beer in Australia

While you have paid money for this book and therefore in the eyes of the law it belongs to you, each and every copy of The Slab is for Kim and Josie.

While you have paid money for this book and therefore in the eyes of the law it belongs to you, each and every copy of The Slab is for Kim and Josie.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Y ou know how, in acknowledgements , you read about how the book was the work of more than one person, and that many others helped out? Well, thats rubbish. No matter how many times I left the laptop unattended I never once saw anyone else sit in front of it and begin writing a chapter for me. It would have been greatly appreciated but it never happened. Because researching and writing a book is a pain in the backside. There were any number of things I would have rather been doing other than reading academic journals or sitting in front of the laptop typing out words. Yes, even cleaning the shower would have been preferable.

That said, some people have provided assistance of the non-writing kind. Most notably my wife, Kim, who helped me with the formatting of the book. And by helped me I mean did it all while I looked on helplessly. I know how to write words, making them look pretty on the page is not my forte. She also borrowed numerous dusty books from the University of Wollongong for me.

Thanks also go to Matt Kirkegaard at the website Australian Brews News for the heads-up about the truth behind the oft-cited story that porter was used to toast the birth of the colony on January 26, 1788.

Thanks to David Hunt writer of Australian history books Girt and True Girt for showing an interest in The Slab when I mentioned it on Twitter in passing. Okay, so it wasnt really in passing at all. I threw it out there totally deliberately. Anyway, despite being on deadline for his own book, he offered to read a few chapters of The Slab and graciously didnt say they were total rubbish. He even passed them onto his publisher. Talk about going above and beyond the call. David, if loads of other authors now contact you on Twitter about their book, I do apologise.

Thanks to David as well as John Birmingham and James Smith for providing cover blurbs for The Slab , thereby making it look a bit more like a proper book.

To Jack Marx, from whom I stole the idea of writing an introduction for each chapter. It came from his wonderful book Australian Tragic . It offers conclusive proof that history can be fascinating.

Kate Shepherd designed the cover but declined the offer of giving herself credit for it on the back. But she cant stop me from doing that here thanks Kate.

Thanks goes to beer, without which this book simply wouldnt exist and Id have to find a much less enjoyable hobby (by which I mean drinking beer. Writing books isnt a hobby its work).

Thanks also go to my parents, without whom none of me would have been possible. And to my aunt Barbara, who knew I would write a book a long, long time before I did. Sorry it took so long. And sorry youre not around to see it.

Lastly but no means leastly, thanks to you, the reader. Im genuinely appreciative that you chose to spend some of your hard-earned money to buy this book and I did the best I could to try and make it entertaining for you.

Australians have never been quite the nation of boozers they imagine themselves to be.

Donald Horne

The Lucky Country (1964)

A NOTE TO THE READER

Australian history was fascinating. And it was bloody funny.

David Hunt, Girt

Y es David, yes it is . But this fact was something I really only discovered while researching and writing The Slab. Like most people of my vintage, the amount of Australian history I learned in high school was exactly zero. I studied both modern and ancient history all the way to Year 12 and the very country in which the classroom I was sitting in was located never rated a mention. Not even in the modern history periods where we learned about World War I which was taught from a very European perspective. And thus I left school knowing the name of the man who shot Franz Ferdinand and thereby started World War I (Gavrilo Princip didnt even have to Google it. Why my brain chooses to hang onto that piece of information I will never know) but not the name of our first Prime Minister. That, ashamed as I am to say it, I learned from a TV ad that aired several years ago designed to embarrass clueless dolts like myself.

I understand the situation regarding teaching our own history in high school has changed and a very good thing it is too. I just hope the school history curriculum isnt like school curriculums everywhere else, which seem to be based on one concept okay, lets work out which are the most boring parts of this subject and then thats what well teach. Because, as Mr Hunt states above, the Australian story is a fascinating one. Its full of great stories and some of them involve beer or other forms of alcohol. That includes the tale of the rioting soldiers in World War I, the NSW politician whose actions essentially led to a half-century of the pubs closing at 6pm, the Australian city where alcohol was banned before the first building was constructed and even the fact the First Fleets departure may have been delayed by a day due to sailors being too hungover to sail.

This book and my interest in Australian history actually started because of beer. Im a self-confessed beer geek and, as I got more deeply fascinated by it, I started reading books about the subject. Time and again, those books would make some small reference to an event in Australias past the Central Station riot, the Darwin Rebellion, a drunken orgy that happened soon after the First Fleets arrival. Itd be just a few lines, but they would stop me in my tracks and Id talk to the author in my head Hold your horses guy, I want to hear more about that.

But obviously they never heard me. So I had to go find out the full story myself. That involved reading a lot of Australian history books. Soon enough I got into the habit of going straight to the index and looking for beer before reading the whole book. Initially, there were only a handful of such tales I looked at and I used them to write a week-long series of pieces for my blog Beer Is Your Friend (go check it out at beerisyourfriend.org. Ill still be here when you get back) called History in a Bottle.