7 December 2018
By Fiona Stocker
Australia (click here) is a nation built on beer. When Port Jackson, the site around which the city of Sydney sprang up, was settled in the late 1700s, the people there were hungry not just for food, but for a steady supply of ale and other types of liquor.
Foundering off Tasmania’s treacherous north coast near the aptly named Preservation Island, the Sydney Cove ground to a halt on a sandbank and sank slowly while the crew salvaged what they could. Artefacts from excavations of the survivors’ camp indicate that this included some of the beer.
Two hundred and twenty years later, I was standing below the ship’s towering rudder, the centrepiece of the Sydney Cove shipwreck exhibition at the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. The ship may have failed to steer its course to Sydney, but the remaining beer survived for around 200 years on the icy seabed. In the 1990s it was recovered from the wreck during excavations led by Mike Nash, a marine archaeologist with the Australian Historic Shipwrecks Team, and sent to the museum in Launceston for preservation. And now the beer is back, renewed and re-brewed courtesy of a partnership between the museum and Australian brewing company James Squire....
