Aboriginal Drug - Pituri
Traditional Aboriginal Drug Use And The Pituri Trade In The Aboriginal Economy
Once this Aboriginal drug was also Aboriginal money. Pituri was the centre of Aboriginal national and international trade before European invasion.
Like Native Americans, Australian Indigenous peoples used/use a variety of Aboriginal drugs made from native plants. Many of these were nicotine-based, the most effective being Pituri, not only an Aboriginal drug, but also Aboriginal currency. Pictured is a pre-colonial order form for Pituri, from the days when we had our own sophisticated forms of print literacy and written numeracy for business documents (message sticks), prior to European invasion.
The Pituri Standard
Duboisia hopwoodii is the western scientific name for the Pituri shrub. Of all the Aboriginal drugs, Pituri had the highest nicotine content. It also held the greatest value as currency, and thus the "Pituri Standard" was born (similar to the "Gold Standard", only based on something useful). This plant was produced in vast quantities, selectively bred by Aboriginal scientists, and cultivated by Aboriginal farmers, then shipped off to fill written orders like the one pictured above, along trade routes all over the continent. This drug-based economy linked with trade routes through Arnhem land and into Asia, regulated by the Yolngu-Macassan Trade Agreement that was going strong back when Europe was still in the dark ages.
How To Prepare Pituri
- Obtain permission for purchase of specific, carefully bred variety sanctioned by elders and traditional scientists (good luck)
- Chop up a teaspoon of leaf and stem
- Grind up very fine
- Add equal part ash from an alkaline plant
- Mix to a brown-grey paste
- Roll into a thin cylindrical shape
- Chew until euphoric
- Spit out, or continue to stupor
- Spit out, or continue until cataleptic
War-time Market Crash
Pituri also had sacred and ritualistic applications, but these were lost along with the entire native economy when colonial intrusion resulted in the greatest market crash in the continent's history. After the Indigenous economy collapsed, the great Pituri plantations were finished, and the drug's use passed out of habit and, in most cases, memory. It was replaced by the insipid and inferior European tobacco, which was used, along with flour and tea, to pay the Indigenous "employees" upon whose backs the pastoral industry (and thereby the new colonial economy) was built. This was with the notable exception of Western Australia, where Aborigines were simply rounded up and forced to sign themselves with an "x" into unpaid slavery.
Thus the colonial pastoral economy subsumed the previously thriving Aboriginal business world, which would later be labelled by anthropologists as a "subsistence economy" of "wandering nomads". The Pituri Standard and sustainable agriculture were replaced by the Gold Standard and the rape of the land. Indigenous forms of literacy and numeracy fell out of use with servitude, and the myth of the "illiterate and innumerate Aborigine" became reality.
Pituri use these days is shrouded in mystery, and has become something of an outback Holy Grail for Ethnobotanists and New Age pilgrims alike.
