In the early decades of the colony of New South Wales, somebody planted hemp in the Hunter Valley. They were probably thinking that, if the plant thrived, then they could make money selling it to make rope and canvas which was much-needed for sailing ships, in particular. This long-ago farmer could hardly have suspected that in about a century-and-a-half, the crop – by that time naturalised along the river bank between Singleton and Maitland – would stir up a national moral panic among citizens worried that a shocking “sex drug” was being plucked for free from the riverbank by naive youths and wicked miscreants with bad behaviour on their minds.
Hemp was more than respectable when the early convict fleets brought the seeds of many important plants to Britain’s new prison colony in the south seas. Indeed, it was an industrially vital plant. (Interestingly, the word “cannabis” was the ancient Greek word for hemp, and this word morphed over centuries into “canvas”, meaning the strong, coarse fabric woven from hemp fibres.)
In 1803 NSW Governor Philip Gidley King was very happy with the hemp crop he had planted the year before, noting in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks that he used a pint of seed sent from India to sow 10 acres. “It grows with the utmost luxuriance, and is generally from 6 to 10 feet in height,” he wrote.
It has been noted by plant experts that the governor’s hemp crop would probably not have made very good rope since it was apparently cannabis indica and not cannabis sativa – the variety best suited to textile manufacture. The plants are very similar and the British naval types don’t seem to have realised they were actually different.
Of course cannabis has notable pharmaceutical effects, which is why it was used as a medicine for many years, until it was demonised and struck from pharmacopoeias.
Exactly how the plant made its way to the Hunter isn’t clear, though it seems fair to speculate that some early landholder was trialling it as a potential industrial crop. At any rate, in 1846 Dr Francis Campbell (who for a time practiced at East Maitland) wrote of hemp “growing wild in the greatest luxuriance on the sandy bank of the river Hunter, near Singleton. This spontaneous crop appeared to cover about an acre of an extremely loose sandy loam, in a small flat which had been formed by the dislocation of the high bank into the bed of the river. The plants were vigorous and healthy, and upon the whole the crop looked dense and evenly”, he wrote. Apparently this was the sativa strain. The plant grew happily and spread for decades until, in 1964, Australians were startled to learn that a massive growth of hemp had been found spread along about 65 kilometres of Hunter river bank. It was estimated that about 200 hectares were heavily infested. The largest stand was said to be about about 40 hectares on its own.
It seems implausible that such a massive stand could have been entirely unknown or unexploited by people who knew what it was. Certainly farmers and landholders knew about it, even if they never used it. One anecdote suggests the knowledge became widespread in the early 1960s because of a visiting American surfer who saw it, recognised it and passed it around his circle of friends. According to that story, more and more people started visiting the Hunter River on harvesting expeditions until it came to the attention of the press, politicians and law enforcement agencies.
“Sex drug growing wild,” was the headline in The Melbourne Age of November 17, 1964. No longer lauded as an important industrial plant, hemp had become “marihuana” – a dreaded “sex drug”. This was largely thanks to US-sponsored “Reefer Madness” campaigns which surfaced in Australia in 1938 in Smiths Weekly, which described it as “a Mexican drug that drives men and women to the wildest sexual excesses . . . distorts moral values and leads to degrading sexual extravagances”. Under the influence of marihuana, “the addict becomes at times almost an uncontrollable sex-maniac, able to obtain satisfaction only from the most appalling of perversions and orgies”.
A helpful US narcotics agent by the unlikely name of A.M. Bangs provided valuable background to Smiths Weekly, describing how victims of the drug were apprehended by lawmen but because of their stupor were unable to be questioned “for hours, sometimes days”. “The women sit on their cell cots, their faces and clothes ripped, trying to piece together what they did in their orgy of lust. The men slowly come out of the stupor that gave them frenzied sexual desires and colossal physical strengths”.
Thanks to this lurid pre-publicity, the 1964 headlines about the shock appearance of the dreaded “sex-drug” in the Hunter sent church leaders and others into a spin. Not surprisingly, the headlines also dramatically boosted short-stay tourism to the Hunter, with day-trippers heading to the river with sugar bags to fill before the authorities managed to poison, uproot and destroy the crop. Newspapers helpfully explained that the plant needed no special preparation before being smoked.
While so-called “weed-raiders” headed to the valley, the police were there to warn that anybody caught would be charged with possession of a narcotic. The eradication campaign appears to have taken quite some time, during which, according to author John Jiggens: “many Sydney university students had their initiation into the world of weed on summer holiday jobs with the Department of Agriculture, clearing, burning, poisoning.” Meanwhile: “quite a few Newcastle lads had their trailbikes revving along the back roads of the Hunter Valley and were selling the herb along Hunter Street.” Jiggens quoted one persons recalling that: “You could pick the weed at many riverside locations, but getting back to the highway with a sugar bag full of heads, and the cops on the prowl, could be pretty nervy. Some guys used to fill their hubcaps with grass. Others went quietly on moonlit nights and took their time to pick pounds and pounds.”
Apparently, the Department of Customs and Excise paid bounties to farmers who provided information that led to the arrest of “weed raiders”. One farmer told Jiggens he used to direct young weed hunters who asked him how to find cannabis to fields full of “stinking roger”.
The eradication of the Hunter River stands naturally didn’t remove cannabis from society. As Jiggens pointed out, US servicemen, flying into Sydney for rest and recreation from the Vietnam war, brought in huge quantities of South East Asian pot. Next, criminal networks – some apparently connected to US intelligence organisations – grew and marketed pot as a major commercial enterprise. Fast forward to 2023 and big crops are grown hydroponically in suburban houses owned by criminal syndicates. Cannabis is back as a medicinal herb, tolerated in certain situations but otherwise still illegal to grow, possess and smoke.
