Austrailia's Kava Secrets

Kava packets...sold in Arnhem Land

Troy is only eight but he knows the words to Yanguna, a song about kava. He sings away as the four-wheel-drive bumps along a dusty track through Arnhem Land, a remote Aboriginal-owned area in Australia's top end.

Most Australians only know kava from trips to Fiji or Vanuatu. In Arnhem Land, they've been drinking it to extremes for 20 years. Kava has been blamed for making communities comatose and draining tens of millions of dollars from local economies.

In 1998, the Northern Territory government banned kava. Last year, it allowed restricted supply under licence to a handful of Arnhem Land communities. A black market endures and is now worth about A$2 million a year.

Kava was once seen as a solution to critical problems.

By 1981, alcohol abuse was raging through indigenous communities in Australia like a cyclone. That year, leaders from a northeast Arnhem Land community took a trip to Fiji and sampled kava. They noted its calming effects and could relate to the way people sat peacefully talking around the kava bowl. They arranged supplies for their community, hoping kava might provide a positive alternative to alcohol.

The hope was short-lived. Jim Downing, a community development officer in Arnhem Land at the time, says many of the alcohol abusers became heavy kava users and "the mild sedative soon became a pretty solid sedative. They wouldn't get up in the morning, they didn't go to work, and they weren't looking after their families properly."

What began as a low-key affair with profits going back to the community quickly became a thriving trade across Arnhem Land.

Downing recalls that "all the people who hang around and make a great profit from Aboriginal communities exploited the situation. There were the Œwhite pluggers' and one Samoan man too, who was going around pushing it like mad. There were even people on yachts travelling around, calling into little communities on the coast, and pushing them to buy kava."

Jone Lotu is a Fijian-Australian, born and bred in Arnhem Land. He believes that introducing kava to Arnhem Land was a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to appropriate the traditions of another culture. "There's usually protocol in how we drink kava in Fiji," Lotu says.

"Now when you just sit around a bucket with a Coke bottle that's cut half open, and just kind of everyone dipping into the bucket to drink kava, you don't really feel that people are respecting the cultural significance of kava."

By 1997, the unregulated kava business was estimated to be worth A$6 million-A$8 million a year. The trade was dominated by a group of non-Aboriginal people with family links to Tonga, operating in cahoots with some local community leaders.

The state of communities alarmed Denis Burke, the Northern Territory's health minister in the late 1990s. "One of the tragedies was that kava was often being mixed to such toxicity that it was literally mud," he says. "People were comatose day in and day out because the supply of kava was kept up to them. Football teams couldn't be mustered up. There was neglect of children. And this in communities that were stressed in various ways without the add-on effects of kava."

About three out of four men and half the women in Arnhem Land have used kava. Heavy users drink for up to 16 hours a week and some occasionally indulge in 24-hour binges.

While it doesn't trigger the violence associated with alcohol abuse, kava can cause weakened immunity and lethargy, the Menzies School of Health Research has found.

The Menzies School has been studying kava since the mid-1980s. Its senior research officer, Alan Clough has not found any evidence that kava causes physical addiction.

But he says some people become obsessed with drinking kava to the point where it dominates their lives, even at the expense of eating. Hard core users are severely malnourished and show signs of extreme weight loss, up to 50 percent loss of body fat in some cases. Over a two-month period in 1987, three apparently fit young men died of heart failure while playing football. They were believed to be heavy kava users.

Clough says kava's role in these deaths is uncertain but he has a theory that kava and exercise don't mix. "Kava being a very strong muscle relaxant may well induce arrhythmias in the het that could lead to sudden cardiac death," he says.

Clough also attributes to kava withdrawal at least 35 cases of people suffering seizures, some of which are similar to epileptic fits. Four communities in Arnhem Land now have a licence to sell kava. Kava powder is imported from Fiji by a licensed wholesaler. People can buy guaranteed quality kava in 200-gram packs for $A28, about one-fifth of the black-market price for a product often cut with milk powder. One person can legally buy a maximum of 400 grams a day, and 800 grams a week.

Profits from sale are invested in community projects. Yirrkala's community council, in north-east Arnhem Land, made $A70,000 in its first year's trading.

It has bought a $A4000 ECG heart monitoring machine and built a $A60,000 car park. In the west Arnhem Land community of Warruwi, the local shop has reported a sharp rise in sales, which indicates an increased spend on food instead of exorbitantly priced black-market kava.

Police and licensing authorities have been cracking down on the illegal trade. Since 1998, they've made 124 busts in Arnhem Land, seizing 4800 kilograms of kava with a street value of about A$5 million. Maximum penalties are severe‹eight years' imprisonment for possession of 25 kilograms‹but so far no one has gone to jail.

In the licensed community of Yirrkala, the black marketeers have found a niche. They now offer 24-hour home delivery‹very convenient for those who don't make it to the kava shop during opening hours.

Earlier this year, the King of Tonga appealed to black marketeers in Australia who have family connections to Tonga to stop giving his country a bad name.

While few people, even in Australia, are aware of kava use in Arnhem Land, it may soon be thrust into the international spotlight. A kava conference will be held in Suva in November.

The recent banning by European and other western countries of medicines containing kava prompted the conference.

The bans have hit kava-producing Pacific nations hard. They followed reports of serious and, sometimes fatal liver damage from the medicines. The Menzies School's research in Arnhem Land includes rare data about kava's effects on the liver.

Clough believes there may be a big difference between kava in the pill and kava in the bowl. He has found that while drinking kava causes changes in liver function, there is no evidence of long term, irreversible damage. "That's pretty compelling," he says, "when you consider folks around here have been using kava pretty heavily and almost continuously since 1982 in some cases."

Clough says his findings are consistent with a theory that unprocessed kava contains a chemical, glutathione, that protects the liver and that this is extracted during the manufacture of derivative products. That may be welcome news for Arnhem Land's kava drinkers and kava's reputation generally.

Ross Duncan and Jock Cheetham travelled to Arnhem Land for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National Background Briefing program.