Bundaberg Rum began as a solution to garbage. The sugar mills clustered along the Burnett River produced mountains of molasses, the dark, sticky residue left after the sugar crystals were spun out. Molasses was heavy, hard to cart, and barely worth turning into stock feed. The cane men did the arithmetic and saw something better: alcohol. On 1 August 1885, in the Royal Hotel, the district's biggest mill owners gathered around a table with W. M. C. Hickson in the chair and resolved to distill their way to profit. They put up 5,000 pounds and became the first directors of the Bundaberg Distilling Company. Operations began in 1888, and the first rum ran from the stills in 1889. What had been waste flowing toward the sea became a product that would carry the town's name across a continent.

The distillery has twice gone dark, and both times fire was the reason. Production stopped from 1907 to 1914, and again from 1936 to 1939. The second blaze remains the one Bundaberg still tells stories about. Burning rum poured from the wrecked buildings into the Burnett River, a slick of high-proof spirit that ran with the current and killed fish along its path. For a town built on the river, it was a strange and terrible sight, the water itself seeming to catch the distillery's flames. The company rebuilt each time. There is a particular toughness in an enterprise that turns a sugar mill's leftovers into liquor, watches it burn, and simply starts again, and that toughness became part of the brand long before any advertising agency tried to bottle it.

By 1961, rum had an image problem. It read as the drink of an older, rougher generation, and the company wanted a broader, more sociable audience. The answer was a polar bear, drawn by the agency to lean into a larrikin idea of Australian mateship. The conceit was deliberately ridiculous. Here was an Arctic animal selling a tropical spirit, the suggestion being that Bundy could ward off any cold, in a part of the world where cold barely registers. Bundy R. Bear became one of the country's most recognisable mascots, beloved enough that the advertisements themselves became cultural touchstones, even as the brand drew criticism for how readily that affection reached the young.

In 2000, the distillery passed to the British drinks giant Diageo, and in 2014 the new owners decided to move bottling operations more than a thousand kilometres south, to a Sydney suburb called Huntingwood. For Bundaberg, a region still recovering from devastating floods, the lost jobs stung. The Queensland premier called it disappointing; the local mayor worried about the blow to tourism. Diageo insisted it remained committed to the town, that distilling, maturing, and blending would stay where they had always been, and that premium lines like the Master Distillers' Collection would still be bottled here. The rum is still made in Bundaberg, from Bundaberg molasses, the way it has been for well over a century. Some of it just gets dressed for sale a long way from home.