by Jill Stark
Public-health experts have been telling me for years that, if we are to have a chance of reducing the enormous medical, social, and economic burden of alcohol misuse, we first have to change Australia’s entrenched binge-drinking culture. We can no longer debate that there is a problem. Every week, four Australians under the age of 25 die, and 60 teenagers are hospitalised, due to alcohol-related injuries. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of young people treated for alcohol-related brain damage grew five-fold.
But working out how to reach these drinkers has proved a tricky proposition. Governments have thrown money at campaigns demonising booze, and warning young people that drinking will see them arrested, maimed, raped, or killed. The testimonies of Chris and his fellow bloggers reveal that this approach has left young people feeling patronised and alienated. It’s given them no incentive to change their drinking habits, and may well have encouraged them to veer in the opposite direction in protest. While I’d be flattering myself to think I’m in the youth demographic these campaigns have been trying to reach, I’ve been equally turned off by messages which imply that drinking is inherently dangerous and unpleasant, when my own experiences tell quite a different story. I could see how what Chris had come up with might well be the road map to reach a disillusioned generation.
When I first interviewed him over the phone, where he spoke to me from his Caloundra home, I was astonished by his level of insight into the complex connections that Aussies have with alcohol. His ability to articulate his own motivations for drinking was even more impressive, especially for someone who was just 23. I remember wondering where I’d be now if I’d had that degree of clarity about my own relationship with alcohol at his age.
In early 2010, Chris and I met in person. Relentlessly upbeat and energetic, he had a passion for his work that coursed through him so violently he was practically luminous. Here was a man on a mission — to change our drinking culture and to unlock what he believed to be Australia’s greatest untapped resource: Sunday mornings. And his pitch was convincing. ‘We live in a country where we’re hung-over for a seventh of our lives. If you binge drink for two nights a week between the ages of 18 and 28, you’ll have drunk for 10,000 hours. We’re creating a culture of drinking experts,’ he told me. ‘The cost of that expertise is 3000 people a year dying from alcohol misuse. That’s 57 Australians every single week.’ Chris reckoned that three months off the booze was the minimum time it took to fundamentally shift a person’s relationship with alcohol.
I admired what he was trying to achieve, but I was also a little suspicious. Was Hello Sunday Morning a modern-day temperance movement? A slick front for God-bothering puritans?
But there was something about him. On some level, even then, I knew that meeting Chris was a game-changer. I quizzed him on his year without booze. Didn’t he get bored? How could he enjoy parties without a few beers? A whole year? Seriously? I accused him of being a lentil-loving tree hugger on a mission to change the world one booze-ravaged soul at a time. He would offer only a chuckle and the suggestion that I should try it for myself if I wanted to find out how it worked.
Gradually, as my doubts about Chris dissipated, I could see what I really doubted — my ability to forgo alcohol for what seemed like a preposterously long period. I’d given up booze before: prior to meeting Chris, I’d just finished Febfast, in which participants give up drinking during February to raise money for young people with drug and alcohol problems. But it was a white-knuckle ride. I put life on hold, waiting out my booze ban like a footballer pacing the sidelines, desperate to get back in the game. I struggled to imagine how, if I removed alcohol for an even longer period, life could be anything short of two-dimensional. Don’t the best nights out usually happen after a skinful? Hedonism rarely springs from soda water. I had more faith in the transcending power of beer than I did in myself.
The hangovers continued after meeting Chris, and the what-ifs lobbed into my mind with increasing regularity. I did my best to ignore them. That’s not easy when you spend your working life writing about the health consequences of a society sickening itself on a noxious diet of booze, fags, and fast food — the public-health world’s axis of evil. Health reporting can induce the sort of hypochondria that would make Woody Allen proud. But some health messages I chose to ignore; I had only stubbed my last cigarette out a couple of years before. It had taken several weeks of waking up in the middle of the night with coughing fits that made my abdominal muscles ache before I finally called it a day. Sometimes the only way you can change is when the future slaps you in the face so hard it leaves a handprint on your cheek.
But smoking’s not like drinking. These days, it’s almost more socially acceptable to marry your cousin than to light up in a public place. With alcohol, the opposite is true. If you want to be a social pariah, try refusing a drink in an Australian pub at six o’clock on a Friday evening. I’ve had no doomsday warning with booze — and even if there had been one, I’ve mastered the art of selective hearing. I paid scant attention to the implications of a story I wrote about research which warned that as little as eight drinks a week could shrink the size of your brain. But a study that found regular drinkers have above-average happiness and wellbeing scores, while non-drinkers are the most miserable, was digested in great detail and posted on my Facebook page.
For me, being drunk was not a fast track to ill health and calamity. I was binge drinking before the phrase was even invented, and so were most of my friends. We’re all still alive and healthy. We haven’t been in car accidents, been assaulted, or assaulted someone else. We haven’t woken up in hospitals, contracted communicable diseases, lost jobs, committed crimes (barring crimes against music in karaoke bars), ruined relationships, or gambled away our life savings on the pokies as a result of our drinking. For the most part, being drunk is fun for us. It brings texture to our lives, and leads to new friendships, dancing, romance, sex, belly laughs, and bonding. The stories I write for my newspaper about alcohol-induced carnage simply don’t resonate with my own experiences. The soaring rates of alcohol-related injuries and liver disease, the brain-damaged women, and their kids being born with foetal alcohol syndrome — I might as well be writing about life on another planet.
Reporting on alcohol might have become the defining issue of my journalistic career, but I merely convey facts. I can’t comfortably be likened to the politician who preaches family values while secretly committing acts of depravity with leather-clad call girls. In my mind, I’m no more obliged to drink responsibly than the transport reporter is obliged to ride his bike to work to ease Melbourne’s traffic congestion.
Still, I have to admit that my two worlds sometimes collide. A year or so into my coverage of Australia’s binge-drinking epidemic, I had a boozy Saturday-night dinner party with some girlfriends and got to bed around 2.30 a.m., waking up, with a scratchy throat and a sore head, around six hours later to go to work. I was hoping for a quiet Sunday shift, with something light and inoffensive that would glide its way inconspicuously onto page 12 — perhaps a colour piece on a charity fun-run, or a discussion on the best treatments for baldness. Instead, I learned that overnight the federal government had announced that taxes on pre-mixed spirits, colloquially known as ‘alcopops’, would be raised by 70 per cent, effective immediately. As I was the resident expert on all things binge drinking, and alcopops had been blamed for turning kids into drunken delinquents, I had approximately five hours to write a 1500-word feature on the ramifications of this war on lolly water.
My brain hurt as though I was hearing nails being scraped down a blackboard. I could barely keep my eyes open. The prospect of writing an intelligible treatise on Australia’s horribly convoluted alcohol-taxation system — and the effective ban on a product that, at that point, made me gag just to think about — was unpalatable, to say the least. But I did it. I pulled out stats, compiled tables, and rang up contacts to get their opinion on this watershed moment in
Australia’s history of dependence on grog. I even quizzed the then health minister, Nicola Roxon, thankful that it was a telephone interview and she didn’t have to suffer the impertinence of my morning-after breath.
The article would go on to be showcased by my editors as part of The Age’s submission to the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association Newspaper of the Year Awards, with a blurb on how my reports had highlighted the devastating consequences of Australia’s binge-drinking culture. I read the piece again after the awards, and marvelled at how much sense it made, and how little evidence there was that I might still have been over the limit when I wrote it.
A few months later, I was shortlisted in the 2008 federal government–sponsored National Drug and Alcohol Awards. I ended up being a joint winner, along with reporters at the Geelong Advertiser, which had run a brilliant campaign against drunken violence. I took to the lectern at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre and made a brief speech, expressing my gratitude to the people in the sector who worked so tirelessly to turn around Australia’s alcohol problem: people without whom I’d have nothing to write about. As I spoke — squinting in the stage lights and looking out at the 500-strong audience as the screen behind me filled with a giant image of my face beside a headline that screamed ‘STOP THIS MADNESS’ — I felt it: the cold, wet wallop of hypocrisy. I might not be getting stretchered into the back of an ambulance or carted off in a police car every weekend, but I sure as hell wasn’t the poster child for the moderation movement.
But the only thing I knew with more certainty than the truth of my own hypocrisy was that as soon as I was off that stage I’d be diving headfirst into the nearest bottle of wine. I knew I’d get drunk; I knew I’d be hung-over the next day. It was a Friday night, and I’d just had a major win. When you win, you celebrate. And when you celebrate, you drink. Those are the rules. Who was I to argue with several centuries of tradition?
IT TAKES THREE years, several dozen more stories, and a whole lot of drinking before I hit the wall. Consigning New Year’s Day 2011 to the expanding archive of days I’d rather forget, I wake up on 2 January hoping to feel better. I don’t. I feel anxious, lost, and still horribly hung-over, my faith in the healing properties of a quarter-pounder meal and a chocolate-fudge sundae seemingly misplaced. It’s past 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, but I’m far from ready to say hello to it. The sun, glinting through a chink in my bedroom blinds, seems to point at me, an outstretched finger of light challenging me to get out of bed. I shrink away from it. The memories of yesterday linger. My heart, while not quite galloping, is still cantering along as if it has somewhere really important to be. There’s a sickness in my stomach, the origins of which stretch far beyond my New Year’s Eve blowout. Anxiety jangles in my bones as I begin to acknowledge the obvious: drinking brought me here. And I’ve been here too long.
I start thinking about Hello Sunday Morning and what it would mean to give up alcohol for three months, turning over the implications in my head, trying to find an angle from which the prospect will look less absurd. It terrifies me — but that’s how I know I have to do it. Yet I have many misgivings. How can I survive summer? All those warm nights with weekend barbecues, after-work drinks in rooftop bars, and lazy afternoons in beer gardens. Then there’s the not-insignificant matter of my 35th birthday at the end of March. I can’t remember the last time I had a sober birthday. The prospect is laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Maybe I can do three months without drinking, but just stop a week early so I can get pissed on my birthday.
The decision is too enormous. I pull the doona over my head, which, on day two of the hangover from the fiery pits of hell, is still thumping like a state-of-the-art subwoofer. Perhaps I’ll just stay in bed a bit longer. (This is often my solution to dilemmas that seem too hard — the adult equivalent of thumping your fists on the floor and yelling, ‘It’s sooooo unfair!’)
My horizontal tantrum is interrupted by the ringing phone. I can see that it’s Loretta, one of my closest friends and long-time drinking-partner-in-crime. She’d been living in Europe for nearly two years, and returned home to Melbourne in December, via a ten-day silent meditation retreat in an Indian ashram. After her alcohol-free vegan getaway, her senses were heightened, her insides were cleansed, she’d acquired a startling new level of mindfulness and, disappointingly for me, her drinking muscles had atrophied. The realignment of her chakras had turned her into a two-pot screamer, and I found it deeply unsettling. At a particularly raucous house party just before Christmas — at which my friends and I put in a marathon effort, kicking on from midday Sunday to five o’clock the following morning — I’d watched Loretta watching us. As it got to the pointy end of the night, and the drinking, singing, dancing, and general messiness ramped up, there she was, standing silently on the edge of the 20-strong group, nursing the same beer she’d had for hours, bewilderment written large on her face. It was the look you might expect of someone who’d been teleported from their lounge-room sofa to the surface of the moon.
She skipped the New Year’s Eve parties and went to stay with her family in country New South Wales, working in her brother’s pub instead of drinking her way into the next year. I remember getting a text around 2.00 a.m., wishing me a happy new year and telling me she was tucked up in bed with a cup of tea and a meditation book. At the party, as I sipped my tequila from a martini glass, we laughed at her newfound virtuousness, placing bets on how long it would last. Secretly, I was jealous.
This late morning, I let the phone ring for a long time before I’m ready to answer. Loretta knows me too well to be convinced that everything’s just dandy when clearly it’s not, so I don’t even try. I tell her about the hangover that won’t die, the baleful panic attack, the fact that I’m still in bed, and the monumental brain fuck I’m experiencing at the thought of not drinking for the rest of summer and a big chunk of autumn. She is, as she always is when I’m in danger of losing my shit, calm, tender, and practical. ‘Sweet, you don’t have to decide anything right now. You just have to get out of bed.’
So I do. I douse my face with cold water, brush my teeth, put my trainers on, and face the day. Even with sunglasses so big they cover half my face, the sunshine hurts. But as I walk around a glorious-looking Princes Park, blue sky overhead, the pain slowly subsides and my pace quickens. I start to enjoy the warmth on my skin and the effect it’s having on my thoughts. I imagine how much more rewarding a morning like this would be if I could look at it without grimacing; if I could look at it before midday. In the grand scheme of things, three months isn’t that long, right? It’s less than 1 per cent of my life so far. What do I have to lose — other than horrendous hangovers, a beer belly, and the gaping hole in my pocket?
Later, as it dawns on me I won’t taste wine again till round two of footy season, I begin to get scared. But underneath the apprehension, the decision feels right. I am sick, in every sense of the word, of being drunk. There’s no novelty in it anymore. Every. Fucking. Weekend. Sobriety can’t be any more boring than that. I want to know what life is like without my beer goggles. I want to be brave enough to do all the things I do on a big night out — meet new people, dance, chat up guys, be silly just for the sake of it — without the Dutch courage that alcohol gives me. Can I shift the perception, seemingly hard-wired into my sense of self, that fun comes with a glass in its hand? After years of writing stories that sought to hold government and industry to account for Australia’s drinking problem, it’s time to put myself under the same spotlight.
January
I BEGIN TO rebuild myself from the rubble and prepare for the alcohol-free journey ahead. I stock up on herbal teas, move the wine from the fridge to the back of my tallest cupboard, buy new gym gear, and start to imagine how a svelte and sprightly — and sober — me might look. I picture myself in three months’ time, transformed into some sort of superhero, the newfound energy allowing me to leap over skyscrapers and shoot lightning bolts from my now-sparkli
ng eyes. In this future world I am physically and mentally lighter, I have abs you can bounce lemons off, and I’ve perfected the sort of conversational skills that will make me a darling of the after-dinner circuit.
The first few alcohol-free days are actually quite fun. It’s a whirlwind of exercise, wholesome meals, and the thrill of taking control of a situation that had been careering away from me like an empty shopping trolley down the face of Everest. I start writing a list of all the things I hope to achieve during my vacation from booze. This love of lists comes from my mum, who is never without a folded envelope or Post-it note filled with the scribble of her life’s most immediate priorities. Like her, I’ve learned that there are few greater satisfactions than the sight of a fully scored-off list. Hangovers, with their side serve of procrastination, have seen me consign many a half-completed list to the bin. But this is a new dawn, a new day. There’s no room for dispiriting bins of stationery.
On the latest list, which I distinguish from its predecessors by assigning it to fancy notepaper and entitling it ‘The Big List of All Lists’, I write down my goals. They range from the practical (‘clean apartment properly’), to the energetic (‘start running’), to the perilously overdue (‘DO TAX RETURN!!!’), and the hopeful (‘find love’). The list is three pages long: one page for every month of sobriety. The chaos that for too long has reigned over my world has no idea what kind of regimented shit is about to come down on its head.