by Jill Stark
But I don’t write a list entry for what I think I’ll gain most from this experiment — maybe because I’m not sure I want to find out. By staying sober for longer than I ever have in my adult life, I may be able to figure out how I got here. It may provide the key to knowing why being drunk is so hypnotically appealing that I’ve been doing it almost every weekend since I was a teenager. Why do I place so much value in getting off my face when the downsides have started to cause me such grief? What is it about our culture that makes drinking a social necessity? If I’m a product of my environment, what is happening in the countries, Scotland and Australia, that have shaped me. Eighty per cent of Australians surveyed in a 2010 study said that they think we’re a nation with a drinking problem. How many of us are willing to put our hands up and say we’re part of it? It may be confronting to answer some of these questions, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling invigorated. I love a challenge.
Yet as I ready myself to change the habits of half a lifetime, I find that not everyone is convinced of my ability to transform. When I tell my editor, Gay, about the three-month abstinence plan, she smiles and says, ‘That’s good, that’s really good, Jill. I’m sure you’ll get there.’ The arched eyebrow and voice raised half an octave suggest otherwise. She’s seen me lead the charge on too many staff nights out to believe that I’m ready to give up my role as unofficial Sunday Age social secretary so readily. Journalism, with all the stress of meeting deadlines and the unsociable hours, lends itself well to a lush’s lifestyle. We might not all be the foul-mouthed, emotionally dysfunctional boozehounds Hollywood suggests, but there are enough of us who are to elevate the depiction beyond mere stereotype. In this context, telling my editor I’m not going to drink for three months is something akin to Hugh Hefner announcing plans to join the priesthood.
Some friends are equally stunned by my decision. One is so shocked that she confesses to spilling a glass of champagne on the carpet when she reads my pledge on Facebook. Others are genuinely baffled: ‘It’s a bit extreme. Couldn’t you just drink on weekends?’ Many are supportive, commending my ‘bravery’ and promising to help keep me strong.
My family are behind me, although Dad’s reaction is fairly predictable: ‘You missed out the middle stage — moderation.’ This is a variation on his favourite catchphrase, ‘everything in moderation’. In my early drinking days back in Edinburgh, he’d trot it out with a shake of the head and a smile every time I’d roll out of bed at lunchtime complaining about a hangover, just to remind me that no-one forced the glass into my hand. I’d argue that if we were true to his maxim, moderation itself should be exercised in moderation; he was undeterred. A source of tremendous amusement for him was watching me and my older brother, Neil, as we reached our peak party years, hit the town, and then hit the soluble aspirin the next day. I think he teased us because it was a relief for him to discover that others in the family were human. For the 38 years that my parents were married (they divorced, painfully but amicably, in 2008), Dad never saw Mum hung-over. ‘I don’t do hangovers,’ she still tells us to this day. They’d go out with friends, and Dad would have a couple of pints, perhaps a port nightcap, and he’d wake up with a dull headache and a queasy stomach. Mum could get stuck into a few glasses of wine, follow it up with a couple of single malts and a whisky liqueur, and the next day she’d be singing in the shower at 6.00 a.m. as if her bloodstream was somehow impenetrable to alcohol. It was very annoying.
I obviously haven’t inherited Mum’s constitution. But after pledging to go alcohol-free, hangovers are, for now, a thing of the past. When you’re used to feeling dreadful a couple of mornings a week every week for as many years as you can remember, it’s a novelty to wake up feeling rested and fresh.
The first sober weekend is glorious. On Sunday, I can’t help but feel quietly smug as my friends complain about their mornings-after while I’ve already worked out at the gym, been to the supermarket, and done two loads of washing before lunchtime. Sobriety also gives me the time to read more and start writing again, filling pages with creative musings and bashing out the beginnings of short stories on my laptop. The early mornings are surprisingly enjoyable: the deserted streets, the sense of space — and the stillness. It’s purifying. I feel like I’ve been let in on a well-guarded secret.
A week in, and I’m amazed at how easy this abstinence lark is. I thought I’d have been tempted by now, but the desire for alcohol has all but disappeared. Every day that passes leaves me with a stronger sense that my body and mind are cleaner than they’ve been in years.
After two weeks without alcohol, I feel great. My skin is brighter; I’m energised, happier, and fully committed to life as a responsible drinker. Mentally, it’s as if a fog has lifted: my mind is clearer; my thoughts are more sharply focused. I’m calm and motivated at work. There are moments when I feel so alert and full of vigour that I fear I may burst into a round of star jumps. It’s weird; I hadn’t expected to take to sobriety so enthusiastically. I don’t miss drinking at all.
TO UNPACK THE genesis of my booze-free odyssey, let me take you beyond Australian shores to discover how a binge-drinking Scottish hack came to be a binge-drinking health reporter 17,000 kilometres away from the chilly climes of her homeland. It started, as so many of these stories do, with a boy and a few drinks. It was the year 2000 — a date that seemed such a fanciful prospect during my childhood that when it finally arrived I was a bit disappointed not to be whizzing around on a jetpack and having my every whim catered to by a robot butler. In our third year at high school, five friends and I pledged that on the first day of the new millennium, wherever we were in the world and whatever we were doing, we’d return to our Edinburgh high school and have a reunion in the bike sheds, picking up where we left off: smoking fags, drinking cheap cider, and rocking out to Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion II on a beaten-up ghetto blaster.
I’m pretty sure that nobody turned up. The richly imagined future we saw for ourselves come the age of 23 turned out to be largely the same as our present, at 15. Most of us hadn’t left the area — I was still living with my parents in the house I’d resided in since I was a baby — and our musical tastes hadn’t expanded vastly. My taste in alcohol hadn’t improved, either; I was still a cider girl. This was long before it became a boutique beverage for the inner-city crowd — I was a fan in its paint-stripper days. Diamond White, K cider, and Merrydown: these were drinks that packed a punch.
But I had expanded my travel horizons. After I graduated with a journalism degree, my friend Sharon and I hightailed it to New Zealand, where we spent a year backpacking and drinking our way around the South and North islands. We returned just before the turn of the millennium, and I landed my first job: as a reporter for a regional weekly paper just outside Edinburgh.
At the same time, I took on a part-time bar job, working Friday nights in Espionage, a new James Bond–themed nightclub. It was a cavernous labyrinth encasing five bars over four floors, starting at street level and burrowing deep into the bowels of Edinburgh’s Old Town. It was also a building that cradled my past; between the ages of 16 and 19 it had been my second home. Back then it was called The Mission, and that was an appropriate name. I’m not religious, but I worshipped this place with all the fervour of a holy man, prostrating myself every weekend on a blackened altar of metal, grunge, and indie. With fake ID in one hand, vodka and Coke in the other, and dressed in Seattle-standard shorts over leggings, flannel shirts, and Doc Martens, my friends and I would lose ourselves in lyrics that spoke to our teen angst. Returning to work there in 2000 was the ultimate pilgrimage.
The club had a different air to it in its new incarnation. There were neon fridges filled with Bacardi Breezers where the cloakroom used to be, and the bouncers wore suits and earpieces instead of combat trousers and beanies. But the makeover didn’t fool me: on each level I swear I could see sweat dripping down walls, and could smell patchouli oil and Red Stripe soaked i
nto the sticky floor. I saw snapshots of my past in every corner. It might have undergone a slick facelift, with leather furniture and a lengthy cocktail list, but at its core still beat the heart of a grunge venue. But all those memories would be eclipsed when, in my old stomping ground, I met the man who would bring me to Melbourne.
His name was Hugh. He also worked behind the bar. When we first met and he told me that he was a backpacker from Tasmania, I must confess I wasn’t immediately sure what nationality that made him. But I was sure of one thing — he was very cute. He had the sort of boyish smile and luminescent blue eyes that could loosen the knickers of a nun. He simply had to be my boyfriend.
On Valentine’s Day 2000 I made my move. Fiona and I got pissed and went to Espionage, where we could get discounted drinks and I could eye up the cute Tasmanian barman. Hugh — who, fortunately for me, had broken up with his South African girlfriend the previous day — had no idea what was coming. My chat-up line, delivered with all the subtlety of a marching band at a séance, went something like this: ‘The trouble with all you Aussie backpackers is you come here to see Scotland and all you do is hang out with other backpackers. YOOOU [dramatic pause, wagging finger] should be with a Scottish chick.’ He politely said he was flattered, but that it was too soon after his break-up to contemplate a new relationship.
His romance ban didn’t last long. We hooked up the next night after dancing to ’70s funk at a dingy venue called Jaffa Cake, in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle. Never underestimate the seductive powers of a nightclub named after a chocolate biscuit, or the feminine wiles of a half-pissed Scottish chick with a plunging neckline and access to her mother’s expansive collection of malt whiskies. And from this most unlikely of beginnings came an eight-year relationship that would take me to a life on the other side of the world.
When I arrived in Melbourne in the winter of 2001, I felt right at home in a country that not only had an international reputation as a hard-drinking nation, but also seemed to celebrate it. If Scotland were a man, he’d be wearing a kilt and sinking single-malt whisky by an open fire; Australia would be a larrikin in board shorts and thongs, chugging beer at a backyard barbecue. Language barrier aside, I suspect they’d be good mates. In those first few months, I think I heard about cricket star David ‘Boonie’ Boon’s legendary 52-can in-flight beer-sculling record more times than I heard the national anthem. And what other country can boast a prime minister who entered the Guinness Book of World Records for downing a yard of ale in 11 seconds — an achievement that Bob Hawke believes may have won him more votes than any of his policies. This was the land of the drive-through bottle shop, the birthplace of the esky. I was in heaven.
A contact who had previously worked in the Melbourne office of a Canadian company once told me that she realised just how internationally renowned Australia was for boozing when the firm introduced a no-alcohol policy: management declared they would no longer buy booze for staff consumption at work events. The company had been sued in Canada, by the wife of an employee who had died after drink-driving following a staff function. But its offices in Sydney and Melbourne were exempt from the booze ban. The executives told staff: ‘Alcohol is so engrained in the Australian culture and way of life that we will make an exception.’
It may be the Aussie way of life, but it seems that this culture has turned toxic. In the ten years since I first set foot in this wonderful sunburnt country, concern about alcohol problems has intensified, growing with every year that passes. Public drunkenness and violence on city streets are hard to ignore; underage drinking is rife. The fallout from this boozed-up lifestyle is devastating. Emergency departments are filled with casualties — in an average week, 57 Australians die and 1500 end up in hospital as a result of excessive drinking. Rates of alcohol-related crime, violence, and chronic disease have soared. That burden, added to healthcare expenses and loss of productivity, costs the economy $36 billion a year.
So how did Australia get here? Is this just the way it’s always been in the ‘lucky country’? And if it is, what’s driving this culture? If I want to know how I got here, hung-over and thoroughly sick of it, perhaps I need to understand how the heavy drinking culture that’s nurtured my way of life was formed. When I first stopped drinking, some friends told me proudly that Australia sits at the top of the heap in world drinking ranks; I should be embracing booze, not turning my back on it. One colleague went further, saying that it was ‘un-Australian’ to swear off the grog: ‘It’s part of our heritage. It’s who we are.’
I wonder if that’s true, or if it’s just a convenient story we tell ourselves to explain our love of the bottle. Three weeks into my booze ban, I seek answers to these questions by drawing on the research of one of the world’s leading alcohol-policy experts. During the five years I’ve written about these concerns, he’s been my go-to research man, a veritable guru of booze. Professor Robin Room, director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne, has been working in the field for more than 40 years. He says that a reputation for heavy drinking is part of Australia’s ‘national myth’; it fits into a romantic self-portrait of a country of rugged bushmen, who tell tall tales and share drinks with mates after a hard day’s yakka. This is the equivalent of America’s Wild West mythology — a gang of miscreants thumbing their noses at polite society.
But the reality is a bit more nuanced, according to Room. Just as I learned to drink in Scotland, Australia’s early culture of heavy drinking was transported from British shores. In the 18th century, a gin epidemic swept through Britain and Ireland, causing devastating social problems and a mass crime wave. By the late 1700s, jails were overflowing and the first convicts were sent to Australia, with a penal colony established in 1788 in what is now Sydney. When teetotaller Captain William Bligh became the fourth governor of New South Wales in 1806, he saw drunkenness as a problem among the wealthy New South Wales Corps, who ran the colony and had a monopoly on trading rum. Bligh banned the use of rum as currency. What followed was one of the most dramatic uprisings in Australia’s history. On 26 January 1808, about 400 Corps members, wielding bayonets, marched up Sydney’s Bridge Street to Government House and declared martial law, placing Bligh under house arrest. It became known as the Rum Rebellion, planting in the national consciousness the idea that fighting for the right to drink alcohol was a key part of Australia’s cultural identity.
Yet historians argue that the rebellion had little to do with rum, and instead was the culmination of a long and complex power struggle between Bligh, who wanted to control the way the colony was run, and settlers such as John Macarthur, who headed the Corps and wanted more freedom, including the unrestricted right to own property. The name ‘Rum Rebellion’ was actually coined 50 years later, by a teetotaller called William Howitt, who liked the alliteration and wanted to further the belief that the colony was awash with booze.
Popular folklore suggests that early settlers brought more alcohol than food with them when they first arrived. The belief is that they then got sozzled regularly, drinking more grog per head of population than any other country in the world. But this, says Room, doesn’t withstand scrutiny. While they did drink heavily — about 13.6 litres of pure alcohol per person per year — the level of consumption was not markedly different from that of other countries at the time. ‘In those early years of the colony in Sydney, the consumption per capita was high, but once you accounted for the fact there weren’t many children and women around, it wasn’t that different from Britain, and it was actually less than the United States at that point,’ Room says.
Heavy drinking was rife during the gold-rush period of the 1850s, as masses of men were thrown together without the influence of women to tame their excesses. Itinerant bush workers, sheep shearers, drovers, and stockmen who toiled in the Outback also drank a lot, which helped to give rise to the concept of ‘mateship’. I’d never heard this term until I moved to
Australia, but it immediately appealed to me, this idea that the nation works most cohesively when you offer friendship and loyalty to your fellow countryman, whether they’re a mate, a stranger, or even an enemy. In the early 19th century, this notion, at the core of the fledgling national identity, was linked closely to drinking. Workers rewarded themselves with collective alcohol binges at the end of a hard week’s slog — an early incarnation of the ‘work hard, play hard’ concept. It also gave rise to the custom of ‘shouting’, in which men would take turns buying a round of drinks for their mates.
There were more women and children in Australia by the late 19th century, and men increasingly moved from the bush to the suburbs. Consumption dropped to 5.8 litres of pure alcohol per person per year (about half the levels of early colonial days). Beer began to be favoured over spirits. Room says that from this point, Australia had a Jekyll-and-Hyde attitude to drinking. On one hand, there was the notion of male bonding and mateship, which relied so heavily on alcohol; on the other, there was the rise of a church-led temperance movement. This latter was in part a reaction to high levels of public drunkenness and violence in cities, as more hotels and taverns opened up — much like we’re seeing in modern-day Australian cities. The movement also gained popularity with women’s groups and working-class men, who saw the harm that hard drinking caused. They wanted a better life for their families, and fought to reduce alcohol consumption, lobbying to have licences restricted and closing hours moved back.
But as the temperance movement gained dominance, an anti-temperance culture began to take hold among the bohemia: writers and artists who viewed the war against booze as a puritanical outrage. Led by Sydney’s Bulletin magazine, the notion of the ‘wowser’ — a joyless meddler trying to restrict the freedoms of the masses — was born. I’d never come across this Australian term when I arrived, but I quickly learned that it had deep cultural significance. As Room tells me, ‘The caricature of the “wowser” as a thin, hawk-nosed puritan, dressed in black and bearing a rolled umbrella, perfected by The Bulletin’s gifted cartoonists, has left an indelible image on the Australian consciousness.’