High Sobriety (5 page)

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.'

To this day, being branded a wowser is seen as an affront. The fear of being portrayed as that sticky-beaked prig means that politicians discussing restrictions on the sale or promotion of alcohol will often preface their comments with the disclaimer ‘I'm not a wowser …'. Nobody trusts a non-drinker.

Perhaps this goes a way to explaining why some people have reacted so defensively to my decision to give up booze. It's only been three weeks, but already some are treating my abstinence as if it's a personal insult. At a party during my second week of non-drinking, I was asked, ‘Don't drink, don't smoke — what do you do?' My identity was suddenly reduced to the sum of the substances I'd chosen not to ingest. Despite repeatedly telling the host that I was driving, he insisted that I have a cold beer to toast the birthday boy, his brother. ‘C'aaarn, y'can have one. Just one. C'aaarn, just one beer. It's a party!' Eventually I had to tell him I'd necked a couple of whiskies before I left the house, just to get him to leave me alone.

Alcohol loosens us up. The implication is that you're an uptight control freak if you abstain. But the suspicion of teetotallers is also scorched onto the Australian national psyche, the mistrust stretching all the way back to the days when non-drinkers were viewed as religious killjoys intent on curbing civil liberties.

The temperance movement scored its biggest victory during World War I, when six o'clock closing for hotels and taverns was introduced in four of the six Australian states. The idea was to cut down on drinking hours to encourage men to spend less time in the pub and more time with their families. The unfortunate consequence of that legislation was what became known as ‘the six o'clock swill': men would finish work at 5.00 p.m. and race to the nearest pub to drink as much as they could in that last hour before closing. Chairs, tables, stools, billiard tables, and dartboards — anything taking up space that could otherwise be filled by drinkers — were removed from the floor and walls to allow for the fast flow of booze. Hotels lost their friendly feel and became hostile environments crammed with drunk, aggressive men jostling for service at the bar. Women were all but banned. With opening hours slashed, the continued temperance push, and the post-war Depression, alcohol consumption fell to its lowest levels during the 1930s, to just 2.5 litres per person.

Once in place, six o'clock closing proved hard to repeal. Despite its increasing unsavouriness, referendums proposing a move to ten o'clock closing were resoundingly defeated, in New South Wales in 1947 and Victoria in 1956. But public opinion finally swung in the other direction, with the move to later closing coming to New South Wales in 1954 — and not until 1966 in Victoria. It's hard to reconcile the 24-hour drinking culture of the Melbourne I know with a city that until relatively recently had such strict rules around booze. It doesn't fit with the presumption that alcohol has always been at the centre of Australian life. However, with early closing repealed, drinking gradually shifted from being the sole domain of men to becoming a more social pastime involving the whole community. Women began to be integrated into the drinking culture, as hotels were allowed to serve alcohol with meals, and sports clubs were granted liquor licences, turning them into social hubs.

What followed was an increase in drinking that peaked in 1975 at 13.1 litres of alcohol per person — levels not seen since early colonial days. This shift away from Australia's puritanical past was felt most keenly in Victoria in the 1980s, when premier John Cain set about turning Melbourne into a continental-style all-night city with a thriving bar culture. Since 1984, there's been a four-fold increase in the number of places where you can buy alcohol in Victoria. Deregulation in the 1990s relaxed liquor-licensing laws, leading to a proliferation of quirky laneway bars and cocktail dens. But it's also had a significant downside. For alcohol researchers such as Room, the consequences of this unfettered growth of the night-time economy were inevitable: as the number of late-night venues has grown, alcohol-related violence, injuries, and accidents have skyrocketed. He says that politicians — spooked by the spectre of wowserism and by a cashed-up liquor industry that aggressively pushes the free-market ideology — have been reluctant to take measurable legislative action.

Interestingly, at the same time as licensing was being deregulated, Australia was at the forefront of tough drink-driving laws. In 1976, Victoria became one of the first jurisdictions in the world to introduce random breath-testing. By 1988, the practice had been adopted nationally. ‘That certainly went against this whole cultural frame of Australians as big drinkers. But the way in which it happened — there was a trade-off going on,' Room says. ‘They did away with early closing in pubs, but brought in more restrictions on drink-driving. They justified the tightening up of one area by liberalisation in another.'

In a country where the tyranny of distance made driving home from the pub standard practice, particularly in the bush, these laws helped to shift that culture. As road accidents and fatalities came down, so too did alcohol consumption, dropping to about ten litres per person (over the age of 15) in the early 1990s. Rates have remained fairly steady ever since.

So, despite what some of my friends have told me, by world standards Australia is not the nation of champion drinkers that legend suggests. According to a World Health Organization report released this year, Australia came in at number 30 of 180 countries, lagging behind Nigeria, South Korea, Uganda, the Seychelles, and many countries in Europe, including Ireland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Drinking everyone under the table with a whopping 18.22 litres of alcohol per head was the tiny Eastern European republic of Moldova. Any self-respecting Aussie beer-guzzler would be embarrassed by that.

It seems the story of the nation's drinking culture is a little more complex than the ‘this is who we are and who we've always been' narrative. Room accepts that, historically, there have been cultural links between national identity and drinking, and that overall consumption rates are not markedly different from — and, in some cases, are significantly lower than — those in previous eras. What worries him and others in the public-health field is that many of those who
are
drinking are doing so at increasingly harmful levels. He believes that the rise in binge drinking we're witnessing, particularly among young people, is not tied to some romantic notion of the larrikin Aussie beer-lover, but has been manufactured by a market that treats alcohol as if it were a commodity as benign as tea or butter. Booze is readily available on every street corner, in shopping centres and drive-through bottle shops, and in pubs and hotels at all times of the day and night. It's cheaper and more widely advertised than ever before. Australia has also moved from a beer-drinking nation to a country of wine lovers, leading to a wine glut that has seen prices plummet and problem drinking increase.

‘The politically safe line for doing something about our alcohol problems is to say, “We've got to change the drinking culture,” because saying that means it's a longer-term project than happening next week. And secondly, it becomes almost code for saying, “We'll leave the market alone,”' Room tells me. ‘It's an alternative to saying, “Why the hell do we have places that sell alcohol at five in the morning? Why do we let the supermarket chains sell alcohol so cheaply?” The fact that alcohol is available at more hours of the day than would have been true of any time after World War I in Australia — that's an issue. The way that countries find their way out of these periodic binges is through a mixture of regulatory action and changing the culture. If you think about what happened with drink-driving, it wasn't simply a matter of, “We've got to change the culture of people thinking they can get in a car after they've had a few drinks.” There was also a tough regulatory edge to it.'

After chatting to Room, I'm heartened that I can place my own drinking habits in the context of a ‘periodic binge' — a boozy blip in history, if you like. I'm sure if I'd reached adulthood in the temperance era I'd have been much more restrained. But what happens beyond the binge? For me, the answer will come in two months: I'll either go back to old habits or I won't. For Australia, a country where getting hammered is seen as a birthright, the end point is less clear.

AS JANUARY DRAWS
to a close, my productivity continues to improve. I find that there are more hours in the day when I'm not drinking. But although I'm still enjoying feeling alert and healthy, the initial glow of sobriety is starting to lose its sheen. Saying no is getting harder.

The summer sun throws up some tough moments. A 40-degree day watching my friends drink chilled sangria in the pool while I sip water. After-work drinks with colleagues in a riverside beer garden — them: a bottle of sauvignon blanc; me: organic lemonade. I feel as if I'm missing out, and find myself resenting that I can't join in. When I committed to stop drinking, I pledged I wouldn't hide; I was going to go out just as much and have just as much fun as I would if I was drinking. But after nearly a month without alcohol, I'm not sure that's possible. I'm still going out, but I've now become fixated on the fact I'm not drinking, positive that my friends are having a better experience than me. I've convinced myself anew that sobriety is boring.

Then comes the night that changes everything. Cherry Bar is a rocking little live-music venue down a grungy city alleyway, cranking out kick-arse tunes till dawn. It's a Melbourne gem, and one of my favourite places to lose myself in an indulgent swirl of music, dancing, beer, and — occasionally — questionable blokes. One of the owners is a friend: James Young, a rock 'n' roll showman who successfully lobbied the council to have the laneway renamed AC/DC Lane in homage to the iconic band's Victorian roots, and whose parties are legendary. This night, Australia Day eve, is his birthday bash. The combination of a bunch of my closest mates, great music, and a bar serving free beer and Jägermeister shots is going to be a huge challenge. For the first time, I question whether I'll be able to resist temptation.

An hour in, and my apprehension is palpable. I can't stop looking at my watch, trying to gauge whether the clock really does tick faster when it's powered by booze. On a big night, it's not unusual for my friends and me to spend five or six hours at Cherry. Surely I'll get bored without the blurring of time that alcohol creates.

As I drink my soda water and lime, watching my friends knock back free beer, I tell myself I'll give it another hour before I make my excuses and drive home. I feel horribly exposed without a drink in my hand. The more I focus on my difference, the more self-conscious I become, tucking hair behind my ears as my eyes dart around the room. Little things that I would usually be oblivious to start to grate: the way my boots stick to the tacky floor, the smell of spilled beer, and the thin line of sweat forming on my top lip.

I retreat to the toilet to have a word with myself. Being sober is not the problem; my fixating on it is. So I decide to stop. I head back out and start enjoying the music and my friends' company, rather than worrying about where the night will go.

My friend Tash's boyfriend, Andy, who affectionately calls me ‘Rockin' Jill' (a tribute to my energetic style of dancing) is concerned that without beer I will rock no more. By 10.00 p.m., his fears prove unfounded. When I hit the dance floor, something extraordinary happens — my whole body buzzes, arms and legs blissfully ignoring the voice in my head crowing, ‘You can't dance sober.' I'm no longer the social pariah; I'm once again Starkers, the party girl. Jumping around like a teenager, it suddenly seems so obvious: it's not pints of beer or Jäger shots that make a night special; it's good music, great company, feeling loved, and the sense of confidence you project when those elements align. That feeling you get when a band belts out a chorus that makes it impossible to sit still is not exclusive to being drunk. The rush you feel when a favourite singer hits a note that wraps around your heart and leaves you breathless is just as real when you're drinking water.

This is truly a revelation. Big nights out on the piss have been part of my life for so long that I couldn't imagine what a night like this would look like without alcohol. Now I know. It looks clearer and the feelings last longer. Without alcohol fraying the edges of my memory, the experience is more profound. Perhaps the sweetest moment of the night is hearing one of my oldest friends and awesome dancing partner, Amy, tell me that sober Jill is just as much fun as drunk Jill.

There are testing moments tonight too, of course. There's the young man who sidles up and asks, ‘What's your name, darl?' despite the fact we met ten minutes earlier, when he told me that I had the same name as his mother. Discovering that I'm Scottish, he becomes agitated when I can't tell him whether I'm ‘on the IRA's side or the other lot'. (I later spot him on stage shirtless, wrapped in a curtain, head-banging to a Ramones number.) Having to constantly repeat myself also becomes frustrating as the night progresses, as does the tendency for drunk people to talk way too close to my face. Is there always this much projectile spittle, and I'm usually just too boozed to notice?