On Gin Lane

It is nowadays hard to keep one’s mind off alcohol. Of course, I don’t mean in the private sense, that as one grows older, midday and 5 p.m. seem each day to arrive a little later on the clock; nothing whatever to do with one’s own harmless and soothing glass of red with dinner. No. I mean alcohol in its civic sense, impinging on law enforcement, health and public corruption.

How can alcohol ever be far from one’s thoughts, when each day’s news reminds us of the childish political manoeuvres in Canberra over “alcopops”? Or (in Melbourne) how the Brumby government allows the liquor trade to turn part of our city streets into a creditable image of Hogarth’s “Gin Lane’: hordes of foul-mouthed, abusive, vomiting louts of both sexes to replicate for us a noisome stew that would have shamed eighteenth-century London?

Liquor is one of life’s eternal paradoxes, offering to humans both exaltation and degradation. It is a “Catch-22” of the greatest antiquity: back in biblical times, Noah was disgraced for his naked cavorting when he was drunk; Lot, while heavily in wine, impregnated his own daughters. Yet both were very far indeed from being “bad men” in any general sense. Don’t waste a moment searching the Bible for ethical guidance about the grog; in one place it thunders that “wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging”, while in another it temptingly suggests the merit of “a little wine for thy stomach’s sake”.

There is no quick fix for the evil aspects of alcohol, as the United States discovered during its bizarre thirteen-year (1920–33) attempt at Prohibition. Boozing got worse; crime and violence flourished; ineradicable corruption permeated public administration. Prohibition perfectly bore out the sagacity of General de Gaulle: “Some problems a wise man will not attempt to solve. He will learn to live with them.”

Alcohol-wise (as we say) Australia made an unpromising start. When Captain Phillip arrived, he brought for his Marines a three-year supply of “spirits of almost undrinkable foulness”. (Note “almost”.) Very soon, as other ships began to touch Sydney, most of Phillip’s civil and military officers were deeply and improperly into private trading in alcohol. (“Rum Corps” was a name well bestowed.)

So began, and so today continues, that symbiosis between government and the liquor trade: governments need the revenues from excise and other liquor taxes; the liquor trade needs governments to support grog-trading laws which help the industry to pour the maximum of its product down customers’ throats, while extracting the maximum money from their pockets. A symmetrical symbiosis indeed. But where does the broader public interest lie? And who is looking after it?

My boyhood home was not bigotedly teetotal. There was always a tablespoonful of “port-wine” to liven up a jelly or a trifle, and a bottle of brandy “for emergencies”. (I can’t recall even one emergency serious enough for the cork to be drawn.) But the poverty-pall of the Great Depression ensured that Dad was lucky to score four bottles of beer a year, each one for some special occasion.

Even if we had been rich, alcoholic indulgence would have remained minimal. Vast tracts of Melbourne suburbs, as well as many country areas, rested content under the morality of churchgoing Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, with their energetic “temperance” movement and “total abstinence” pledges. Every Sunday morning the wowser parsons shouted from their pulpits for hellfire to fall upon the liquor trade.

The sheer ferocity of some of these puritanical killjoys made them figures of ridicule. Nevertheless, the press reported their tirades; the strong Non-Conformist element in commerce had a substantial grip on business advertising budgets—a fact not lost upon newspaper managements; was it only the super-cynical who asked why the Reverend Irving Benson of Wesley Church was for so long retained by Sir Keith Murdoch as a weekly columnist for the Melbourne Herald?

Almost as a personification of the zeitgeist, Sir John Jungwirth sat for some thirty years at the head of the Victorian public service. An able and incorruptible administrator, he was both ardent Methodist and implacable Rechabite. It took an uncommonly sharp brewer, distiller or publican to get ahead of the thinking that went on under Sir John’s well-brushed black bowler hat.

Above all, there was not a state politician who could disguise his pallour whenever the “church vote” was reported to be restless.

With grass-roots religion nowadays emitting only a faint whisper of its past strong voice, and the pulpits no longer a bridle on politicians, the liquor trade is off its chain. Do not underestimate its ruthless cynicism. The “alcopops” which now debauch juvenile taste trace back to the 1950s, when Australia’s largest distillers engaged a Melbourne firm of public relations consultants to advise on “getting kids onto the hard stuff”, and “picking their drinks from the top shelf”. (How well I remember the phrases!)

The trade is perfectly well aware of the road deaths from drunk driving, the nightly saturnalia of our streets, with their bashings and knifings and pools of shoe-filling vomit; the perils of sober people who would like to use public transport, the ruined health of tens of thousands and the cries of shattered families. For “the trade” these are all mere background to the tune of merrily ringing cash registers: “Shhh! Don’t interrupt such lovely music; don’t say a word.”

The sovereignty of silence about abuse traces back to the 1930s, when the breweries made the novel appointment of an executive to direct their public relations. They chose “Ginger” Burke, a journalist with the Melbourne Herald. He had fought in the First World War, and swung a keen baton as a special constable in the Victorian police strike of 1923. After six months in his new job, nothing whatever had appeared from his office; management sought an explanation, and they got one: “That’s OK,” said Ginger. “When you’ve got a bad case, the only sensible policy is to shut up and say nothing.”

A special task force of the Victoria Police is currently investigating compliance (that is to say, non-compliance) by the trade with the present liquor laws. An interim report by the inspector in charge reveals widespread abuse. Hotel-keepers (“venue proprietors”) are blatant in their breaches, for example, in continuing to serve patrons who are already drunk. Even after being given a police caution, as the rules provide, they revert immediately to serving anyone who can still stand more or less upright, and who has the price of a fresh pot in his hand.

Penalties are (in theory) quite severe: an offending publican can be struck off and barred from holding a licence; premises may lose their permit to serve liquor. I stress that there may be instances of which I am unaware, but I cannot recall a single recent instance of a proprietor or a premises being thus dealt with.

In Victoria, tame-cat tribunals oversee both grog and gambling. Neither has been noted for over-officious interventions such as might discommode the operations of their respective industries. (A recent questionable decision by the gaming body has produced—no doubt with cruel and overstated cynicism—a suggested new name for the gaming tribunal: “The James Packer Comfort Crew”.) I shall not be holding my breath in expectation of any great changes in Victoria’s discipline of drinking.

Unless, perhaps, we can revive Methodism. Imagine that!