High Sobriety (15 page)

He has a theory about the drinking and loutish behaviour. The hard-nosed journos, predominantly men, were overcompensating for the fact that they spent their days in offices typing, which was traditionally considered women's work. They were the ‘Wild West of the clerical class', he says. ‘The editor would say, “We're off to the pub for a counter meal,” you'd knock back seven or eight schooners, and then you'd come back and fall asleep on your typewriter. That was just what you did. It was the social glue.'

But the wild lifestyle took its toll on many mates. There were more than a few hard drinkers who ended up unable to function. Some went on to develop alcoholic dementia. ‘A lot of the so-called legendary journos made their names among their peers just as much for their behaviour at the bar, or for their ability to hold alcohol or still file with one hand over their eyes. But back then nobody thought of it as “problems with alcohol”. It just meant they could drink more than anybody else, or that they were wilder. But yeah, marriages fell apart, lives fell apart.'

Sly had told me something similar. The war stories from the halcyon days don't tell the whole tale. ‘More often than not, if you drill down to the end of the story, the person died prematurely or became very lonely. There was a series of working alcoholics. There were people who lost their way in that culture.'

Sly believes that the hard-drinking reputation of crime reporters, and the police officers they befriended, was part of a myth constructed to help maintain the boys'-club mentality in a politically incorrect era. It was the kind of macho culture that, in the late 1970s, saw one female reporter sent home from work for wearing trousers. ‘It was that idea that girlies couldn't possibly look at a dead body. You can't have a girl go down the pub and drink ten pots. Of course, some of the best crime reporters in the world have been female.'

When feminism took hold, many female reporters embraced the drinking culture as a way of being taken seriously in a man's world. In Canberra, journalists and politicians would mingle at the non-members bar in Old Parliament House, or have long lunches together at the National Press Club or a handful of favoured restaurants. Boozy Friday sessions became so sacrosanct that a tacit agreement was reached between journalists and politicians: on Friday afternoons, no press conferences would be held, nor media releases issued. Things often got out of hand in these drinking sessions. In an incident still talked about today, two of Australia's oldest and most venerated political reporters charged at each other ‘like a pair of old bulls' during a heated argument in the Press Club bar, their bellies bouncing off each other upon impact. ‘This was accepted behaviour,' Tony says.

Graphix, an upstairs late-night bar in Kingston, was also a popular haunt with pollies and journos, particularly on budget night. It didn't start jumping till after 2.00 a.m. ‘Blood was spilled, scores were settled, and marriages went upside down,' said Tony. But he remembers it most for being the venue where, in the late 1980s, he and some colleagues invented the sport of ‘ottering'. ‘One night, a few of us worked out that if we put our hands behind our backs and stood at the top of the stairs and fell forward, you would slide on your bellies flat to the boards and get to the bottom. And if you had your head up, you wouldn't get too much carpet rash. Politicians would actually come along to watch it because a lot of people in the press gallery got into it. It made planking look pretty bloody ordinary.'

But it was a perilous pursuit. On the same night that an ABC television reporter fractured her wrist while attempting the advanced ‘double otter' with a colleague, a
Sydney Morning Herald
photographer broke his leg in a solo feat. Their efforts made such an impact on the then federal treasurer, Peter Costello, that he shared them with the nation during a live National Press Club speech following the delivery of his 1998 budget.

Hazardous drinking games aside, the relationships formed under the influence of alcohol had professional benefits for both politicians and reporters. Tony says that secrets were passed to inebriated journalists prior to Paul Keating's leadership challenge on Bob Hawke. ‘Keating's people made sure that journalists were extremely well briefed at Graphix, very late at night, about what Keating was up to and what a dreadful bastard Hawke was. That was all because of lubrication. Notes would be taken in the toilets and so forth. Somebody confided one night that Peter Walsh, who was the finance minister, had named Hawke “Old Jellyback”. Suddenly it started appearing in newspapers. A lot of unsourced stories from that period came out of those drinking holes very, very late at night, quite often with the sun glinting off Lake Burley Griffin when you were driving home.'

I know, from speaking to friends and colleagues in the Canberra press gallery, that drinking has not gone out of fashion in the nation's capital. Journalists still mix with politicians, and budget night remains one of the booziest events in the political calendar. But there's no doubt that things have changed. Thirty years ago, newspapers provided their senior political reporters with large houses, where lavish parties would be thrown and journalists, diplomats, public servants, and politicians would get drunk together. The perks are gone these days, and there are few ‘lifers' left. Reporters might spend a year or two as a Canberra correspondent, using it as a stepping stone before returning to a more senior role at head office. The chummy relationship between reporters and parliamentarians has changed, too — politicians are more closely media-managed than ever before.

For Tony, it was Paul Keating's decision to privatise the catering at Parliament House that sparked the beginning of the end of the entente cordiale. The new contractors deemed the non-members bar unprofitable, closing it down. It was later turned into an aerobics centre. ‘It changed a lot of things because suddenly there was no central social outlet where politicians and staffers and journos could gather in a totally informal way, pass secrets back and forth, and drink a lot and get a bit indiscreet. Things moved out of Parliament House, and a couple of other restaurants around the place became meeting places, but they were much more formal and much more open, and people could see who was talking to whom. The new Parliament House also allowed politicians to disappear into their big offices, protected by receptionists, so it really grew apart, the political class from the journalist class.'

The Prime Minister still holds annual Christmas drinks at the Lodge for the media, but Tony says they're sedate, stage-managed affairs. Not like the parties thrown by Bob Hawke, who, although he didn't drink for the 12 years he was in parliament, would invite his favourite journos upstairs to play pool and drink till dawn. John Howard's shindigs were also a high point for Tony. ‘One year, I was stumbling around and I went over to get a drink, but the waiter said, “Sorry, the drinks are off now. It's over. Mr Howard says the drinks go off at this time.” So I went back and said, “John, this is fucking outrageous — you've turned the taps off.” He said, “What are you talking about, Tony? I know nothing about that.” And I said, “Well, you better go and talk to your caterers, because we've just been told we can't have any more drinks.” So off he went to talk to them, and next minute the grog's back on, and everyone's yahooing and carrying on. Then I said, “There's a lot of young journos here who have never seen the Lodge” — because they have a big marquee out the back for the party — “I think you should do a guided tour.” He said, “Well, Tony, that's a good idea.” So off we go, and we started this conga line weaving through the Lodge and carrying on, and we ended up at the grand piano playing Christmas tunes and singing off-key, and it went on quite late into the night.'

At another of Howard's Christmas parties, a well-known press-gallery photographer stripped down to his jocks and jumped into the pool. Howard was amused; his wife, Janette, wasn't. At the following year's party, there was a cover stretched over the pool.

As Tony points out, it's hard to imagine Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott playing host to such high jinks without it turning into a controversy. For reporters, the demands of the 24-hour news cycle, and of increasingly discerning media consumers who expect stories to be packaged with interactive graphics, pictures, and video, leave little time for long sessions in the pub.

But it doesn't stop me from feeling like I'm letting the team down by not joining in. Clearly, journalists are big drinkers — it's just who we are and who we've always been. I'm betraying the traditions of my profession by opting out.

Tony disagrees. ‘I don't think it's so exclusive to journalism as people imagine, this drinking culture, because you'd go to other trades and alcohol was … alcohol was Australia.'

He may be right. When I first met Chris Raine in 2010, it was a few days after the Quills, the Melbourne Press Club's annual awards for Victorian journalism — a night notorious as the biggest media piss-up of the year. As we were having coffee in the
Age
cafe, Butch walked past. We swapped stories about the wild night we'd had, and which journo had disgraced themselves the most. I recounted how I was so drunk at the afterparty that I tottered over on my red satin stilettos and took a tumble ankle-deep into a fish pond. We laughed, and as Butch walked off I pointed out to Chris that this was exactly why I couldn't accept his challenge of three months without alcohol. ‘It's too hard in this culture,' I said. ‘Journalists are such big drinkers.' He smiled knowingly. He'd heard it before. Lawyers, nurses, advertising executives, tradesmen, flight attendants, architects — they all insist that their industry has a reputation for hard drinking.

In the end, I don't have to worry about surviving a strike sober. We avoid industrial action and have a huge public rally instead. It's heartening to see so many Melburnians turn out to support the newspaper that has such cultural significance to their city. We manage to hang on to some of our subs, but many of them go. The farewells are heart-wrenching. And at every leaving do organised by management, no soft drinks are offered. Our professional stereotype prevails.

June

I BUMP INTO
my editor at the traffic lights outside the
Age
building, on the way to work. She has something to tell me, and apparently it can't wait. ‘I was thinking last night about your situation. Maybe you're one of those people who should just never drink.'

I'm a bit taken aback — but there's more. ‘You know, there are some people who can't drink because they don't know when to stop. I'm not saying that's you, but maybe if you can't drink moderately, you just shouldn't drink at all.'

Given that she encouraged all of her staff to sign up for a month off the booze for Febfast and lasted three days before succumbing to a post-work glass of wine, I feel this is a tad rich. But the underlying message stays with me. First Kerri-Anne, now my editor: people think that I have a drinking problem. Yet would an alcoholic just be able to stop? Would they hit a wall of stress and get around it without opening a bottle? Nevertheless, it gets me pondering the nature of addiction. How many people slide from binge drinking to all-out dependency? Is it an easy transition?

To explore this further, I arrange to meet one of my favourite contacts. Professor Jon Currie is the head of addiction medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital. He was also the chair of the National Health and Medical Research Council committee that revised Australia's alcohol guidelines in 2009 — the committee that, after exhaustive scientific review, concluded that if we want to reduce our lifetime risk of disease, accident, and injury, we should have, on average, no more than two standard drinks a day, and no more than four in any one sitting. Jon, who now only drinks according to these guidelines, insists that consuming any more will sharply increase the risk of ill health.

We meet in the hospital cafeteria. When he arrives late because his previous appointment ran over time, he's flustered and full of apologies. But I don't mind; over my years of covering the health beat, he's been enormously helpful, and always generous with his time. I tell him about my year without booze, and ask about alcohol dependency — and whether a regular binge drinker who loves to party can end up with a full-blown drinking problem. He tells me that addiction is a complex risk-equation: exposure plus genetics plus environment. It means that if you have a family history of dependency and move in circles where heavy drinking or drug use is rife, you could be in trouble; between 6 and 10 per cent of the population falls into that category. And while your socioeconomic status may play a part in your access to treatment, addiction is not a respecter of social class. ‘You can get as dependent on champagne or good red wine as you can on Jim Beam,' he says, telling me that many of his patients are young professionals.

From what he sees in terms of numbers walking through the doors at St Vincent's, it seems that there are far more people in trouble than ever before. And they're getting younger: Jon says many addiction clinics are starting to treat children aged 13 or 14 (the youngest child he's seen was ten). Their drug of choice is almost always alcohol. ‘It's very small compared with the adult population, but our worry is that what we used to see at 25, in terms of patients with alcohol problems, we're now seeing at 18 to 20. Kids in their last three years of high school are particularly worrying. The levels of drinking at that 15-, 16-year-old age are really quite a worry in schools now, and it seems to be escalating.'