High Sobriety (21 page)

I arrange to catch up with Beth and her friends Beck, who's also 19, and Emily, 20. We meet in a city beer garden, but surprisingly, even though I'm paying, they all order soft drinks. One has to work later, one is driving (as a P-plater, she can't have any alcohol in her system), and the third just doesn't feel like it. Well, these are hardly the boozed-up delinquents hooked on cheap grog the headlines would have us believe.

They tell me that they all started drinking in Year Nine, around the age of 15. One of their friends had parents who were relaxed about drinking, so they'd tell their folks they were going for a sleepover at her house and get smashed. By Year Ten, their own parents started buying them alcohol to take to parties. They didn't like the taste of beer, so pre-mixed spirits, or alcopops, were their favoured drinks. The right brand was important: Vodka Cruisers were cool; UDLs were for bogans. Beth would tell her parents that the six-pack would be shared with two friends. It wasn't. I realise that I'm about to learn more about my boss's daughter than my boss may know herself. I start to wonder if this was such a good idea.

Now that they're all of legal age, the girls say they still drink more at home than they do in clubs and bars. ‘Very rarely do we go out and buy all our drinks out. We might have just a shot or one drink when you're at a club, but we'll pre-drink until we're at a comfortable level of drunkenness. Most young people of our age will avoid buying drinks out. It's so expensive,' Beth says.

Have they ever considered going out and not drinking? Emily, the only one in the group with a long-term boyfriend, says that she doesn't really drink to get drunk anymore, but she'll often have a drink just to have something in her hand. Beck says that she's been out a couple of times when she's the only one not drinking, and it wasn't fun. ‘When you're sober, you just hate drunk people — they're really annoying. You'll be dancing or whatever and you just think, this is really boring. Why do we do this?'

I ask Beth how life would change if she didn't drink. ‘Oh my God! I can't even imagine it. I'm very impressed that you're taking a year out,' she says, wide-eyed and smiling. ‘One friend once said to us that when you're sober, you realise that going to a club is literally just all your friends standing in a circle bopping, and that's, like, all you're doing, but when you're drunk it's hilarious and it's the best time ever.' We both laugh. I don't think I've ever heard a more succinct description of my teenage years.

Beth continues, ‘I definitely feel the pressure to drink when I go out. Like, not necessarily that people are making me drink, but I would feel like I wasn't going to have fun if I didn't drink. I've never gone out without drinking. I'm sure I could do it, but I have this mental thing where I think I'm not going to have fun. Drinking gives you a lot of confidence, and even if you're, like, making a massive fool of yourself, you don't feel like you are.'

Here's a witty, incredibly smart young woman who's more of a conversationalist than I could ever have hoped to be at that age, who thinks she's less than herself without alcohol. If she's already all of those things, what does she get from drinking?

‘I think there's a certain thing where it's kind of cool to be drunk. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be really embarrassing and everyone's going to be laughing at you. It's a cool element. They're the drunk person — “Oh, you were hilarious last night” — that kind of thing. There's an aspect of entertaining each other. You can get a reputation for being that big drinker who's always doing hilarious things when they're drunk, and that's sort of a positive in a way — until it's taken too far and you end up vomiting all over yourself, and then you're not so cool anymore.'

I can relate to that. I've struggled a bit with my identity since I stopped drinking. Who am I if not the loud girl at the party forcing everyone up to dance and making a goon of herself? People do gravitate towards the lively, drunk characters at parties, although admittedly sometimes they're laughing at them, not with them. But I've come to realise most of the things I don't do now that I might have when I was drunk would see me risking injury, unplanned pregnancy, vomiting, or a combination of all the above. The other fun stuff — dancing, meeting new people, singing off-key, cracking lame jokes, and behaving like a child with attention-deficit disorder — are still well within my remit of skills sober.

When they left school and started university, any doubts the girls may have had about drinking being the accepted and expected way of socialising were erased. The boozing began on day one of O (Orientation) Week. Beth talks about the University of Melbourne's annual induction camp for arts students as if it were a bacchanalian orgy. ‘The basic aim of that camp is to be drunk the entire time, and have sex with as many people as you can while drunk. So we'd be in these huge dorms with bunks, and people would just be having sex, and everyone would be trashed. They have competitions to make you vomit. It's sort of sending the message that the only way you're going to meet people at uni is if you get smashed with them. You have to drink, otherwise you don't have a chance.'

The weekend camp is organised by former students, ensuring that the binge-drinking baton is passed down through the years. Drinking games are part of that tradition, with students competing in beer-sculling races, or encouraged to have ‘one before ten' or ‘ten before one': to down one drink before ten in the morning, when they're usually painfully hung-over, or have ten drinks before 1.00 p.m. All drinkers work in teams, and points are given for each completed task. Girls get extra points for taking their tops off. ‘Everyone lost all their inhibitions. In the normal circumstance, people wouldn't, like, just take off all their clothes, but everyone suddenly felt comfortable to be completely naked. I didn't do it, but I sort of felt like I would because everyone's doing it and it seems fun,' Beth says. ‘For a lot of people, that is an extremely attractive prospect — of just getting completely smashed the whole weekend. I think I was drunk from, like, the Friday night to Sunday afternoon. At night there's parties, and they do all sorts of competitions and dress-up stuff, and then in the day everyone just lies on the ground feeling disgusting. There's lots of throwing up, people passing out. It's very full-on.'

Beck, who goes to Monash University, says that things are similar there. ‘They have a week during the semester called Green Week, which is supposed to be a celebration of beer. I'll be walking to and from lectures, and people are doing these obstacle courses involving drinking on the lawns. It looks really strange because other people are totally sober, just going to their classes, and there's this pile of people vomiting or doing stupid things.'

It sounds extreme, but students playing drinking games is hardly a new phenomenon. Green Week began at Monash in 1987. The following year, the student newspaper advertised the upcoming festivities with the line, ‘If you can remember last year, you weren't really there.' The event promised ‘five days of fun, frivolity, fornication and extremely high levels of intoxication', with free beer every day and sculling competitions.

Professor Rob Moodie, who was a student in the 1970s at the University of Melbourne, where he is now chair of global health at the Nossal Institute, told me that, when he was 21, he and fellow undergraduates competed for the ‘Bachelor of Imbibition'. This marathon pub crawl around 24 watering holes saw contestants earn qualifications for various drinks — a seven-ounce was a diploma, a pot was a master's, and a glass of top-shelf was a PhD — in pursuit of the ultimate prize, the bachelor, awarded for knocking back a drink in every pub. The worse for wear would also finish with the title ‘BND' after their name — bloody near dead.

When young adults leave home and are thrust into a world of freedom and new friends, which usually coincides with turning 18 and their first legal drink, they're going to party hard. But while in Rob Moodie's day, drinking games were informal affairs thrown together by groups of friends, these days pubs, university clubs, and student unions are running organised drinking events. Some pubs target the captains of university sports clubs, offering cheap drinks to get them to bring teams to the venue. Sex is also used to sell booze. To advertise student events, Pugg Mahones, an Irish bar in Carlton, near the University of Melbourne, had on its website earlier this year an image of a young woman in her bra, spreadeagled against some beer kegs, while another woman, wearing a bra and jeans pushed down to reveal her underwear, straddled and kissed her. The strapline read, ‘Because uni isn't all about study.' Beth says that those kind of promotions aren't uncommon. The arts camp advertised its weekend of fun with posters from
American Pie
, a teen movie about a group of high-school students who pledge to lose their virginity before graduation.

One concept that teenagers become familiar with from an early age is getting drunk to pick up. Annual end-of-year schoolies events, where students go wild at week-long parties in beach resorts across Australia, have become famous for alcohol-fuelled sexual exploits. A survey of 500 students at schoolies week on the Gold Coast in 2010 found that 60 per cent had more than ten drinks a night, and ‘hooked up' (had intercourse or performed sexual acts) with a stranger at least once during the week. A quarter of boys and 4 per cent of girls also had sex with multiple partners. When the 17- to 19-year-olds were asked why they did it, many said it was the social norm: ‘That's what you do when you're at schoolies.'

Having had a boyfriend for more than two years, Emily says that she found events such as schoolies and O Week a challenge. ‘It wasn't just that I didn't want to sleep around, or even the kissing. It's that culture of, everyone's getting a bit loose, we're at a concert, and all of my friends around me are turning around and making out with the guys they're dancing with, whereas I didn't want a guy to touch me, I was pushing them away. Going to clubs, it's fun to drink, and I still enjoy the dancing, but the whole interaction with the opposite sex is fuelled by this sex thing coming into it. I don't always feel comfortable going out because guys do touch you and grind up against you. You can't just casually chat with guys because a lot of the time their end goal is to ask you if you want to come back to their house.'

Beth agrees that alcohol is a ‘huge part' of interacting with the opposite sex, and says that it helps her to talk to guys. At high-school parties, ‘hooking up' — by which they mean kissing — was often the sole point of the evening, but now it's less important. None of them have hooked up with a new guy sober. ‘If you're drunk and you're really confident and you're talking to everyone and you're being loud, I think guys find that attractive — that confidence, although it's artificial. If you're the centre of attention, guys like that,' Beth says.

The pressure to drink doesn't just come from their schooling experiences. Both Beth and Emily have worked in office jobs in the finance industry, where they saw an entrenched binge-drinking culture, a pattern of behaviour every Friday night, which was often led by colleagues much older than them. Emily was taunted for months after she left a boozy office Christmas party early. ‘I'm still confident in my choices, and I try to not be affected by people teasing me about not drinking with them, but it still affects me. My cool factor is apparently based on how late I can stay out and how much I drink,' she says.

For Beth, it was eye-opening. ‘I was really surprised that the [office] drinking culture is just as strong as uni drinking culture. And it didn't really matter what age you were — everyone wanted to do it. It highlighted that it's everybody, it's Australia. The media concentrates on youth, but everyone else is doing it too.'

The statistics back Beth's theory up. Baby boomers may shake their heads at the binge-drinking habits of their kids and grandkids, but it may well be that young people have inherited unhealthy drinking patterns from older generations. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey show that older Australians are much more likely to drink every day than their children are. Ten per cent of people in their fifties drink daily, rising to 13 per cent of those in their sixties, and 15 per cent of people aged 70 or older. That compares to just 2 per cent of 20-somethings, about 1 per cent of teenagers, and an average of 8 per cent across all age groups. And while young people are drinking to excess in greater numbers than older people, their elders are not far behind. The survey found that 21 per cent of those in their fifties regularly drink in a way that puts them at risk of long-term health problems, compared to 27 per cent of 20-somethings and 32 per cent of 18- to 19-year-olds.

While all the focus is on binge drinking among younger generations, alcohol experts say that there are huge problems ahead for their parents and grandparents. As Professor Steve Allsop, director of the National Drug Research Institute, told me during my ‘Alcohol Timebomb' series: ‘Even if nothing changes, we're going to have a substantial increase over the next 20 years of older people who are drinking at levels that cause harm to themselves and potentially to others. And it may be that things get worse rather than better because if the baby boomers take their drinking habits into older age, that's going to be a real problem.'

Drinking may be an integral part of Beth's world, but, despite the pub crawls and the wasted weekends, she's realised that getting pissed is not what makes her popular. ‘Most of the good friends I've made at uni, I've made in lectures and tutes because when you're drunk the whole time, you don't really make friends. You get to know people, but you don't learn about each other — you're just drunk together. People don't realise how dependent they become on alcohol. I sometimes take a step back and think, oh my God, I'm so dependent, I've got to try and go out without drinking that much.'