High Sobriety (22 page)

As I've discovered at 35, it's hard to walk a different path from your friends. At 19, it's got to be near impossible. Alcohol experts say that, to change the culture, we need to show young people that not drinking is just as valued by society as getting drunk. The rise of social media has made that more challenging. In a study conducted by Brad Ridout from the University of Sydney, boozy Facebook profiles were found to be creating a social contagion effect, normalising binge drinking and encouraging more young people to get pissed. The study of 163 university students aged 17 to 24 found that those who saw alcohol as a strong part of their online identity were likely to drink more to keep up their party-animal image. They were also more likely to have blackouts, get into fights, or have sexual encounters they later regretted. A recent British study found that the average Facebook user is drunk or drinking in 76 per cent of pictures they post on the site. I suspect that if I did an analysis of my own Facebook page, I'd reach a similar conclusion.

In research conducted by Dr Nicholas Carah from the University of Queensland, which used young
Hello Sunday Morning
participants as subjects, bloggers described Facebook as an ‘archive for wild nights out', where the dominant portrayal of drinking is glorified, and the drinking itself is made to seem excessive. One described the status-update cycle on Facebook as ‘Who's going out?' in the evening, and in the morning, ‘I'm so hung-over — why did I go out?' Rather than posting pictures of academic achievements, young people talk up their drunken antics, and are praised for it. The sicker you feel the next morning, the more kudos you get.

When blogger Andrew joined
Hello Sunday Morning
, he went through his Facebook photos and deleted all the ones in which he was drunk or had a drink in his hand. ‘I ended up deleting, like, two-thirds of my photos … People take their cameras round because … that's the way they know what happened last night.'

Beth says that she has no plans to stop drinking. She's by no means a massive drinker, in comparison to some her age: on an average night out, she'll have six or seven drinks. Unlike some of her friends, she hasn't mastered the ‘strat vom' (strategic vomit), where you stick your fingers down your throat and make yourself sick so that you can keep drinking; when she drinks too much, that's the end of her night. She admits that when her mum told her about me still getting drunk on the weekends, she was surprised. But after thinking about it for a while, it didn't seem so weird. ‘I was like, well, I enjoy drinking and I enjoy getting drunk, so I don't actually know what would happen to me to make me stop doing it.'

The alcohol campaigns warning young people about the perils of binge drinking miss the mark with these girls — they don't relate to images of kids being arrested or beaten up. What might sway them is an advert highlighting the health hazards of too much booze: they know that it's bad for their livers, but that's where their knowledge ends. The kind of statistics that Craig Sinclair from the Cancer Council highlighted, about the risk of breast cancer, might be enough to get their attention. ‘You're not quite aware what you're doing to your body when you're drinking in excess, but with smoking, the advertising about that, and the stigma, was so strong that I knew I didn't want to be a smoker,' Beth says. ‘But I didn't feel the same thing for alcohol. It's such an inherent part of Australian culture. If there were adverts that really showed you what you're actually doing to yourself when you're drinking, you might stop and think. That's probably what smoking was like 50 years ago.'

After I leave Beth and her friends, I think about their experiences and conclude they're not dissimilar to mine at that age. They're probably not drinking any more than I did, and I must confess to being a fan of the old ‘strat vom' in my early twenties, although we didn't have cool shorthand for it back then — it was just a self-induced drunken spew. The big difference is how much more insight they have into the drinking culture they inhabit. They're aware that using booze as a social crutch is not a great long-term strategy. They know that it's probably bad for their health. Yet they still drink regularly. Their peers and their community expect it of them; and when they try to opt out, they feel shunned. If these switched-on young women think that it's more acceptable to binge drink than it is to drink moderately or to abstain, then this isn't just a youth problem. They live in a community that exalts drinking as the cornerstone of all social interaction: their bosses tell them that not having Friday knock-off drinks is un-Australian; their parents buy them booze and teach them that a glass of wine is how to unwind after a tough day; and their music festivals are sponsored by alcohol companies, and headlined by multi-millionaires who sing songs about getting wasted. Can we really expect them to drink moderately in this environment?

As I reach seven months of sobriety, this point is underscored tragically when Amy Winehouse is found dead in her London flat. The divinely talented 27-year-old singer, who battled addiction and penned a defiant hit about resisting rehab, literally drank herself to an early grave — vodka bottles were found next to her body. Within hours, wailing fans were getting pissed outside her home, sobbing and belting out her songs. They created a shrine using, along with flowers and cards, beer cans, wine glasses, and bottles of vodka and gin. It seems that even if it kills you, alcohol's cool.

August

LAST NIGHT, FOR
the first time since I stopped drinking, I didn't feel like the odd one out. At a reunion dinner with friends from my
Age
traineeship of five years ago, the non-drinkers were equal in numbers to the drinkers. Of the eight of us, two were pregnant, one doesn't drink, and then there was me, the social animal of our year — who, on our induction trip to Sydney, was one of the last to go to bed, after persuading everyone to have one more for the road and join me in a rendition of ‘Flower of Scotland' — now sensible and sober. Three of them have since left
The Age
, and one works in our Canberra bureau, so we rarely get to catch up as a group.

It was a fun evening, with lively conversation, fond memories, and, for once, a mocktail list that was both interesting and reasonably priced. But as we spilled out onto the street around 11 o'clock, I was reminded of why I rarely venture into the city after 9.00 p.m. Young guys clutching cans of bourbon and Coke were hollering to their mates and jumping into the road, trying to hail cabs; girls in skimpy dresses smoked cigarettes and screamed out incoherently against the backdrop of an ambulance siren. We flagged down a cab and adopted a women-and-children-first policy, sending our pregnant friends home before the rest of the group.

As we drove out of the city, it seemed that Melbourne was one heaving mass of drunkenness. The staff that work in these late-night venues must have balls of steel.

I used to be one of them — I spent more than ten years working in bars. From my first job at 18, in Dad's golf club, to an Irish pub in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a homely boozer in Melbourne, bar work taught me patience, diplomacy, and people skills. And it toughened me up. I learned pretty quickly how to escape the advances of drunk businessmen and how to defuse a fight before it started. Copping verbal abuse, wiping up spew, and being hit on by cavemen was just part of the job.

For the most part, I loved it. And I was good at it. At the Jekyll & Hyde in Edinburgh's New Town — a horror-themed pub, where the toilets were hidden behind a false bookcase and staff donned lab coats to sell cocktail-filled test tubes, before performing the Time Warp en masse at last orders — I learned to pour three pints at once, ensuring that a queue of thirsty punters were served speedily enough to avoid a riot. It was a good laugh. I made lifelong friends and met some fascinating customers.

Bar work even led to my first big break in journalism. Among the regulars at Champagne Charlies, a small, city-centre Edinburgh bar popular with suits, was a group of guys from Scotland's then highest-selling newspaper,
The Daily Record.
I was a first-year journalism student who used to practice her shorthand on cigarette breaks. I hassled the boys about work experience every time they came into the pub. I had something they wanted: beer. They had something I wanted: access to a national newspaper. It seemed a fair swap. I got my work-experience placement and, just over a year after finishing my degree, via stints at a local paper and a press agency, these pub regulars became my colleagues when I landed a job at the
Record
.

But bar work is for the young and nimble. Being on your feet for nine hours and knocking off at 3.00 a.m. loses its appeal when your bones are creaking and you're ready for a nana nap by ten o'clock. Your threshold for tolerating drunken idiots also drops. But more than anything, it gets harder to keep up with the lifestyle. Boozy lock-ins were common in six of the seven pubs and clubs I worked in. Even if you worked a day shift, you'd knock off, sit on the other side of the bar with your workmates, and pour your wages back into the till.

There's a collegial atmosphere when you're part of an unburdened workforce of students and backpackers in their twenties. On busy shifts, bar work can feel like trench warfare: it's you and your mates behind the barricades, against the snarling hordes on the other side. Nothing speeds up the bonding process quite like an inebriated halfwit trying to feel up one of your new friends as she clears tables. When I was a backpacker in Christchurch, my workmates at The Bog Irish Bar became my surrogate family. We worked hard and played harder. It was one of the happiest times of my life, although much of it is a blur. Looking back at travel diaries, it seems that I drank for more than 300 of the 365 days I spent in New Zealand. My travelling buddy Sharon, who I met working at Jekyll & Hyde, got a job in an office and wasn't far behind me, but I think working in a pub definitely meant that I drank more than she did.

I'm not surprised to learn that a 2007 study out of Britain's Office for National Statistics found that bar staff in England and Wales were twice as likely to die from alcohol-related problems as the general population. Researchers speculated that the high risk levels might be related to social pressure to drink at work, lack of supervision, separation from family members, and the recruitment of people who were already heavy drinkers. I think about the bars I've worked in, where young backpackers are thousands of kilometres away from their parents, and colleagues share the night's horror stories over knock-off drinks. It's not difficult to see how an unhealthy pattern might develop. Full-time bar work makes it easy to fall into a habit of daily drinking.

It has been five years since I pulled beers when I started my only bar job in Melbourne. I'd been struggling to get full-time work in journalism since moving from Scotland, and, even though I was freelancing for
The Age
, it wasn't enough to pay the rent — so I found myself returning to the only other trade I knew. At 29, I wasn't overly enthused by the prospect of getting back behind the bar. I was too old to hack the pace in nightclubs and late-night bars, so I found a pub that kept civilised hours. The Rose Hotel in Fitzroy is an old-school, no-frills pub, where the walls are adorned with pictures of footy legends, and the locals keep their personalised stubby holders behind the bar. The decor, which looks like it's hardly changed since the pub was opened in 1861, has a cosy, lounge-room feel. Just two streets back from the Brunswick Street party precinct, this homely boozer is a rarity in a suburb that's become so gentrified, the blue-collar workers who built it have been largely priced out of the area. There's trivia on Monday, and a meat-tray raffle every Friday night; it's a country pub in the middle of the inner city.

The alcohol and hospitality industries cop a lot of flak for fuelling Australia's binge-drinking problem, but it's not all aircraft hangar–sized nightclubs and 24-hour bargain-basement bottle shops. There are lots of places like The Rose, where people feel connected to their neighbours. In country towns, communities are built around the pub, with social events, sports clubs, and fundraisers often organised through the local watering hole. In the city, it's less common; bars can be cold and uninviting, their trade and staff transient. That's why I fell in love with The Rose. It's a pub with a soul. Each year they stage a street party to raise funds for the local primary school. The bar's also part of a pub cricket league, involving 14 Fitzroy establishments that play off before an end-of-season ‘Super Sunday' event, which attracts hundreds of people and brings in cash for local charities.

My first shift was a baptism of fire: a wake for the former owner, a formidable woman who had run the pub, with her husband, for 13 years, before selling up in 2001, when my former boss, Tony, and his wife, George, took over. Hundreds of people had gone to the funeral, far more than the small chapel could cater for. Many came back to The Rose afterwards, to continue the celebration of their former publican's life. They raised their glasses to her good humour and generosity, and played the Hawthorn club song again and again for a woman who lived for footy and had become a substitute mother to many of the locals. Laconic men with callused hands and sun-blasted skin shed tears openly. Then there was laughter, as they remembered her inability to suffer fools. I realised very quickly that this was more than a pub — it was a community. For me, thousands of kilometres away from my family, and after four years without a stable job to which to anchor myself, working at The Rose was the first time Melbourne felt like home.