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Unique and Deplorable: Regulating Drinking in Victoria

Michael Harden November 01

What happens when hardline policies collide with the best of Melbourne subculture – our bars, our laneways and our most iconic music venues? In the September edition of Meanjin, Michael Harden’s charts a history of deplorable drinking in Victoria, from the six o'clock swill to the events that led to the temporary closure of the Tote last year. A brief extract is below and you can read the full essay on our editions page.



In 1960 Judge Archibald Fraser, Chair of Victoria’s Licensing Court, reported back from an arduous overseas trip sampling the hotels, restaurants, bars and cafés of Europe and North America in order to observe how Victorian licensing laws and drinking habits compared. Apparently, they didn’t. In his report, Judge Fraser wrote: ‘Drinking habits in Australia are, from my observations in the places visited, unique. They are unique in the sense that they are deplorable.’

Victoria has something of a history of deplorable drinking habits or, at least, a history of people being deplored by the drinking habits of their fellow Victorians. This is the state, after all, where the temperance movement had its most fervent supporters. Melbourne was ground zero for Australia’s first temperance rallies and where an 1885 petition calling for a reduction in the number of licensed premises, signed by 45,000 Victorian women (a quarter of the female population), was presented to Parliament.

It’s also the state that, in more recent times, has done its fair share of hand-wringing about streets apparently awash with alcohol-fuelled violence and watched as its government-appointed licensing authority flailed about in a seemingly ill-planned response, often creating new problems (inadvertently undermining the viability of Melbourne’s live music scene) and overlooking potential solutions (staggering licence fee increases for the small intimate venues that are the antithesis of the stabbing/punching/glassing big city clubs) in the process.

There’s nothing new about governments mucking things up when it comes to regulating alcohol. Booze is a hard beast to pin down in legislative terms. The law is more familiar with the black and white approach of determining when and how people drink alcohol, even though to explore the issue of why they drink as much as they do might lead to more effective solutions. And, as study after study from Canberra to Washington to Glasgow has found, for the law to regulate the consumption of alcohol in any effective manner, restrictions on its availability would have to be so severe that, according to a 1984 Scottish report, ‘No elected government could contemplate the proposition.’

It hasn’t stopped them trying though. The deplorable drinking habits to which Judge Fraser was referring on his return from his junket in the Northern Hemisphere were mostly directed towards the notorious six o’clock swill, the practice described by the Sun News Pictorial in the late 1950s as a ‘daily demonstration of piggery … that no other country in the world can match’. The spectacle of hoards of men mobbing the public bars of hotels every night after work for an hour-long speed-drinking session, downing as many beers as possible before time was called and they all staggered out onto the streets to head home, three sheets to the wind, was undoubtedly unique. It’s also a great example of how wrong governments trying to deal with the availability and consumption of alcohol can get it, despite the best and most virtuous of intentions.


 

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