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.