I wrote the following piece in 2015 and nothing has changed. Alcohol and gambling are still sordid bedfellows. As a collective we decry cruelty to animals but turn a blind eye to the mayhem off the track. Our young are still being preyed on by the alcohol and gambling industry but as a species we are more concerned about the horses than our own children. The Spring racing calendars in Sydney and Melbourne are squarely pitched to consumers under 25 years of age who do not have the experience, bank accounts and support to properly process over stimulation.
Drinking alcohol is not a rite of passage, it is a privilege. The Aussie attitude to alcohol is fractured and dangerous.
Drunk, broke and brain damaged is still drunk, broke and brain damaged. The Chanel frock, the Hugo Boss suit and the crystal flute of French bubbles does not hide the reality:
‘One of the great social and sporting events on the Australian calendar is the Melbourne Cup held on the first Tuesday of each November.
Owners, trainers, and jockeys from all over the world bring elite thoroughbreds to the state of Victoria in an attempt to win the $6 million, 3,200-metre event.
It is the number-one staying race in the globe’s horse-racing diary.
Melbourne comes alive during the spring carnival.
And when Melbourne lights up, this beautifully planned, free-settled city shows off its class.
I’m a born and bred Sydney sider, and my sparkling harbour city was the site of the first penal colony in Australia.
Sydney, in purely natural terms, is more beautiful than Melbourne. Sydney’s beaches, bushland, cliffs, escarpments, and harbour leaves Melbourne a distant second.
But Melbourne has two things Sydney has never had: style and class.
Sydney can be brash, arrogant, and needy. As a collective, the people of Sydney seem to have something to prove. Maybe it’s because of our grim and sordid past as a penal colony? We are like a male peacock with our tail plume fully extended, always trying to impress.
Melbourne has nothing to prove.
True class exists in the silence of knowing what you have, and Melbourne’s silence swamps Sydney’s constant noise.
Sydney is short skirts and bikinis.
Melbourne is a Chanel suit.
Sydney is a black, overpolished BMW.
Melbourne is a silver, understated Mercedes.
When Sydney puts on a horse race at Royal Randwick, it is short skirts, cocaine, and New Zealand wine.
Melbourne is Prada and Laurent Perrier.
No matter how hard we try, Sydney will never be Melbourne, and it’s time we stopped trying or stopped telling everyone how good we think we are.
Sydney is a natural beauty, and like many natural beauties, it is wracked with low self-esteem.
Anyway, back to the Melbourne Cup.
Last year I spent a week in Melbourne with my three sons and partner and attended the Melbourne Cup and Derby Day.
We had a ball.
I had not laughed so hard and so often for a long time, and I laugh a lot.
We went to some amazing restaurants and strolled through gorgeous old-world suburbs dotted with stunning homes and friendly people.
I did a lot of people-watching during the trip, both on and off the race course, and even though Melbourne does social life with more class than Sydney, there is one glaring similarity.
Public alcohol abuse.
Alcohol.
Since the first convicts landed in Australia, the rum ration set a standard for the legitimacy of alcohol abuse.
And the great, great, great grandchildren of the free settled get just as drunk as the offspring of the convicts.
Alcohol does not heed or acknowledge any form of social boundary.
And please, do not take me for a wowser or a do-gooder.
If you can garner anything from my writing, be it my opposition to control, obsession, and political correctness.
On a slight tangent, I watch my country giving away its culture and foundation to US-bred conservatism that stifles real democracy.
Our modern, democratic society stifles public debate.
Gone are the great writers and thinkers such as Orwell, Green, Conrad, Greer, and Huxley.
Yes, our own Germaine Greer.
Female Eunuch is still one of my favourite books.
If you are an Aussie with more than a 100-point IQ and have not read Greer, hang your head in shame.
Anyway, Aussies are vanilla, just like the Yanks.
Boring, but dangerous!
Vanilla!
Love the ice cream, but avoid the state of mind.
Sadly even, Australia is a creamier version of Yank vanilla. The last thing I want is to be vanilla—or even worse, an American copy.
My view on alcohol has not been formed out of vanilla but bleeding and gushing blood red.
My own blood.
And the tears and anger of my loved ones.
To guarantee the health and safety of myself, my family, and the public, I had to get sober.
Get sober or die.
I can’t drink any amount of alcohol with safety.
I wish I could have a beer and wine with my partner at dinner.
I truly do.
The social conviviality of a superbly made bottle of wine with friends is one of life’s truly great pleasures.
It is a privilege to drink responsibly, but I can’t, and after many years away from that first drink, I frankly don’t see any point in just one drink.
I want to get full as a Catholic school when I drink.
I want to get pissed as hard as I can and as fast as I can. As much as I wish to romanticise just one cold beer or cheeky chardonnay, it is not in my DNA to stop at one drink.
I want twenty-one drinks and then stop if I run out of money or fall over.
And the scary thing I am observing in my magnificent country is that a lot of my fellow citizens have the same problem.
Not all, but a lot, and the drinking patterns of our youth are becoming even hungrier.
More urgent.
Our youth are drinking to seek oblivion because the propaganda of success promotes the concept of immediacy.
The more I have and the quicker I have it, the better off I will be, but when this logic is applied to alcohol, the outcomes are catastrophic.
Thousands of Australians die each year as a direct result of alcohol abuse.
Tens of thousands of Aussies are hospitalised annually due to alcohol.
Sixty-seven percent of domestic violence is directly related to alcohol abuse.
Seventy percent of public violence is attributed to alcohol consumption.
The stats are on the move, and the demographics are occurring in a younger age bracket.
Our youth are out to enjoy life, and they equate enjoyment with drunkenness.
Getting ripped.
I loved to get ripped, but my personal example is one of complete loss.
I paid a huge price in my naïve pursuit of life avoidance through chemical abuse.
So did my family. It paid a bigger price.
I turned into a selfish, needy, cowardly, dishonest, conniving, gutter hungry, mongrel dog.
And I don’t use the label of alcoholism as an excuse. I own my failings.
I do not seek sympathy just understanding.
It is who I am, and for me, it is in my past, but on a daily basis, I own my past by not picking up that first drink.
However, there is a difference between my youth and the youth of today.
It is consistent hope.
In 1978 (when I picked up my first beer), society offered me hope.
There were plenty of self-fulfilling jobs and a clear path to success.
The economy was strong and not underpinned by a false, residential housing market.
Tertiary education was free.
Bank managers were part of the community.
The affordability rate for a home was four times your income.
Now, the affordability rate is fifteen times your income.
In the 1980s, you could pay off a home by the time you were forty and not live like a rough sleeper in order to do it.
Now, mortgages cycle over a life of forty to forty-five years. Young couples are going into massive debt just to own a home.
Tertiary loans strangle graduates well into their late twenties.
Government pensions are not a guarantee, and legislated superannuation is a fee trap.
Our world is lurching from one crisis to another.
Social media has turned privacy and individuality into a public commodity, thereby removing its currency.
And finally, corporate conservatism is dumbing down the skill base in order to maintain share price, so real wages have been stagnant for over a decade.
Life is tough, and it does not offer youth the future bonuses it did when I hit twenty.
So our young live for today.
Our young drink for today, because tomorrow may never come.
And you cannot blame them.
So they eat, dance, drink, and copulate with abandon.
They have been told and shown that is the way to celebrate life.
Yet, as I have learned, the celebration of life is in the silent gap between the stimulus and response.
Freedom of choice.
Alcohol dilutes freedom of choice and fills the silence with noise.
Pollution.
And yes, there is great joy in the distortion of reality.
It can be a helluva of a ride and a big part of me says to go for it!
Enjoy the ride!
A smaller part of me is jealous, because it is a lot of fun.
However, the wiser part of me says it’s time to put the issue on open forum.
Public debate.
I believe it is the largest social problem in Australia and walks hand-in-hand with credit card debt.
Our youth watch their elders getting shit-faced, so the behaviour is validated.
Our youth are bombarded by images of beautiful women on beautiful boats sipping chilled vodka.
In magazines.
TV.
Social media celebrates the rite of passage of public, drunken degradation.
And if it remained just a rite of passage, alcohol abuse may be acceptable, but it is not.
It becomes a lifetime scourge that deforms, stunts, and corrupts.
It stops people growing.
It mires communities into drama and violence, and it keeps society on the back foot.
And guess what?
I would love to see every young man and woman in Australia have a whole year alcohol-free.
As adults.
To see what it is like to live without alcohol in your system.
To experientially give every mature Aussie a social freedom of choice.
To feel your nerves tingling and tangling without anxiety.
To feel all your senses come alive with joy.
Seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and touching.
Amplified, not dulled.
To experience the beauty and wonder of sober sex.
To look into your loved one’s eyes and really see the person behind the iris.
Really see.
I could assure you that if the whole of adult Australia had a year off the piss, the use of depressants, sleeping tablets, pain killers, and Viagra would drop by well over fifty percent.
Brothels would go out of business.
The economy would fire, and the greedy corporates would rot and reassess their behaviour.
Work absenteeism would fall.
Savings would increase.
Credit card debt would decrease.
Male violence directed at women and children would be isolated to the true sociopaths.
Road fatalities would fall.
Our emergency rooms in hospitals would become serviceable.
There would be so much more smiling on our streets.
Guess what? The use of illegal drugs would dry up dramatically—alcohol is the gateway to much of our drug abuse and antisocial behaviours.
People would see through the con job they are being sold as democracy.
Really see.
We are not so brave and not so free.
Really, really see the lie we are living.
But no …
My dream of an Aussie utopia is a mere pipe dream because alcohol is legal and socially acceptable. The alcohol lobby groups are capable of bringing down governments, and our politicians are self -seeking, gutless robots.
And yes, people can drink sensibly.
Just like some people can have a line of coke or a bong or spliv or even a shot of hammer.
Yes, folks!
Some people can use illegal drugs socially.
Some.
Only some.
But all the young girls I observed spewing on roads and gutters and trains and flower gardens at the Melbourne Cup were looking beautiful and happy a few hours earlier as they sipped their first vodka cooler.
From my experience, illegal drugs do not make you as violently ill as booze does.
They can.
Some do.
Some kill.
But not in the regularity and mayhem that alcohol does.
And the old adage that booze is legal does not carry credence nor creditability. Gun ownership is also legal in the United States, yet alcohol and guns are the major reasons for premature male death.
Legality does not equate to justice.
