Message in a bottle

By TIM WATKIN

Tradition is wrapped around Christmas like a bow around a present, and the tradition means millions of presents exchanged, tens of thousands of families coming together and thousands of work parties. And at the centre of most of these traditions New Zealanders are likely to raise a glass. 'Tis the season to have a drink. Or a few.

It will surprise no one that alcohol is our most commonly used drug. Last year we drank about 430 million litres of beer, wine and spirits. Liquor retailers, pubs, bars and clubs don't separate alcohol sales from non-alcoholic drinks and food but we spent $2226 million with them last year, on top of the $645 million we spent on beer and wine in supermarkets.

Consumption peaks at Christmas but we are not merely seasonal tipplers. Alcohol is both part of our daily lives and our cultural identity.

Whether associated with the joy of friendship shared, love found, the embarrassment of an indiscretion, a source of argument or a consolation in loss, alcohol will have been there at many of the most significant events of our personal lives - from baptism (perhaps even conception), through 21sts, weddings, business deals, anniversaries, to funerals.

Alcohol has long been a constant in life, competing with death and taxes for certainty.

As it has been a marker in our private lives, so it has been a marker in the life of New Zealand. A 1974 royal commission on the sale of liquor insightfully concluded " ... the history of our liquor laws more than anything else represents a microcosm of New Zealand social history as a whole".

In other words, look at alcohol and you'll see the rough - sometimes blurred - outline of our society.

European explorers, followed by whalers and sealers, first brought alcohol to New Zealand in the 18th century. As temperance campaigner the Rev W.J. Williams said, "The white man and the whisky bottle came to New Zealand together."

Before European arrival, Maori were one of a very few cultures who had not developed alcoholic drink. It took a while for them to develop a taste; liquor was initially called waipiro (stinking water) or wai kaha (strong water).

But it was soon pouring in with the pioneers and has since soaked into our way of life as if into a sponge.

Yet, as ubiquitous as it is, New Zealanders have always had an uneasy, ambivalent relationship with alcohol. Dr Mike MacAvoy, the chief executive of Alac, defines it as a love/hate relationship - "enjoyable for many, but ruining the lives of others".

Since both the first brewery and temperance society were set up in Kororareka (Russell) in 1835, we have tended towards an all-or-nothing approach - drink until you fall over or don't drink at all. Alcohol was a "faithful companion" or responsible for "nine-tenths of the evils of society", according to 19th-century attitudes.

Where continental Europe had a tradition of drinking with food and at home, the settlers arriving here in the mid-1800s, mostly working-class British, brought a binge-drinking pub culture. We're still wrestling with this legacy today.

On arrival, they took that tradition further; early settler society was awash with drink. They drank mostly locally brewed spirits, as beer and wine had to be shipped in from overseas and were expensive; brandy and rum were most popular.

It's at best a rough estimate, but historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg believes that in the 1840s Pakeha men each drank around 45 litres of licit spirits a year. That had halved by the 1860s and halved again by the 1890s.

Such heavy drinking took its toll, and in Auckland in 1847 there was one conviction for drunkenness for every eight people. It wasn't until 1870 that drunkenness comprised fewer than half of all convictions nationally.

Still, not all alcohol was drunk in order to get drunk. It was safer than many water supplies in early settlements and was used as a medicine and source of nutrients as well.

Women and Maori drank little but then, as historian Jock Phillips, editor of the online Encyclopaedia of New Zealand and author of A Man's Country, explains, New Zealand was a rural, frontier society where men heavily outnumbered women. In far-flung settlements and work camps, pubs were open seven days a week. There was often little for men to do with their disposable income except put it on the bar.

"Drinking alcohol became a central definition of the male community and the male role in life," Phillips says.

However, outside the nation's pubs - their windows frosted by law so as not to corrupt passersby - a counter movement was sprouting in the fertile ground of many immigrants' deep-seated puritanism. Temperance societies took off in the 1870s and for a few decades prohibition was one of the most debated topics in the colony.

In Parliament, division between the Liberal Party's wet and dry factions almost toppled the Government in 1893. Between 1880 and 1914 no fewer than 44 new statutes relating to liquor were passed. Prohibition helped to put moral issues on the agenda, encouraging early moves towards a welfare state.

One reform act, in 1881, banned publicans from offering concerts or dancing girls, ensuring bars were, according to Auckland University Anthropology professor Dr Julie Park, "more like locker rooms than places you'd want to go for rest and recreation". Seen as a deterrent to drinking by the prohibitionists, such legislation only reinforced a drinking-for-the-sake-of-drinking culture.

That culture made no room for women, Park adds, "because alcohol was associated with men, with the public world, and prostitutes, and was not something for respectable women".

Paradoxically, while fears about the demon drink disenfranchised women from some spheres of society, it helped win them the vote in 1893. The temperance movement became a political training ground for suffragettes.

Prohibitionists were convinced that only the will of the people could overcome the "mouldy old institutions" aligned with the brewing industry. Believing women would support them, they made a radical push for universal suffrage.

The movement reached the apex of its powers early last century when New Zealand three times came within an inch of going dry. The first attempts in 1911 and 1914 just failed, and in 1919 prohibition won on election night, only to be overturned by the votes of servicemen overseas.

It was the beginning of the decline of the temperance movement. Social trends were tilting against it. The flood of alcohol available, while still significant, had reduced to a river. A tipple had become more acceptable among the middle-class. We might even have developed a more sophisticated, European-style attitude to alcohol had it not been for the two world wars.

Phillips says war re-intensified our national drinking problem. New Zealand's boy soldiers were little prepared for the horrors of either war. Leave from the front-lines became an opportunity to drink heavily and forget quickly what they had seen and done.

During World War I, 6 o'clock closing was introduced as a temporary measure, partly to stop bored soldiers at training camps heading into town and causing mayhem. It lasted until 1967 and created what historian Keith Sinclair called "the most barbarous drinking custom in the world" - the 6 o'clock swill.

After finishing work at 5pm, men - it was still almost all men - had an hour to drink as much as they could before they headed home.

"It forced people into a certain pattern of drinking," says MacAvoy, "a pattern that sees every opportunity to drink as an opportunity to get pissed, and ... that's proven extraordinarily resistant to change".

The tradition was maintained despite a referendum at every election offering change. Gordon McLauchlan, columnist and author of The Story of Beer, recalls a conversation with beer baron Sir Henry Kelleher which suggested a reason for its longevity.

"They might have got drunk," Kelleher said, "but at least they went home".

Many women feared they would never see their husbands if the pubs stayed open, and McLauchlan suspects many men shared their concern. He recalls his heavy-drinking father confessing after the 1949 referendum that he had voted for 6 o'clock closing.

"I was surprised, but then I realised he didn't actually trust himself."

The brewers and publicans weren't of a mind to complain. They sold plenty, without incurring the costs of keeping the pub open each evening.



The tradition of bingeing in big beer barns and rugby clubs, with equally big carparks, continued until 1967, when closing time was extended until 10pm and, McLauchlan says, "the non-boozers retreated in good order". It signalled a social upheaval in which "the whole culture of New Zealand has changed".

By 1967 the baby-boomers were voting - a new generation, dominated by middle-class city-dwellers, who had been on OE, seen the European model of moderation and wine with food and had a new, liberal attitude to drink.

Phillips describes "an extraordinary revolution" with two main features. First, alcohol has become de-gendered. Second, what we drink has been transformed.

Park led a series of studies on alcohol and women in the 80s. Until the 60s women seldom drank outside the home for respectability's sake, and even then tended to stick to a sherry at Christmas. But as young women moved into the workforce they also moved into the pub, making them a new target demographic for brewers.

It's no coincidence that the way we drink and what we drink has changed since women entered the pub scene. Wine and spirits sales have grown at the expense of beer, and while the rise of the ladette culture in the past decade has seen some women binge-drinking, New Zealanders overall are drinking less.

Alcohol and food are more linked in people's minds thanks to trend changes from dining out to host responsibility. More specialty beers are available, and come in 330 ml bottles rather than the big, brown 700 ml variety.

We seem, to some degree, to have shaken off the binge-drinking habit inherited from Britain. Between 1970 and 2000, our total consumption fell 2.1 per cent while Britain's increased by 58 per cent. That fall is largely the result of a drop in beer consumption of 31 per cent, but has been compensated by a 202 per cent increase in wine consumption.

Pioneering vintner Nick Nobilo says that's a huge turnaround since World War II, when his father was stigmatised for making wine. He says the wine industry deserves credit for much of the initial "thrust" towards moderation in the 60s. Now, winemakers are feted as significant contributors to our export earnings and tourism industry. Some even promote wine as a health product.

Alac's MacAvoy says the breweries realised they had achieved market saturation by the 70s, and so have changed their marketing from selling quantity to selling a good-time "experience".

Jason Wells, an account director at advertising agency Young & Rubicam, who has held DB accounts including the Tui Yeah Right campaign, says selling beer is all about getting together and having a laugh. "It's a symbol of being able to unwind and have a good time."

If only it ended there. While there is a trend to moderate drinking it's impossible to ignore alcohol's ongoing social devastation, through the road toll, domestic violence and ill-health. Figures from the Ministry of Health's national alcohol strategy show that while excise tax on alcohol raises about $440 million a year, the social costs of excess drinking are between $1.5 and $2.4 billion.

The images of alcohol we see most often are still the extremes - the good times of beer commercials or the shocking drink-driving ads. Ambivalence remains.

And with our new liberalism comes new problems.

"The fallout of that has been that alcohol is more readily available and well within the reach of young people who have more mobility and disposable income," says MacAvoy.

More than half the alcohol underage drinkers consume comes directly from their parents, he adds. Teenagers today, mimicking their parents - and, unknowingly, the pioneers of 150 years ago - still see binge-drinking as a badge of adulthood and a cure for boredom.

As Nobilo says, "We've come a long way." Equally, as MacAvoy says, "We've got a long way to go."

* On Monday: Part 2 - Alcohol and health