I''ll Drink to That

Drug and Alcohol Review, 1988

The place of alcohol in Australian life in the years since the Second World War is considered. Patterns of and trends in use are described, along with the magnitude and distribution of alcohol-related problems, the history of alcohol controls, the growth of treatment and other responses to alcohol problems and the nature of societal concerns about drinking.

Addiction, 2005

Gender, Place & Culture, 2015

Gender is a key lens for interpreting meanings and practices of drinking. In response to the overwhelming amount of social and medical alcohol studies that focus on what extent people conform to norms of healthy drinking, this article extends critical feminist geographical engagement with assemblage thinking to explore how the technologies of biopower covertly materialised as bodily habits may be preserved and challenged. We suggest an embodied engagement with alcohol to help think through the gendered practices and spatial imaginaries of rural drinking life. Our account draws on interviews with women of different cohort generations with Anglo-Celtic ancestry living in a country town in Victoria, Australia. Three vignettes based around emergent themes of maternal, domicile and socialising bodies help shed light on the contradictory ways gender is lived through the dynamics of alcohol consumption which help constitute everyday life in a country town.

Media International Australia, 2016

Public health literature proposes that the Australian alcohol industry–funded organisation DrinkWise is a Social Aspects Public Relations Organisation (SAPRO) that favours industry over public interests by deploying ineffective alcohol harm reduction strategies. This research addresses a gap in the critical public relations literature by investigating these claims through an examination of DrinkWise’s source media content. Content and rhetorical framing analysis revealed how the organisation framed the alcohol issue, as well as identifying the messages and message audiences of their media releases. Results supported extant research suggesting that DrinkWise is insulating the alcohol industry against evidence-based public health harm reduction strategies, by engaging in agenda building through industry-friendly framing of the alcohol issue, and dissemination of information subsidies to elites and policy-makers. We discuss the conclusions through a lens of hegemony and develop an argu...

Social History/Histoire Sociale, 1994

2017

Since the repeal of the state liquor regulations in Australia that prevented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from having legal access to alcohol, numerous strategies have attempted to minimise the harms associated with problem drinking. This book tells the story of how governments, their advisers and Indigenous people themselves believed they could minimise such harms by changing the way people drank: how they tried to 'civilise' the drinking act itself. In a sense, this endeavour started in 1789 when Governor Arthur Phillip first taught the captured Aboriginal man Bennelong to raise his wine glass in a toast; however, it was two centuries before the notion found its way into policy in the form of government-endorsed liquor outlets serving Indigenous people in or near remote communities. In the 1970s and 1980s, canteens and clubs were licensed to serve rations of beer in remote Indigenous communities, and government agencies made it possible for Indigenous organisations to purchase public hotels whose sales were affecting their communities. These two approaches to the distribution of alcohol were originally driven by the belief that drinking on regulated premises over which Indigenous people had some control would help to inculcate moderate drinking patterns, and help to prevent damaging binge drinking and sly grog sales. This idea, that people would be able to 'learn to drink' in a conducive setting, forms a narrative thread throughout this book.

Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

The Victorians liked to drink and they lived in a society geared towards alcohol consumption. In the great industrial cities of Britain, there was almost no escaping the beer houses; gin palaces; refreshment rooms; restaurants; theatres; music halls; vaults; dram shops; oyster bars; private clubs and public houses that served a dizzying array of alcoholic drinks to suit people from all walks of life. Drinking went on from dawn till dusk and on into the wee small hours so we know that many people liked to drink. Yet we know very little about their reasons for doing so because the issue of drunkenness has cast a long shadow over the majority of alcohol consumers. In reframing drink and the Victorians, this book looks deeper than the problems of alcohol, to investigate the reasons why people drank it in the first place. It picks up where Brian Harrison's study of the Victorian temperance movement ended and surveys the period from 1869, when the state began to take more control of alcohol regulation and licensing, up until 1914 when wartime regulations were imposed on alcohol sale and consumption. 1 Harrison's study ended just at the point when the expansion and consolidation of the alcohol industry gave consumers more choice than ever in the types of alcoholic drinks they consumed and in the types of drinking places they frequented. Alcohol became a mass-produced commodity available to an expanding consumer market and this led to heightened political, moral and medical concerns about the problems associated with drinking and drunkenness across towns and cities in Britain.

Despite a higher proportion of *Indigenous Australians abstaining from alcohol, 17% still continue to consume alcohol at high-risk levels-reportedly one and a half times higher than that of the national average. This is a serious public health concern, due to evidence of a high incidence of alcohol-related harm existing within Indigenous communities; as well as alcohol being linked to the social determinants attributing to their poor health. Through evaluation of the harms associated with high-risk levels of alcohol use among Indigenous Australians, and strategies used to combat this public health concern, this portfolio demonstrates how the long history of Indigenous social disadvantage, combined with high levels of alcohol use are a socially determined consequence of, and contribution to, the current health and social gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Journal of Australian Studies, 2010

This article discusses the escalating concern about female drunkenness in early-twentieth century Brisbane. It argues that the tabloid Truth in particular created an image of the problem drinker as a teenage girl. In the process, the Truth constructed these adolescent girls or young women as if they were devoid of any personal responsibility for their drinking. It transferred the blame for this onto traditional adversaries of prevailing social values: the illicit lover, knowing woman and racial other. This denial of female agency negated the challenge that girls' drinking might otherwise have posed to the gender order by reinforcing belief in girls' presumed passivity. It also disguised the fact that young women were willingly deciding to drink as part of their membership in subcultures in which social drinking played a significant role.