High Sobriety (14 page)

When I get home that night, I'm desperately craving a drink — a pull-the-cork-out-with-my-teeth, neck-the-bottle, and-belt-out-love-songs kind of craving. I'm so tense my shoulders are up somewhere around my earlobes, and my jaw is clamped so tightly my teeth hurt. The three unopened bottles of red wine on my kitchen benchtop are so hard to ignore, they might as well be doing the can-can and cheering my name with pom poms. I can see myself taking that first sip. I can feel the muscles uncoiling, and the jangled nerves settling down. It might only take one glass to get peace.

But somehow I manage to close my ears to alcohol's siren song. Eventually, my breathing returns to a normal rhythm and my heart stops fluttering. I'm stronger than I thought.

As the week drags on, it gets harder. The days are long. We spend hours in emotionally charged union meetings, trying to figure out ways to save even one job. It punches a hole in my guts and leaves me exhausted. The stop-work staff meetings are the worst. The house committee has to try to persuade the editorial floor not to walk — as much as we all want to make a public display of our strength and unity, we don't think this is the way to do it. Instead, we try to convince our colleagues that a high-profile public campaign, highlighting how the outsourcing threatens the very future of our mastheads, is the way to go. It's a strategy that many staff members oppose. There is anger; there are tears and recriminations. It's awful. For the subs, it must be agonising. Staff are crying and hugging one another in stairwells, as if a nuclear holocaust is coming. Beneath our emotion is the grim knowledge that there's probably nothing we can do. What we love is in its death throes; it feels like we're fighting for a mercy killing.

It's hard not to succumb to a drink at the end of the day. It's really fucking hard. There are times this week when I would gladly raffle off a vital organ for one sip of beer. One evening, being around a friend as she blithely chugs back a Peroni is so teeth-grindingly excruciating that I have to use all my powers of restraint not to karate-kick the stubby from her hand and run wailing into the night, to the nearest bottle shop.

As I struggle not to cave in, I realise how much I've relied on alcohol to calm my brain after a tough day at work. It gave me a reprieve from the racing thoughts, from the doubts and fears. Not only did it soothe the anxiety, but it also allowed me to paper over my shortcomings. Without it, I'm being forced to face my biggest flaws. Sometimes I lash out without thinking. I can be negative and controlling. And I can't blame the hangover; I can't blame the beer. This is me. It's uncomfortable, but staring my weaknesses squarely in the eye is the only way to foster change. I will persevere and prevail.

In fact, alcohol has been my quick-fix medication whenever life serves up a shit sandwich. Six years ago, when I found out that my grandmother had died, I left the pub I was working in and took a bottle of vodka home with me to numb the pain. It seemed the acceptable reaction to grief. When my parents announced that they were getting a divorce, I called my ex-boyfriend and we went straight to a bar. It didn't end well.

But alcohol is a depressant. When I drink too much booze, it feels as if I am driving a bulldozer through my nervous system. It depletes levels of the ‘happy chemical', serotonin, in my brain, and raises my heart rate. The morning after, as my body tries to fight the sedative effects of a bucketload of beer, it can lead to a heightened sense of hyperactivity. Alcohol might ‘take the edge off', but the next morning those edges are sharper and cut deeper. Yet I'm not alone: the post-work glass of wine is a nationally accepted way to unwind. Earlier this year, when Australians were questioned as part of a federal government survey on national wellbeing, 40 per cent admitted to using alcohol to cope with stress. Only half found it an effective strategy. But our knowledge that it's not helpful doesn't stop us from relying on it — alcohol is still the default remedy in times of crisis. A stiff drink is the panacea for shock. I remember watching news footage of Queenslanders who had lost everything in 2010's devastating floods. As they waded through the remnants of their lives, some of them told journos, ‘What can you do but have a beer?'

At work, the mood is bleak. Despite all of our strategising and negotiating, and a public campaign that garners the support of dozens of Australia's most prominent leaders and thinkers — including former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, writers Peter Carey and John Pilger, and an array of former state premiers and Australians of the year — there's no sign that management will back down on the redundancies. No-one's saying it, but there's a palpable sense of inevitability to it all. The unspoken fear is that someday, and that day may be soon, newspapers will no longer be printed. We're ready to embrace the digital revolution and to accept a degree of rationalisation if it will help us to survive, but what will survival cost? What will become of our craft when the last of these skilled practitioners, with newspaper ink pulsing through their veins, are put out to pasture? When they walk out the door for the last time, it won't just be friends, colleagues, and decades of experience that we'll lose. The door will close on tradition.

As I brace for possible industrial action, and for the days of hard drinking in which I can't participate, I start to think about the role that alcohol has in that tradition. Journalism is a recipe for heavy drinking: the long hours, the late deadlines, and the often extraordinary events we witness. The comradeship between subs and reporters, working together to get a late-breaking story into the paper, was traditionally cemented over beers when the presses started rolling. It was no surprise to me when I learned that it was journalists at the
Bulletin
magazine who led the push against Australia's temperance movement, fighting any moves to restrict the sale of alcohol. Boozing is a journalistic institution.

In my tabloid days in Scotland, retiring to the pub when your shift was over was an almost daily occurrence. Here, ten years later, it's not so common — although there are some notable exceptions. In particular, there was the infamous 12-hour farewell lunch that a group of
Sunday Age
staff organised for our colleague Cam, who was off to spend a year in New York. What started out as a civilised pub lunch on a Tuesday afternoon ended up as a marathon drinking session. We sat down to eat at noon, and left when the pub shut its doors at midnight. And older journos talk fondly of
The Age
's Bog Bar, which convened after the first edition, in a locker room off the men's toilets. Both sexes were welcome, but membership was required.

Bonding over beers in the pub with workmates is more than just a social gathering or a chance to get plastered. It can be a way to process the trauma on which we regularly report. It also offers schooling for younger journalists, providing a convivial environment in which to learn from veteran reporters who have covered wars, disasters, world cups, and Olympics. In years past, a reporter repeatedly turning in sloppy copy might get some quiet advice from a subeditor in the pub, but now we're losing the chance for some of that interaction. Soon, the people editing our stories won't even be in the same building.

To better understand the historical role that drinking has played in journalism, I talk to some of
The Age
's longest-serving reporters. I catch up with Steve Butcher — or Butch, as he's known in the newsroom. He's our award-winning chief court reporter. He's also an old-school, pavement-pounding grafter, who started his career in 1972 at Melbourne's notorious
Truth
newspaper, a Rupert Murdoch–owned publication, which he sums up as a renegade outfit offering ‘screaming headlines, breasts, sport, and brothel ads'. Heavy drinking was the predominant pastime at
Truth
. ‘You met contacts in the pub; you met police in the pub; lawyers, judges in the pub; crooks in the pub. If you didn't drink, you weren't trusted. So if you wanted a yarn, for people to absolutely open up, they're a lot more comfortable when they're off the bench, out of the police station, away from chambers, and they get a few beers in them. There's a famous saying that a drunk man says what a sober man thinks. Loose lips provide stories.'

Butch says that the art of ‘becoming a chameleon' — blending into your contacts' environment — is the key to establishing rapport and earning trust. If that means sitting in the park and eating a sandwich, he'll do that. If the contact wants to grab a coffee or go for a walk, he'll oblige them. But more secrets are spilled over a few beers.

Oiling up sources over a liquid lunch used to be a management-sanctioned practice. Reporters were given free rein to rack up large expense bills in the pub, as long as the sessions spawned the occasional ripping yarn. ‘We'd have huge nights at the boozer, where you'd turn up to work the next day with a shocking hangover, and by about 11 o'clock someone would say, “Feel like a beer?” “Aw, yeah.” You were thinking, it's going to kill me, but you got over there and before you knew it, you were pissed again. It was fantastic,' he says, with a wide grin.

These days, expenses are more tightly monitored. Set limits on ‘meal' allowances have made boozy afternoons with sources an alien concept for many young reporters. Butch believes that the new generation of journalists are losing the ‘getting your boots dirty' skill of building contacts; we're all far more office-bound, and isolated behind our computer screens, than ever before. ‘More than half of this office I'd transplant back there if I could, for 18 months at
Truth
— the drinking and carrying on and working hard and being screamed at. They would be a lot more sharp-edged than they are. Everyone's so fit and healthy these days. Nowadays you take people for a coffee, which is boring unless you're going to put a whisky in it. There's no doubt some of them [young journalists] are missing that opportunity to get out on the booze and have a drink with a couple of lawyers or coppers. At Christmas, every police station had a party, and the clerks of court would have Christmas parties and prosecutors would have barbecues, and the drunkenness and the outrageousness was just fantastic. You'd take booze and get blind, and fights would start, but it was all in.' These days, he adds mournfully, media companies are more interested in ‘arse protection'.

Butch's good mate John ‘Sly' Silvester,
The Age
's veteran crime reporter and co-author of the
Underbelly
books, believes that newspaper journalism's historical association with heavy drinking is less to do with alcohol being a lubricant and more to do with the long, unsociable hours that came from late deadlines. ‘All of these professions that were the last to break that strong alcohol dominance were almost all shift workers, all high-pressure jobs, many of them life-and-death jobs. So the coppers, barristers who worked long hours and worked in very strange environments together; the journos; the nurses, doctors in casualty — you shared your problems together. Today, we've got counsellors; we've got different ways of dealing with stuff. In the old days, the sort of rule was: go and get pissed, talk your problems out, front up tomorrow, have a shower and a shave, and off we go.'

Drinking was common among reporters and subs working night shifts in the 1970s and 1980s, due to a combination of ‘comradeship, loneliness, and boredom' as they waited for the big story to break. ‘You'd slip over to the pub because you'd done the crossword. There was no internet — this is 8.30 at night and you're working to 11 — so you may as well go and have a few beers as just sit there. No subs went home before the first edition, so everyone was there at midnight. There was nothing for them to do except go home to an empty house. They'd spread the newspapers out, open the fridge, and get some beers out. When I started, the police club was one of the few places you could get packaged grog after ten o'clock at night, so on occasions we'd have the editor ring and say, “We've run out of booze. Can you get us some slabs?”'

Drinking on the job was so accepted Sly remembers reporters turning up to work pissed, and management complaining about the number of empty beer cans in the police-rounds car. Drink-driving was a regular and unremarkable occurrence. The close social bond between journos and police officers meant that crime reporters were often green-lighted. Earlier deadlines, fewer editions, the demise of evening newspapers, and the introduction of drink-driving laws have helped change that drinking culture, which Sly says is not a bad thing — for journos or police. ‘When you talk about the police culture, about working a million hours and then going down the police club and just sleeping on a desk, and then doing a raid, it sounds good. But look at the number of them who died when they hit poles, died in car accidents. Or there were police raids with cops who were over .05 — there were occasions when it was just a miracle people didn't get shot.

‘There were night-shift barbecues, where the patrol cars would pull up, have a barbecue, and then drive up and down the freeway to get their clicks up so it looked like they'd been working. But then, one day, there was a fatal accident involving a divvy van going through a red light after they'd been to a barbecue. They weren't drunk — they weren't even .05 — but that was the end of that. While it was fun to be there, it mightn't have been fun if I was at home and I'd just been burgled and the coppers weren't turning up because they were having sausages on the Yarra.'

But while heavy drinking was rife among law and justice reporters and their circles, both Butch and Sly tell me that it was nothing compared to the shenanigans that used to go on in the Canberra press gallery. Working in a rabbit warren of tiny offices, shrouded in a fug of cigarette smoke, political reporters lived a life of over-indulgence, hundreds of kilometres away from their newspaper's headquarters and the scrutiny of their editors. One of the original party animals was Tony Wright, who has racked up nearly 25 years in the press gallery, starting at
The Canberra Times
in 1987. He now works for
The Age
as national editor, dividing his time between Melbourne and the nation's capital. When we catch up, he looks back on his journalistic career, which began in 1970, and tells me that hard drinking was endemic throughout that decade, and remained so through the 1980s and well into the 1990s.