The mystery of Schoolies and the “wipe-out”.
I thought I knew that our liquor selling licensing laws and businesses were seen by many in the world as pretty antiquated. I suppose it might well explain much of why so many young go well over the limit once unshackled from the final years at school and seek to wipe themselves out during the cultural phenomenon known as ‘The Schoolies.’ The ‘Schoolies’ is a three week festival whereby the year twelve students celebrate their final year at school. Perhaps, the prohibition is still lingering on here in Aussi-land and it all breaks loose during Schoolies..
I don’t quite know the origins of it or what the background of this festival is but I don’t think it has anything to do with Brazilian Carnival or running of the Spanish bulls or similar foreign carnivals. I can’t remember ever having experienced those year twelve festivals. I never went through year twelve. Perhaps that explains it.
There are curious contradictions in our alcohol beverage consumption. We are not exactly shy when it comes to getting full or even totally blotto pissed. Ok, it might not be proper here in The Southern Highlands to be seen pickled but even here not too many would point a finger at you if one occasionally did a Bazza McKenzie stained glass picture show in the taxi forgetting to wind down the window. Yet, to actually get the stuff, you have to go to specially licensed outlets.
The most curious outlets are our supermarkets. Things have finally been allowed to sell grog at supermarkets but the actual selling point still needs you to go to a separate outlet. I mean you still can’t buy butter or a long neck at the same time and at the same counter. However, here in Bowral the separation of grog and groceries have taken a small step forward in our Aldi store. You can buy butter and booze at the same counter. Amazing progress! It is ONLY allowed at counter nr 5. You can’t do it at the other counters and there are signs on the trolley (lockable and deposit paying progressive innovation, Euro inspired), warning you, that only at counter 5 you can buy butter, wine, beer and prawns.
God knows how the Aldi lawyers must have been tortured through dealing with the ‘licensing police or board’. How ‘counter 5’ was given a license must rank as one of the most significant battles won with our licensing laws. To buy the stuff, one has to still be 18 and only in approved points of sale. Cash register 5 is now a licensed venue for the sale of alcohol. Hoorah!
I remember as if yesterday buying a bottle of sherry for my mum and dad at Christmas time when still in Holland at age 12 or 13. I bought is at the grocery store but could also have bought it at the fruit and veggie shop. Even today, you can buy a Heineken or a latte in the train or at the rail station or at the newsagent.
I can’t imagine what the consequences would be if you could buy a can of beer on a train between Sydney’s Central station and Parramatta. I guess all hell would break loose and you can’t open train windows anymore either. Nor are trains provided with toilets. We must have camel-like bladders.
When I queued at the nr 5 Aldi counter with my peanut-butter and a fine pinot I remarked about the oddness of only being able to buy liquor at counter nr 5. A stern looking lady behind me stated; “that’s because only people above the age of 18 are allowed to serve at this counter.” Somewhat flummoxed, I looked at all the Aldi staff and remarked that most of them would be over 18 and asked, not unreasonably I thought, what would happen if my grandson of 10 was helping me packing the pinot back into the trolley. I further asked what would happen if wine was also sold at cash register 1,2,3 or even 4? The stern lady rebuked me and said firmly;” well, that’s the law” and shut down the conversation by giving me a long and hard stare. She obviously thought I was a heathen and an alcoholic. I thought that logic wasn’t very forthcoming from her yet and decided to just buy my stuff and shut up, give it some more thought in the privacy of my car.
It is strange though. Binge drinking here, especially amongst teenager is a serious problem and many a future alcoholic must be in the making during those much accepted Schoolies. Yet, the availability of alcohol is so much more restricted.
So, why is it that in countries such as Italy or France where alcohol can be bought by anyone at almost all shops, day and night; yet, binge drinking is far less prominent? Alcohol is often consumed around the dining table with food and conversation. Getting inebriated in countries with unrestricted access is rarer and certainly much more stigmatized than in Australia were selling of alcohol is much more restricted at licensed premises and only to those above the age of 18.
Why is that so?
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
GERARD: Why is it so indeed?
One of the loveliest things about lots of South American retail outlets-including the big supermarkets-is the ability to wander in, buy some interesting looking, FRESHLY MADE sandwiches, some fruit, some salad, and a bottle of white wine, to take into the nearest park.
THERESE: I hear where you’re coming from and, largely, agree. However, add to that the huge mental inertia induced by brain dead football commentators-indeed, the whole game itself. What chance do young men have?
Why does Australia produce so few people who want to fire up their imaginations? Why did the chicken cross the road? Why did Lee Kwan Yew have to be so correct when he described Australians as being ‘The poor white trash of Asia?
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Hello Venise:
The answer might well have come from the ‘stern looking lady’ at Aldi. She stated that ‘the law is the law’ and was unwilling to actually examine the issue of why cash register 5 could sell alcohol but not the other cash registers right next to each other. I found her husband much more enlightened. He kept grinning and looked rather pleased when I questioned this peculiar cultural oddity. He must have known the response of his wife and at least saw how silly it all was. We, in Australia are creatures of unquestioning acceptance and obedience and don’t easily rebel against authority.
Accept…. by getting pissed and only then… have ‘Dutch’ courage to show bravado by giving someone a ‘king hit’, smash a bottle on the pavement, or go on a rampage yahooing away at old ladies.. .Not that those things are not done elsewhere as well but not quite to those levels seen here. But..I could be wrong.
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Gerard: But why are we such creatures of acceptance? Why are we so obedient? I tend to think one of the reasons for our malaise is we’ve never had to fight for the right to have our own country. I wish the Japanese had invaded us. We would have been forced to use our imagination and our fighting ability. And I can make out a reasonable case to suggest we would have won-without the Americans.
I know, we all make a to do about the bravery of our soldiers in wars THAT WERE NOT
OURS. Had we actually had to fight for ourselves against an invading army we might, today, be a strong and independent nation. A nation with its own head of state. A nation with something to live for. And a people who aren’t born to cringe to the royals, or people with heaps of money
What do we have today?
“”We, in Australia are creatures of unquestioning acceptance and obedience and don’t easily rebel against authority.” Exactly! We have so little purpose that there is noting for our youth to do except become illiterate, innumerate thugs addicted to footy and beer. Hardly the breeding grounds for hard work, application, and a desire to achieve something in life.
To add to our miseries, we have the people with obscene wealth, generally in the mining
industry, whose beginnings are exactly that of the hoons in society, but whose fathers struck it lucky and left them squillions. These people are held out as cult heroes, when all they are is lucky hoons.
Even our accent reveals the sort of people we are….the sound is produced through an almost closed mouth. Too lazy to open it!
Gripe finished-back to work.
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I blame Menzies.
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Crikey Gerard! If that girl in the pic is anything to go by, they certainly aren’t making schoolies like they used to! Makes me wanna go back to school…
😉
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Reminds me of the Brazilian who makes my coffee each day at work. Mind you that’s here weekend gear.
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Need another office-boy at your place of work, Algae?
😉
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Why not! 🙂
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Well my year 12 is heading off for her schoolies this weekend. With friends to Port Stephens, she won’t be drinking though, she doesn’t drink. Can’t see the point of them going off to the Gold Coast or Byron. Shows a distinct lack of imagination for mine. In fact most will give it a wide birth from her school, excitement for the bogans.
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Bogan-Training Week isn’t it? Were I a ‘schoolie’ I think I’d avoid it like the plague! But then, I just really dislike crowds these days… I hear they were quite well behaved this year. One can but hope… some of ’em might just make human beings yet!
🙂
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I only know of one going off to Bogan ville and I suspect they won’t enjoy that. Seems to be mostly private school kids that head there but I could be wrong.
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I think you may be right in that assessment Algae… there seems to be a tendency among kids from wealthier familys when they hit their ‘teens’ to admire, emulate and even amplify ‘ockerism’, which, I hasten to add, most learn to grow out of in later life, though for some it becomes a lifelong passion…
Interesting isn’t it, though, how you get ‘well-brought-up’ kids imitating the wildest kids from less lugubrious suburbs, while, perhaps in a desperate attempt to improve their lot in life, the kids from said less lugubrious suburbs often end up attempting to mimic the (supposedly) more ‘refined’ habits of the middle and upper classes…
I remember whilst studying for my Grad Dip Ed, in a discussion of the comedy of poverty and the types of people young people tend to admire, I think Fonzie from ‘Happy Days’ was mentioned… And a youthful student from the wealthier side of town actually went so far as to say, ‘I really dig poverty! Poverty’s so cool!’
I caught his eye with a fixed ‘look’ and said, ‘Must be a perspective thing…’
😉
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Let’s imagine that getting pissed rotten is a response to a meaning vacuum in a person’s life. Not so hard. I remember once when he was premier, Bob Carr said he understood why people took lots of drugs – you know, more than a taste for a bit of fun. He said it was that people, often rightly, perceived that life had little or no meaning and that there was nothing to look forward to.
I think he was, and still is, right. Imagine we have a society where the climate is comparatively mild (few freeze to death in Australia), where it’s hot and drinking is part of the way of life, where we have the dole etc so that being hard-up where life can seem pointless can be a sustained world view more or less forever, could lead a person to kill the pain of a meaningless existence with drugs and alcohol.
Couple that with an inter-generational lack of work ethic, little or no unskilled work available for the poorly educated or just plain dumb….. and what’s left ? A few more cones, a slab, teenage pregnancies and the cultural wasteland of daytime TV.
In other countries, young people have to take up arms and fight for their families and communities. I think our youth face other battles and the high rate of youth self-harm and suicide suggests to me that our side isn’t winning.
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Here another ‘schoolie’ tragedy. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-22/teen-dies-in-schoolies-fall/4387482
I think people get sucked into so much negativity, take to alcohol or drugs and without being aware become addicted. Each time they survive a drunken bout or multiple cones, they tell themselves, ‘see, I am alright, I survived’! Each time they re-use, the noose gets tighter till finally they never give up and survive till a premature death. Perhaps the answer is involuntary re-hab or institutional care.
I sometimes wonder in countries with death penalties for D&A, whether drugs are much less used
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Gerard, teenage angst is just part of the human condition! We don’t help them with our hypocritical drug laws which actually serve to promote and spread the very practice they are supposedly ‘designed’ to stamp out.
Making drugs illegal is a virtual invitation to a teenager to use them! No self-respecting teenaged rebel-without-a-clue is ever going to obey such a law; it’s too much of a challenge (and, I think, deliberately so!) to their own personal sense of autonomy… ‘You got no right telling me what I can or cannot do with my own body; now where’s that needle!’
On the other hand, if they see their older generation sitting round, stoned and nicely mellow, listening to ‘gran’pa’ music, they’d probably run a mile!
Now there might be some question of surviving a ‘drunken bout’ I’ll admit; I’ve survived enough of them myself (though the most recent was on my 45th birthday! Nary a drop since then!) But to put marijuana side by side with it in this context, as if there were some danger of not surving a ‘few cones’… Don’t you know, Gerard, that it is absolutely physically impossible to overdose on marijuana… Not one single death recorded!
Don’t you think your getting just a tad hysterical? ‘… noose gets tighter and tighter till finally then never give up and survive to a premature death…’
I have to tell you, there were so many times when I was homeless, when life seemed so empty and meaningless and I was so alienated from the rest of society, that without marijuana to take the edge of the harshness of my ‘reality’, I’m pretty sure I would have succumbed to my more self-destructive impulses and committed suicide. And I’m pretty sure both of my brothers would still be alive had marijuana been legal…
The villain of this piece isn’t ‘drugs’, Gerard; it’s the drug laws which create the black market, which in turn creates ‘pushers’, who in turn create ‘addicts’, who in turn generate obscene profits for illegal drug barons… If you must have a rant against the ‘drug problem’ at least lay the blame where it lies; not with drugs or drug use, but with our own societal and hysterical over-reaction to a problem which has never been treated properly for what it is – a medical problem; IF indeed, it is a problem at all, which I strongly think is best left for the individual to decide for himself… Were drugs legal and accessible even an addict need not live so terrible and humiliating an existence and drug-related crime, which currently accounts for more than seventy percent of police time, would all but disappear overnight! And if addicts were treated as people with a medical problem, rather than as criminals, they might be much more inclined to seek help…
🙂
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Addictions are hard to understand and treat. I am sorry if I implied that smoking cannabis cones are in the same league as alcohol and harder drugs. Even so, I have known far too many instances of mental illness that are also associated with heavy use of marijuana . Even if it is harmless physically, to me it seems that many heavy users also live for just that single habit and even though they might be happy just spending their lives doing cones, I wonder if a more substantial use of their time could not have been put to other things. But who am I to be the judge of that?
I am still somewhat suspicious that when it comes to hard drug addiction, they, the experts, often associate that with nasty parental upbringing including abuse of some kind or other,Yet, with cigarette addiction, somehow that association is never made. We know that smoking kills just as effectively.
It might also be that people simply become addicted because of the nature of the drugs and some then keep using, can’t give up till they inevitably overdose and die before their time is up.
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There’s not enough time or space here to go into a discussion of what actually causes drug addiction, Gerard, but you’re correct in assuming parental abuse and/or neglect to be prominent among them.
Do you have any idea of what causes people to ‘overdose’, Gerard? (Assuming the o/d is accidental, that is… and not a suicide attempt or a murderous ‘hot-shot’…)
Once again, most overdoses are actually another indirect side-effect of drug laws themselves; given proper access to quality-regulated drugs, the predictability of effect would itself prevent most accidental overdoses… With such access to qualtiy drugs, even addicts can live useful lives and even make major contributions to society. They are not all the ‘brain-dead’ zombies you appear to think they are…
As for what causes a teenage girl to ‘fall’ from a high-rise building… well… that, as they say, is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish!
🙂
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I suspect this tragedy didn’t have anything to do with drugs or alcohol.
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I suspect you’re quite right!
🙂
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We take Milo to the river to ‘see” (not touch) some ducks, and usually come back around the Bradman Oval. There is a brand-new fence around it now, a nicely painted picket fence.
It was hardly up, and few of the pickets were kicked down and broken; is this senseless vandalism to do with schoolies?
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We see something similar with drugs, in Australia. It’s not uncommon to have the mother of one of our babies on eight, ten, fifteen, twenty ‘cones’ of marijuana per day. We struggle to find evidence that this is bad for the fetus. We know that grass is usually smoked with tobacco, and that this is pretty bad for the fetus, but, the grass, doesn’t seem to be that bad. Babies certainly don’t withdraw from it (unlike narcotics), yet community services would like to stick their collective snouts into people’s business, identifying them as poor parents, based on their drug intake.
This, of course, doesn’t happen in Holland, according to our Dutch paediatrician. He claims that they very rarely see patients on anywhere near the amount of drugs that we have here. He believes that it’s the more liberal attitudes, and relaxed laws.
Anyhoo, as one heathen and alcoholic to another, nice work, Gerard.
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Thanks BigM. As always, a gentleman of the sky.
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If this is the gentlemen’s corner, Gez, I’d like to say what a decent front porch that bloke in your pic is wearing !
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You should see the hallway.
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Think I’d like to just set myself down on that veranda and just rock…
😉
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Yes, one of those verandas that makes bokes want to shove their faces between the pillasters and say ‘bllleeerrr’!
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Nothing bad ever happens in Holland 🙂
I hope something happens there, if not good, then neutral will do….
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Only good things there.
The previous cabinet’s plans to ditch deposits on plastic bottles cannot count on majority support in parliament, Nos television reports on Wednesday.
Coalition partner Labour says it sees great merit in the deposit system and wants to reverse the previous administration’s plans, which were drawn up together with the packaging industry and set to come into effect in 2014.
‘If you look at litter, you never see deposit bottles, just the little ones,’ Labour MP Manon Fokke said during a debate on the infrastructure and environment ministry’s budget. ‘Labour would like to expand the deposit system to small bottles as well.’
The packaging industry argues the current system of collecting bottles separately is expensive and inefficient.
Do you agree? Have your say using the comment box below.
© DutchNews.nl
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I reckon anything which can or should be recycled should have a deposit on it! Ten cents is good; twenty might be better…
🙂
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Hi Big M… ‘fraid I have to correct you slightly… in the UK grass and even hashish is usually smoked with tobacco (to make it go further when you pass it around… I wonder if they still pass ‘the Dutchy’ there these days, with what it must cost there? I’d bet agin’ it, I think!)
However, in Australia, it is rare to see marijuana adulterated in any form (unless in the form of cooking! eg as ‘cakes’ and ‘cookies’)… especially not with (eueuuughhh!) tobacco! Everyone knows tobacco is bad for your health!
😉
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