New research from the University of Otago suggests that New Zealand teens are drinking less than they did twenty years ago. While binge drinking is still prevalent, alcohol is no longer seen by young people as a mandatory part of their social lives. Perhaps older New Zealanders like myself can learn something from the youth. A sober conversation about alcohol and its place in Aotearoa society is long overdue.
Drinking men
I’m a drinker. I come from a long line of drinkers. My father’s death was intricately entangled with alcohol. He was a high-functioning alcoholic who eventually stopped functioning. He was of a generation whose identity rested on their ability to ‘hold their piss’. Another family member has been a non-functioning alcoholic for almost as long as I can remember. It’s a minor miracle he’s still alive.
The twenty years I spent in London revolved around pubs, bars, and restaurants. Drinking was not only my hobby but also, for many years, my career. I was a cocktail bartender and bar manager. I was a wine and beer buyer for restaurant groups. My writing career started with wine lists and cocktail menus. My first published pieces were for wine magazines like Noble Rot. I did, and still do, love the stuff.
But moving back to New Zealand has made me examine my relationship with alcohol, as well as the relationship between alcohol and Aotearoa as a bicultural society.
A third space
In the UK, the pub is at the heart of most communities. It serves as a third space, a place that is neither home nor work, where people of all ages and social classes come together and mix more or less as equals. One night, while I was working in a pub in East London, I was idly grumbling about the absence of a tipping culture. An old man at the bar pointed out that to tip a bartender would be to betray the egalitarian nature of British pubs. A customer could buy you a drink, as he might buy a pint for a friend, but a cash tip would be belittling.
During my travels I found similar if not identical spaces across Europe: in the bars of the Netherlands and Belgium, the beerhalls of Germany, the trattoria of Italy, the cafes and ‘débit de boisson’ of France.
Europeans arriving in New Zealand since colonial times have imported simulacrums of these spaces, but they have always been inferior copies. We just don’t ‘do’ pubs very well, certainly outside of the main centres.
In the medium-sized town where I live, my local pub is a soulless affair. Owned by a fast-growing brewery chain, it sits in a quaint Methodist church that once held a craft store selling knick-knacks to tourists. It’s expensive, $15 dollars for a ‘pint’ (spoiler alert: not a pint). There is very little mixing. People arrive in their discreet groups and family units then drift out again, without brushing up against anyone they didn’t already know. Almost everyone there looks like they work for a medium-sized ag-tech firm. Even the kids.
Alcohol is not pulling its weight. If it’s not the commercial lifeblood and ostensive raison d’etre of the pubs and bars serving a community’s social cohesion, then what good does it actually do?
The wider social costs are well-documented: crime, domestic abuse, sexual assault, street violence, mental and physical ill-health. Alcohol plays a part in feeding all of these and more.
And it’s Māori who are the worst affected.
Stinking water
Alcohol in te reo Māori is waipiro: stinking water, a strong linguistic clue as to Māori attitudes to alcohol in the early days of European settlement. In this Waiata composed by Te Kooti we see what contemporaries thought of the colonists’ poison of choice.
Koia te riri pokanoa,
Ka kai ki te waipiro ka kai ki te whakama ki te mau-a-hara,
Me whakarere atu ena mahi kino e hika ma.
Hence this needless strife.
Which comes from the consumption of liquor,
from shame from hatred.
Therefore, I say, abandon these evil ways, my friends
Māori were one of the few cultures in the world that didn’t develop an alcoholic drink of some kind. Alcohol was as foreign to pre-colonial Māori as muskets and smallpox. And every bit as deadly.
In the 19th and 20th century many Māori, particularly those opposed to the steady creep of European hegemony, campaigned against the drinking of alcohol.
In 1884 Ngāti Maniapoto persuaded the government to declare the entire Rohe Pōtae (King Country) a dry area. The prophets Te Kooti and Te Whiti both discouraged their followers from consuming strong liquor.
The spread of alcohol use among Māori was accelerated during the New Zealand Wars in the 1860s. Kupapa (Māori fighting on the side of the colonial government) were given rum as part of their ration during the invasion of the Waikato, helping to normalise and spread the consumption of alcohol among the Māori population.
In his excellent book Ghost South Road, Ian Hamilton points out that colonial forces marching from Auckland into the Waikato were notorious among Māori and settlers alike for their drunken destructiveness. They arbitrarily destroyed Māori kāinga as well as European settlements such as Raglan. ‘Enemy’ women were abducted and assaulted. This alcohol-fuelled lawlessness surely increased the anxiety Māori felt about the Pakeha invading their land and ratcheted up the pressure to abandon their homes and move south into the relative safety of the King Country.
Alcohol wasn’t simply a by-product of colonialism– it was a tool actively used by colonists to weaken and terrify Māori resistance.
The Great South Road
The start of a long journey
The impact of alcohol use on Māori today is clear. According to Alcohol Health Watch:
- Māori men have a death rate from alcohol which is more than twice that of non-Māori.
- Māori are more likely to be apprehended by police for an offence that involves alcohol.
- Māori are more likely to experience harmful effects on areas such as financial position, work, study or employment, injuries and legal problems as a result of their drinking compared with other New Zealanders.
- Māori women suffer more adverse effects as a result of other people’s drinking than any other sub-group by ethnicity and gender.
Despite changing generational attitudes, the rise of coffee culture, and the increasing awareness of the social and medical harm, alcohol remains a huge problem for many individuals, communities, and for the country as a whole.
Relatively well-off Pakeha like myself who have believed that European drinking habits and drinking establishments can be imported and assimilated into the culture, need to take a good hard look at ourselves.
If we as a nation are serious about honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, then our attitudes towards alcohol need to come under serious scrutiny.
Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash
