Anna Krien - Short Black 6 Booze Territory

SHORT BLACKS are gems of recent Australian writing brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

SHORT BLACKS

1 Richard Flanagan The Australian Disease:
On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom

2 Karen Hitchcock Fat City

3 Noel Pearson The War of the Worlds

4 Helen Garner Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

5 John Birmingham
The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

6 Anna Krien Booze Territory

7 David Malouf The One Day

8 Simon Leys Prosper: A voyage at sea

9 Robert Manne
Julian Assange: The cypherpunk revolutionary

10 Les Murray Killing the Black Dog

11 Robyn Davidson No Fixed Address

12 Galarrwuy Yunupingu
Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

3739 Langridge Street

Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright Anna Krien 2011

Anna Krien asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

First published in the Monthly, September 2011.
This edition published 2015.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry :

Krien, Anna, author. Booze territory / Anna Krien.

9781863957687 (paperback) 9781925203523 (ebook)

Short blacks ; no.6. Binge drinkingNorthern Territory.

Drinking of alcoholic beveragesNorthern Territory.

Indigenous peoplesAlcohol useNorthern Territory.

362.292089915

Cover and text design by Peter Long.

ANNA KRIEN is the author of the award- winning Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmanias Forests and the Quarterly Essay Us and Them.

O n a Tuesday morning, I make my way to the Gap View Hotel for a drinking session starting at 10 am. Im told this is one of Alice Springs three notorious animal bars but, when I get there, the hotel is all shut up. The car park is empty except for a car with an Aboriginal couple sitting inside. I tap on their window and wave my hand at the closed pub. Not open?

2 pm, comes the answer.

Oh, I nod. Im about to get back into my car when I realise the woman is talking about the bottle shop.

You mean the bottle shop isnt open till two? I ask. She nods. You waiting around for that? She nods again. Isnt there a bar here? Thats when I discover a section of the pub is open. The woman directs me out of the car park, back along the main road and down the side of the hotel. A small concrete corridor with no roof doglegs until it is hidden from street view, where a toothless security guard greets me. He raises an eyebrow, then runs a metal detector across my clothes and confiscates my pens.

Someones been stabbed with a pen before, he says. You can grab em when you leave, luv.

Behind me an Aboriginal boy, just turned 18, offers a scrap of paper to prove hes of age. Kindly, the security guard explains how to get a proper ID and turns him away. I walk up a cement ramp to a bar, billiard tables and pokies. There are lots of people milling around but the guy at the entrance tells me it doesnt get pumping till 11.30 am, when the bar switches to full-strength beer. Techno music blares out of speakers. As I wander around, a Sudanese security guard approaches me, his face concerned. Am I lost? he wants to know.

In a way, I am. I dont want a beer. Its 10 am, for Chrissake.

*

At the Todd Tavern down the road its just after midday and the place is jumping. Billy Joel is on the jukebox and women jiggle in time, waiting to be served. On one side of the tavern is the Riverside Bar, the original animal bar, complete with blackened windows creating a kind of false night for its drinkers, who chuck their empties into wheelie bins dotted around the room. A lone white man runs the bar.

Theyre comfortable in there, numerous people say to me when I ask about the low-slung ceiling that makes you hunch and the permanent night. No one forces them to drink there.

In 2009 CCTV footage revealed 236 people inside the small bar at 11.48 am when it is licensed for 100 the Todd was suspended from trading for 5 days. Today, around the other side of the tavern, the cleaner and more sophisticated bar with clear windows is also full of Indigenous people. What used to be a voluntarily segregated pub blacks in the animal bar, whites in the classier section is now black and black.

Outside, Indigenous people are hanging around the closed roller doors of the Thirsty Camel drive-through bottle shop attached to the Todd Tavern. Some form small groups, others wait in banged-up cars across the road, and a lone man, his purple shirt tucked into black pants, his belt buckle and boots shining, with a cowboy hat tilted over his eyes, leans against the brick wall, waiting.

At 2 pm the shutters will open, the tavern will close and the drinking will shift to the dry riverbed of the Todd River.

The change in the hour brings about a different kind of busyness as pubs are cleaned for the late afternoon trade. It is rush hour for Alice Springs taxi drivers. No car, no drive-through is the new rule for these bottlos (unless youre white, in which case you can walk up and buy whatever you want), and taxis are hailed for the 10 metre trip and paid much, much more than the distance demands.

Bush minibuses that drive back and forth from remote Indigenous communities are cheered and hailed into the Gap View Hotel car park, the accordion doors opening for six or so blackfellas, some so zonked they can barely muster any sign of life. And then off they go! Through the drive-through!

I watch as the guy in the purple shirt and cowboy hat approaches the bottle shop and is shooed away like a feral dog. No car, no drive-through, an attendant yells at the mans back as he slinks away.

*

Everywhere you drive along the Stuart Highway the seam of bitumen connecting Darwin to Port Augusta there are handshake agreements between roadhouses and local Indigenous communities. At the Marla Hotel, the last roadhouse in South Australia before the Territory, a young woman says its three cans per Aborigine, no glass, no spirits, and we write down all our takeaways. At the Mt Ebenezer Roadhouse, on the way to Uluru, its no takeaways until the last tour bus has departed.

At Glendambo the bartender says he has to record all takeaway purchases greater than $100 in a book that nobody reads, and has been told to ask all buyers, especially Aborigines, if theyre going onto APY lands (the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands stretch over 100,000 square kilometres in north-west South Australia). But, he adds, I dont, cos thats prejudiced. As part of the federal intervention, shops were asked to take down names of people who bought more than $100 worth of alcohol. Many retailers undermined this with $99 promotions, and the bookkeeping of one roadhouse reveals just how seriously the new rules have been taken there apparently Sid Vicious, Rod Stewart and Charlie Brown have all come through. When I hear this, I cringe. Years ago, I signed in as Meryl Streep at Tennant Creek RSL.

In the long stretches between roadhouses I pass upside-down dead cows, hit by road trains and bloated like blimps; numerous abandoned cars, doors and boot wide open as if the occupants left in a rush; and the odd flock of fluorescent green budgies veering dangerously close to my windscreen. At night, the desert comes alive as Australias mice plague starts to stir, the tiny rodents spilling like marbles across the road. In Aileron, a 17 metre statue of an Aborigine holding a spear stands on a hill overlooking the roadhouse. Inside, the manager is straight up: A sixpack a day, takeaway, whether youre black or white.