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about cricket star David ‘Boonie’ Boon’s legendary 52-can in-flight beer-sculling record more times than I heard the national anthem. And what other country can boast a prime minister who entered the Guinness Book of World Records for downing a yard of ale in 11 seconds — an achievement that Bob Hawke believes may have won him more votes than any of his policies. This was the land of the drive-through bottle shop, the birthplace of the esky. I was in heaven.
    A contact who had previously worked in the Melbourne office of a Canadian company once told me that she realised just how internationally renowned Australia was for boozing when the firm introduced a no-alcohol policy: management declared they would no longer buy booze for staff consumption at work events. The company had been sued in Canada, by the wife of an employee who had died after drink-driving following a staff function. But its offices in Sydney and Melbourne were exempt from the booze ban. The executives told staff: ‘Alcohol is so engrained in the Australian culture and way of life that we will make an exception.’
    It may be the Aussie way of life, but it seems that this culture has turned toxic. In the ten years since I first set foot in this wonderful sunburnt country, concern about alcohol problems has intensified, growing with every year that passes. Public drunkenness and violence on city streets are hard to ignore; underage drinking is rife. The fallout from this boozed-up lifestyle is devastating. Emergency departments are filled with casualties — in an average week, 57 Australians die and 1500 end up in hospital as a result of excessive drinking. Rates of alcohol-related crime, violence, and chronic disease have soared. That burden, added to healthcare expenses and loss of productivity, costs the economy $36 billion a year.
    So how did Australia get here? Is this just the way it’s always been in the ‘lucky country’? And if it is, what’s driving this culture? If I want to know how I got here, hung-over and thoroughly sick of it, perhaps I need to understand how the heavy drinking culture that’s nurtured my way of life was formed. When I first stopped drinking, some friends told me proudly that Australia sits at the top of the heap in world drinking ranks; I should be embracing booze, not turning my back on it. One colleague went further, saying that it was ‘un-Australian’ to swear off the grog: ‘It’s part of our heritage. It’s who we are.’
    I wonder if that’s true, or if it’s just a convenient story we tell ourselves to explain our love of the bottle. Three weeks into my booze ban, I seek answers to these questions by drawing on the research of one of the world’s leading alcohol-policy experts. During the five years I’ve written about these concerns, he’s been my go-to research man, a veritable guru of booze. Professor Robin Room, director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne, has been working in the field for more than 40 years. He says that a reputation for heavy drinking is part of Australia’s ‘national myth’; it fits into a romantic self-portrait of a country of rugged bushmen, who tell tall tales and share drinks with mates after a hard day’s yakka. This is the equivalent of America’s Wild West mythology — a gang of miscreants thumbing their noses at polite society.
    But the reality is a bit more nuanced, according to Room. Just as I learned to drink in Scotland, Australia’s early culture of heavy drinking was transported from British shores. In the 18th century, a gin epidemic swept through Britain and Ireland, causing devastating social problems and a mass crime wave. By the late 1700s, jails were overflowing and the first convicts were sent to Australia, with a penal colony established in 1788 in what is now Sydney. When teetotaller Captain