'Once a Drunkard Always a Drunkard': Social Reform and the Problem of 'Habitual Drunkenness' in Australia, 1880-1914

Abstract

The drink problem loomed large in the minds of nineteenth century Australian philanthropists, clergy and social reformers. At its high points, in the 1830s and 1840s and again between 1880 and the First World War, the temperance movement was one of the largest social reform movements in Australia. Total abstinence was the guiding principle of the nineteenth century temperance movement but from the 1880s temperance advocates also developed more sophisticated tactics by embarking on campaigns for prohibition, early closing, Sunday closing and local option legislation. These campaigns were bitterly contested. Opponents included the vested interests of licensed victuallers and brewers, politicians fearful of losing essential revenue from taxes and excise on liquor and a popular opposition to middle class attempts to police the leisure time and social life of the 'working man'. Temperance reformers countered with claims that drink was a central factor in poverty, family breakdown, domestic violence, crime and serious illness.1 By 1914 the temperance movement both in Australia and Britain had scored only limited victories. In Australia early closing had been introduced in most States by 1914 but local option proved to be more elusive. Despite local option legislation most votes failed to implement the prohibition option favoured by temperance advocates. Although drinking hours were limited and the number of new licences restricted, attempts at prohibition were a failure.2 These campaigns to regulate drinking habits, however, were only the most public and controversial debates on the drink problem. Parallel to these campaigns was an equally vigorous, but less public, debate amongst reformers about the treatment of 'inebriates' or 'habitual drunkards'. Temperance reformers considered the policy of prevention more important than that of cure. Some, however, also felt it necessary to attend to the 'victims' of drink deemed responsible for many of the social problems arising from the ready availability of liquor. Until the mid-nineteenth century habitual drunkenness was commonly viewed as a self-inflicted sin or vice punishable as a crime. By the 1860s a new view, of habitual drunkenness as a disease, had emerged. Brian Harrison ends his major study Drink and the Victorians (London 1971) at the point when this