The Reinvention of Sweden’s “Gothenburg System” in Rural Australia: The Community Hotels Movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a dozen small towns in rural South Australia began a unique social experiment: they imported an alcohol control model from Sweden designed to curb drunkenness, reform the pub and distribute profits for the benefit of the community. The innovative idea of local citizens owning and governing their hotel by committee, and doing away with the drive for personal profit, was an adaptation of the Swedish Gothenburg system. In Australia, it was put into practice in 1897 in the temperance town of Renmark on the River Murray, and other like-minded communities in South Australia followed suit over the next 50 years. This article tells the little-known history of these hotels and explains how and why ideas about the cooperative management of alcohol were found to be particularly compatible with the social and cultural history of South Australia. These Gothenburg experiments connected rural Australia with alcohol policies advancing the municipalisation and improvement of the public house and with progressive ideas of planned towns and garden cities that were being implemented in Sweden and Britain at the time.