Shaun Micallef stands stiffly in the car park of the Mallee Root Roundup B&S ball, as yahooing revellers preload on grog drunk out of boots and beer bongs, to the sweet sound of revving Holden Rodeo utes. He’s not wearing RM Williams and, worse, he’s not even tipsy.
As a teetotaler of a few decades, he’s something of a foreign correspondent for his three-part ABC documentary series, On the Sauce.
Micallef claims not to understand alcohol, setting himself up as an impartial observer of booze culture; he’s not here to wag fingers or get misty-eyed, rather to explore “the grey area between that first glass and self-immolation”.
The larrikin poet CJ Dennis would have categorised him as a wowser – “an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder”. But before an early 20th-century rebrand, when the word was applied to the members of temperance groups, it once meant the complete opposite, and described a disruptive lout. Perhaps then, the word is apt: Micallef reveals that he had been a binge-drinker at university before sobering up.
On the Sauce takes a particular interest in the Australian way of drinking, be it out in the bush or on the terraces (Micallef hates sport). In a quintessentially Australian moment, our man settles in with actor Jack Thompson for a screening-room chat, in which the pair watch Thompson’s boozy back catalogue. In Sunday Too Far Away, Thompson played a hard-drinking shearer. He reveals mistily to Micallef that he’d been drawing on his personal experience as a shearer, during which bottles of rum had been the currency. In Wake in Fright, Thompson points out the “aggressive egalitarianism” of the characters’ insistence that schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) keep joining them for a drink, a mood that persists in Australia today.
Doctor’s orders prevent Thompson from indulging these days, but he says he still hankers for a cold beer with condensation all a-drip – a refreshing confession when programs about alcohol consumption are usually focused solely on the harms.
Of course, Micallef does also examine the dangers – a jolly trip out with the women of the South Yarra Soccer Club is juxtaposed with an interview with a liver transplant recipient – as well as the fallacy that alcohol is the lesser of evils. At an 18th birthday party in Wollongong that he attends, the birthday girl’s mates chant “Down! Down! Down!” as she chugs some bright red concoction. One parent explains that it’s common for their children to witness them drinking. “The kids have been around … not so much alcohol, but wine … for a long time,” he says, which makes me wonder what he categorises as alcohol. Another concedes, “Alcohol is a drug, but I’m so anti all the other drugs out there, to me it seems like the safer option.”
In fact, Australia’s drug treatment and research sector is deliberately named AOD – alcohol and other drugs – to drive home the fact that alcohol is not the safer option. But public perception of it as the acceptable alternative is hard to shake. As Micallef observes, “We refuse to take our prime ministers seriously till they’ve been snapped blowing the froth off a cold one”. It’s not much different across the pond: just one week prior to the airing of the first episode, New Zealand’s new National Party leader, Judith Collins – a staunch anti-illicit drugs advocate – celebrated her appointment with the words “I think it’s time for a drink”.
In upcoming episodes, Micallef will hang out with surprisingly sober comedian Dave Hughes (“I’ve got the look of a drinker, and apparently every morning I’ve got the look of someone with a hangover”), Sober in the Country founder Shanna Whan, and a boozy book group.
He’ll even break his dry streak by getting on the turps himself. Perhaps the feedback he gets from young men in episode one – that non-drinkers are creepy and untrustworthy – felt like an insult that needed to be tackled head on.
Shaun Micallef’s On the Sauce continues on Tuesdays at 8.30pm, on ABC; catch up with the first episode on iView
