‘I will run, I will leave you’

Elspeth Muir’s brother Alexander went out drinking to celebrate the end of university exams. Three days later his body was pulled from the Brisbane River.

Half an hour before midnight my friend Jonathan (not his real name) and I were queuing for the ATM.

We’d been waiting for 10 minutes, but there were still three people in front of us.

At the front of the queue a girl said, ‘‘Oops, it wasn’t me,’’ and walked off. We stared at the winding cartoon cogs on the out-of-service screen. The people in the queue grew fractious. Small blisters of anger rose and popped.

The boy behind us muttered, ‘‘What the f... – why is this taking so long?’’ He was about 18.

‘‘It’s going to take a lot longer now that the ATM is broken,’’ Jonathan snapped.

‘‘What the f..., dude?’’ the boy said. ‘‘Why the f... are you talking like that?’’

I was about to say something, but Jonathan looked at me.

‘‘Don’t,’’ he mouthed, shaking his head. When we were younger, and out late at night, Jonathan would say: ‘‘Just so you know, if someone tries to attack us, I will run. I will leave you.’’

I laughed the first time he said it. Then I realised he was serious. ‘‘Really?’’ ‘‘Yes. It would be best if you ran as well.’’

Each night I get two Google alert emails. One lists the top ten trending articles for the day containing the keyword ‘drunk’ and the other the top 10 containing ‘alcohol’.

I subscribed to the alerts at the end of February 2014, about two months after 18-year-old Daniel Christie was killed by a single blow in Kings Cross, Sydney. His attacker, Shaun McNeill, had punched another youth in the head. Christie confronted him about it, and McNeill punched Christie in the head, causing him to fall and fatally crack his skull on the pavement.

The unprovoked attack was the second of its kind in two months. The other fatality was a 23-year-old Irishman, Thomas Jay Keaney, who was on the phone to his mum when he was drunkenly attacked and killed in Perth. Although Keaney’s death quickly slipped from the public eye, Christie’s lit a fire. The deaths happened at the end of a year during which public awareness about Australia’s binge-drinking culture had been stoked by numerous television and radio documentaries on the subject.

The diversity and inconsistency of the coverage was especially stark around this period. The difference in opinion centred on whether the alcohol industry was the problem, or whether a few violent individuals were responsible for ruining nights out.

In February 2014 laws restricting bottle-shop, pub and club trading hours in Sydney city hotspots were introduced. But while the laws were effective, they also diverted attention from the expansion of packaged liquor outlets, which sell four-fifths of all alcohol, which are increasingly owned by the major supermarket chains, and which are indirectly responsible for more insidious and widespread harm: family violence and alcohol-specific chronic disease.

Meanwhile, the pubs and bars in Sydney’s lockout zone started to close. In a LinkedIn article that went viral, the chief executive of Freelancer.com, Matt Barrie, argued: ‘‘As I write this in 2016, not a day goes by without the press reporting of yet another bar, club, hotel, restaurant or venue closing . . . The soul of the city has been destroyed.’’

At a family wedding a few years ago, my friend Patrick McEniery – a former worker at the now-defunct Surfers Paradise Chill Out Zone, a space for individuals having a bad experience with alcohol or drugs – turned to me and said, ‘‘In your book, will you write about this?’’ I looked where he was pointing and saw my mum, aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins laughing and dancing like idiots, not caring what anybody thought. ‘‘You have to write about the good side of alcohol, too,’’ he said.

I feel conflicted about the demise of Sydney’s nightlife and I agree with much of Matt Barrie’s article.

But midway through it there is a line that stuck: ‘‘Two young men would be turning in their graves if they knew that their deaths had been hijacked to beat up some moral outrage over the sort of human tragedy that sells newspapers to put up a political smokescreen, push a prohibitionist evangelical agenda, sell a suburb to developers and boost the coffers of a couple of casinos.’’

It was a carefully worded statement, and was not meant to disrespect or diminish the tragedy of their deaths. And yes, maybe those two young men would be turning in their graves – I sometimes wonder if Alexander might be doing the same. Only it’s not just about those two young men: it’s about all the people they left behind.

Wasted: A Story of Alcohol, Grief and a Death in Brisbane Elspeth Muir Text Publishing, RRP $37