Dry Zones

Planning and the Hangovers of Liquor Licensing History

Elizabeth Jean Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789811327872
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book tells the story of local-level controls on liquor licensing ('local option') that emerged during the anti-alcohol temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It offers a new perspective on these often-overlooked smaller prohibitions, arguing local option not only reshaped the hotel industry but has legacies for, and parallels with, questions facing cities and planners today. These range from idiosyncratic dry areas; to intrinsic ideas of residential amenity and neighbourhood, zoning separation, and objection rights.
The book is based on a case study of temperance-era liquor licensing changes in Victoria, their convergence with early planning, and their continuities. Examples are given of contemporary Australian planning debates with historical roots in the temperance era – live music venues, bottle shops, gaming machines, fast food restaurants. Dry Zones uses new archival research and maps; and includes examples from family histories in Harcourt and Barkers Creek, a district with a temperance reputation and which closed all its hotels during the temperance era.
Suggesting 'wowsers' are not so easily relegated to history books, Taylor reflects on tensions around individual and local rights, localism and centralism, direct democracy, and domestic violence, that continue to be re-enacted. Dry Zones visits a forgotten by-way of licensing history, showing the early 21st century is a useful time to reflect on this history as while some temperance-era controls are being scaled back, similar controls are being put forward for much the same reasons.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2019

Elizabeth Jean TaylorDry Zoneshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2787-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Walter’s Hotel, 1882

Elizabeth Jean Taylor¹

(1)

Centre for Urban Research, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Elizabeth Jean Taylor

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

In this chapter Taylor introduces the influence of local anti-alcohol policies of the temperance movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using an 1882 incident at a hotel in Barkers Creek, central Victoria, as an illustration. Taylor suggests that the closure of all the hotels in Barkers Creek and neighboring Harcourt by the 1920s as a result of local temperance policies and groups reflects a larger story of legal and political change. The chapter introduces “local option” rights and controls of the temperance era, suggesting these smaller prohibitions have been overlooked and warrant re-examination in light of contemporary planning challenges. With international examples but focusing on Victoria, the structure of the “Dry Zones” book is outlined, seeking to offer a new perspective on the rise of democratic controls on alcohol, their influence on liquor licensing and early zoning ideas, and their legacies for cities and planning today.

Keywords

TemperanceProhibitionUrban historyPlanning historyAustralia

End Abstract

On August 12, 1882, the Castlemaine Police Court report in the Bendigo Advertiser recounted how one John Wilkinson had been charged with “unlawfully and maliciously afflicting grievous bodily harm” on a Barkers Creek hotelkeeper, John Walters. The hotelkeeper recalled how:

The accused came to his hotel on the 29 July, about 11 o’clock p.m., with a man named G. Rutledge, and called for four drinks. Wilkinson asked who was going to pay for them. Sauvarin said, “Well, you asked for them; but if you won’t pay for them I will.” Wilkinson said, “Oh, b______ it, here you are then,” placing two shillings on the counter. Wilkinson then threw the contents of his glass on the ground, and said he would fight any ____ man in the house. (“Police Court”, Bendigo Advertiser, Saturday August 12, 1882, p. 2)

Some of the words considered at the time to be swear words have been blanked out, possibly to our loss. Wilkinson seems likely to have said “bugger it”, and professed to being willing to fight “any bloody man in the house”. Even with the guesswork around dated obscenities there is something timelessly familiar about the pub scene and about Wilkinson himself, with his resemblance to other chaotic characters sprinkled through court reports then as now. It is not difficult to still feel the collective sigh in the room as he threw his drink, pointlessly yet pointedly, onto the ground and announced his eagerness to fight someone—anyone, really—phrased as an insistent answer to a question nobody had actually asked. The publican of Walter’s Hotel (later renamed the Old England) went on to describe how:

When he came in he was half drunk. He commenced bouncing about, and I sent my wife out of the bar. Sauvarin and I tried to persuade him to go home peacefully, as he had his little boy in the dray outside.

Although the publican seemed to have persuaded the belligerent Wilkinson to leave, in the end, to cut a long story short, Wilkinson beat him forcefully and nearly lethally over the head with a fence paling. The publican recounted how he had turned to go back inside the hotel when:

I heard the words, “take that, you ______”, and I fell to the ground like a bullock.

Was it “take that, you bugger”? Or worse? In any case, a police constable later described how he had arrested John Wilkinson at his home in nearby White Gum Flat, and that “he was not sober when I arrested him, and did not appear to realise the position he was in”. He waited as Wilkinson fumbled with his boots, putting them on the wrong feet. John Wilkinson was later found guilty, and sentenced to two years hard labour.

One hundred and twenty years later, in an interview recorded in 2002, my grandmother Una recalled John “Jack” Wilkinson as “a man who could find gold anywhere”, and as someone who was often quickly parted from it at the nearest pub. Wilkinson was my maternal grandmother’s grandfather, her father’s father, making him a great great grandfather to me. In interviews recorded by my sister Kate, my grandmother (who has since passed away) recalled Wilkinson as a rakishly charming old man, carrying sweets and walking along railway tracks through the bushlands of the old goldfields. A stern, small face stares out from the photograph on his 1882 central prison record (Public Records Office Victoria Series 515, 19481)—he looks almost like a cartoonist’s idea of a petty criminal. He existed so long ago that I would hesitate, beyond a slight familiarity of eyebrows and nose (“large”, by the official description), to call him a “relation”.

Yet there are longer and fainter connections, beyond noses, to Wilkinson and his time. Some survived over a century to be told to me as faintly traced tales illustrative of the dangers of drinking alcohol, and go at least some way to explaining the alcohol-free wine (“Maisons sparkling grape drink”) that consistently adorned my family’s alcohol-free Christmas tables over a century later. John Wilkinson’s wife and children had once, for example, spent the night hiding in reeds at the side of the Harcourt reservoir, as he chased them drunkenly through the darkness with an axe—trying in a sincere if unsuccessful effort to decapitate them all. On another occasion he was said to have attempted to persuade his horse to jump a gate late at night after the pub. When the horse refused, Wilkinson slit its throat. The story has a satisfying note of idiocy: you are left to imagine how he had to open the gate himself, drunken and bloodied, one horse down and no closer to home.

Given his penchant for decapitation, my grandmother summarised what she knew of her grandfather John Wilkinson’s character in a relatively understated way. She mentions the experiences of her own father, George—who was, given his birth year in 1885, a younger brother of “the little boy in the dray outside” the hotel in 1882 (likely John Junior). John Wilkinson, she recounted, “wasn’t a very nice man when he was younger - when my father was small he used to belt them. And he was drinking. He was just a…”. At this point, after a weighty pause, she trails off unenthusiastically in the recording and draws out with surprising finality—“a horrible old man really. He drank”. Her decisiveness is surprising to me—in my memory of the moral world of Methodist grandparents, men were divided into “lovely men” and “lovely men, really, except” (except, e.g. when burdened with a horrible wife, or when they drank). Only politicians warranted stronger epitaphs. It is jarring to hear a man described merely as horrible.

It is the “he drank” part that is central to this book. As far as I know, nothing Jack Wilkinson did to his own family (or horse) ever made public record. The hotel fence paling incident was, however, far from his first or his last sketchy appearance in the local press. Intermittent Castlemaine Police Court reports in The Mount Alexander Mail suggest a man readily inclined to call upon a repertoire of violence, arson, glass smashing, or at least colourful language in response to perceived obstacles to his obtaining another drink (“The Smash at Morley’s Freemasons Hotel”, April 24, 1863, “Obscene Language” April 5, 1864, “A Rough Customer”, April 25, 1874, “Window Breaking”, December 11, 1874, “Assault”, April 17, 1878). Yet from these and many similar reports concerning different people it is also clear Wilkinson was not unique, nor were the experiences of his family, nor the hotels he frequented.

Meanwhile at least one of Wilkinson’s sons, George Wilkinson, became active in the Methodist Church and a member of temperance group The Independent Order of Rechabites. The district within which the Wilkinsons lived, Harcourt and adjacent Barkers Creek (on the outskirts of Castlemaine—see map at Fig. 1.1), became home to a branch (or “tent”) of the Order in 1869. A history of the district notes how “at one time Harcourt was credited with having five hotels but because of the strong influence of the Rechabite Lodge, an organisation with strong anti-alcohol beliefs, these were all closed” (Carr 2002). All twelve of the hotels of both Harcourt and Barkers Creek were, by means both direct and indirect, closed during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Harcourt earned a “state wide reputation as a temperance district” when, as the last pub was closed and reopened as a Coffee Palace (alcohol free temperance hotel), the pipes were ripped from the cellar to “allow the liquor to run down the gutter” (Houston 2009; also see “A Harcourt Pioneer”, The Bendigonian, August 25, 1914). For every action, perhaps, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Fig. 1.1

Map of hotels past of Harcourt and Barkers Creek, Victoria

The story of how and why Harcourt and surrounds came to be without any hotels (or more specifically, without any liquor licenses) is partly about the peculiarities of that district, but more so reflective of a larger story of legal and political change. In this book, I examine how the local level rights and controls around liquor licensing that emerged during the anti-alcohol temperance movement reshaped not only places like Harcourt and Barkers Creek, but the wider political landscape. I put forward a case that alcohol was one catalyst for the escalation and new forms of local level rights and controls during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the traditions established through local alcohol controls crossed over with early zoning and continue to be recognisable in land ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Walter’s Hotel, 1882
• 2. The Talbot Hotel, 1883: A Tavern in the (Teetotal) Town
• 3. The Live and Let Live Hotel, 1876–1912: Local Option in Victoria
• 4. The Old England Hotel, 1922: Hangovers
• 5. The Highland Society: Hair of the Dog
• 6. Epilogue: “HAPPY NYE, 1984”
• 7. Appendices