Valentine’s Day, 1916, one hundred years ago. After getting out of their train, troops of the Australian Imperial Force marched into battle, and spent a long day in a sporadic, confused, running fight. At 10.45pm, they suffered their first fatality: trooper Ernest William Keefe, 19, shot through the right cheek. The bullet that killed him was fired by the Metropolitan Police, and he died at Sydney’s Central Station.

In a familiar tale, the pointless violent death of a young man out on the town began a new chapter in the story of alcohol licensing and drinking regulation in New South Wales, a story still continuing with the debate over the lockout laws of the Baird government.

The Battle of Central Station, a riot or military strike which started at the Casula training camp, began as a dispute about drill and training hours. On 14 February 1916, informed that their drill hours were to be extended, thousands of soldiers marched into Liverpool, looting hotels for spirits and beer, then invaded trains to the city, spending the day rioting. They were joined by members of the public, raided fruit carts, fought police and military pickets, and smashed up businesses with German-sounding names. The army court-martialled the ringleaders. The NSW government used the aftermath of the riot to introduce strong restrictions on alcohol sales and hotel opening hours, beginning the era of six o’clock closing.

For the next decades until 1955, pubs in Sydney catered to a mad hour of binge drinking when men, released from work at five, would struggle to pour as much beer down their throats as they could before the “last-drinks-gentlemen” bell. The law physically changed the architecture of hotels: the pattern of the “six o-clock swill” turned pubs into machines for getting drunk fast, lengthening the bars, emptying them of chairs and tables, and covering the walls and floors in tiles and terrazzo to allow for hose-cleaning the vomit and urine (and blood) that comes out of desperate men racing the clock to the bottom of the jug. This is one telling of the story; any regulation just squeezes the harm out somewhere else.

There are other stories, though. Since its beginnings as a flogging prison colony, Sydney has had a seedy reputation, and a beer-and-rum-washed culture with real winners and real losers.

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John Birmingham’s Leviathan tells this darker history and reminds us that underneath the glamour there’s real harm and real violence associated with every alcohol economy. There’s no such thing as a natural market in a drug like alcohol; whether trade in it is monopolised and encouraged by crooked colonial officers, licenced by councils as “big” or “small” bars, or left completely to the underworld of nightclubs and sly-grog shops, the state can never escape responsibility for the violence and harm that accompanies drinking. And it really does harm: Australia observed its national day this year with a spike in alcohol-related hospital admissions.

The temperance movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth century recognised that — and took it to its logical extent. They were anti-drunkenness, but also anti-urban, believing in new, dry, healthy, cities of suburbanism and freedom from cramped violent slums and drunken poverty. “Local Option” referendums in late nineteenth and early twentieth century suburbs in Sydney, in which residents could vote to make their area dry, created a pattern of pub-less middle class suburbs, of gardens and detached bungalows ringing inner working-class terrace suburbs with pubs on every corner.

There’s a certain irony in the gentrification of inner suburbs, meaning that the areas with the most historical pubs in the eastern suburbs are now at the centre of a contest over how and where drinking should be done.

So there are two dissimilar and conflicting stories about alcohol, which coalesce in the end into desires for a particular type of city. On one hand, there’s the liberal desire for civilised habits and tolerance of nightlife, put most recently in a very lengthy article by Matt Barrie. At heart the argument’s very simple; why shouldn’t adults be able to have a drink the way they do in London, Paris and Tokyo, and why should Sydney suffer reputationally?

On the other hand, there’s a bit of context being lost in this simple telling—images of civilised hipsters casually sipping pinot gris in moderation are a misleading way to portray the dangerous Australian relationship with alcohol. The NSW Police have put this point in their own way in their dealings with a city eatery with an “antisocial” wine list.

Since the 1920s, Kings Cross has been in the middle of this as a centre of entertainment and bohemia, but also of social deviance and tolerance, of American troops and their R&R, of a place of sexuality and where suburban norms didn’t necessarily apply. Nowadays, thanks to 30 years of boom, Potts Point, Kings Cross and Darlinghurst are elite addresses, enjoyed by the wealthy and well-connected who prefer quiet and don’t necessarily enjoy the nightlife: house prices have changed the areas far more than laws or development ever could have.

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It’s about public health, public space, public violence, public mores. Habits of drinking have been class and culture signifiers since, as former prime minister Keating put it, “we brought” the alcohol, along with the rest of the trappings of a violent and class-ridden British society in social change.

Historian Richard Waterhouse in Private Pleasures, Public Leisure described questions over alcohol as fundamentally ones about how people developed a popular culture in this country — as working class, as middle class, as respectable, as bohemian, or as something else. The police have been involved since they wore red coats and shakos; controlling, licencing, paying attention or turning a blind eye. Mostly it’s been poorer people who’ve been subject to the attention of the law, while the middle class and rich, who do their drinking behind doors, escape.

The streets are places for this kind of control over public behaviour. There are dark ironies and open hypocrisies in that the Baird government’s lockout laws do not apply to after-hours drinking at the casino. Notions of “reputation” and “quality of life” put Sydney as a centre of liberality, especially relating to tourism, but also code it as a place for some kinds of alcohol abuse and not others: respectable, harmless drinking, done by people of social standing.

Lockout laws have pushed night-owls farther out in the search for 24-hour drinking: to the inner west’s Newtown, for example – merely displacing, not controlling, the same kind of behaviour.

When we’re discussing lockout laws, and access to public space for drinking, we are talking about spatial and class inequality, as well as abstract “freedom” to drink. Policing of alcohol didn’t begin with Baird’s laws. It’s not just about glasses of footpath wine, it’s about the shock of a class of drinkers to whom the law has suddenly begun to apply.

The reaction to the lockout laws is the reaction of middle classes for the first time having their drug-taking habits seriously affected by the state.