February 12, 2006

Alcohol as a nonverbal communicator of a society’s values

Lee Hopkins wrote this 8:00 pm:

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Warning: this post has nothing to do with business communication. It is just a personal observation about Adelaide.


Adelaide Oval - the most beautiful cricket oval in the world
(disclaimer: author is slightly biased)

In a country where sport has replaced God as the religion of the masses, and where drinking [alcohol] is the national pastime (and male binge drinking is in second place), I suddenly realised today that there is little reprieve for anyone from the onslaught of alcohol-based messages. After all, this is a culture where the barbeque is the altar of choice.

I’m sitting with my family in the ‘family dry area’ of the one of the world’s most beautiful cricket ovals, Adelaide Oval. The ‘dry area’ is a small grassed postage stamp compared to the rest of the spectator area. There are,of course, the usual parents with children. But I am especially intrigued to spot a number of what I can only call ‘hard men’ sitting and relaxing in the sun on the grass. These are men whose faces don’t tell stories of cocktail hours and expensive cars; these are faces that tell of hardship, of challenges, of battles with demons. These are mouths with missing teeth, of arms and shoulders with expensive tattoos, of faces lined with the strain of existence.

These are men I would normally steer a very wide path around.

Over the past fortnight I’ve finished a couple of crime author Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder novels. I love Block as a writer, having many of his ‘how to write novels’ books as well as his novels. But I’ve only recently been able to track down some works from his ‘Matt Scudder’ series (Block doesn’t seem to be a big seller here, for some bizarre reason — I must ask at Dymocks why he thinks that is).

Scudder, a recovering alcoholic, has opened my eyes to the difficulties recovering alcoholics face in any western society, let alone one so obsessed with drinking as Australian society is. Here in Australia hard drinking men are both legendary and the stuff that myths and icons are made of.

So where does a recovering alcoholic ‘hard man’ go to escape alcohol here in Adelaide? Sure, there is AA, but on the surface that’s all there appears to be. In what used to be called ‘The City of Churches’ and is more and more being known as ‘The City of Weird Murders’, there is, to be sure, a darker side to this city that I have been blessed enough not to see.

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2 Responses to “Alcohol as a nonverbal communicator of a society’s values”

  1. Lee’s new Better Communication Results blog Says:
    March 7th, 2006 at 7:13 pm

    [...] Related posts: Moleskines and working methodologies, Alcohol as a nonverbal communicator of a society’s values [...]

  2. Lee’s new Better Communication Results blog Says:
    March 17th, 2006 at 12:08 pm

    [...] Related post: Alcohol as a nonverbal communicator of a society’s values [...]

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