Peter Goers: A bar in the middle of Glenelg Beach dry zone is stupidity

THERE’S been a mixed reaction from readers to Peter Goers’ assertion that Holdfast Council’s decision to allow a bar on Glenelg Beach smacks of ‘alcoholic apartheid’. Join the debate: Leave a comment or vote in our poll.

Brad Thornton and Cassandra Mamone with cocktails served by Jade Booth, of the Moseley Bar & Kitchen, which will operate the Moseley Beach Club on Glenelg Beach. Picture: Matt Turner

MOST of us sit on the veranda of our island continent looking seaward waiting for our ships to come in and dreaming of the bush few of us actually set foot in.

Australians all claim the beach as our birthright. Now even that is being compromised.

There are 10,685 beaches in Australia on 47,000km of coastline. All are free public spaces – until now.

Holdfast Bay Council is merrily allowing one Glenelg restaurant to create a bar – let’s call it a sandbar – in the middle of Glenelg Beach, which is one of the most popular family beaches in our nation.

This is the first council in Australia – to my knowledge – which has privatised a beach. It will be a large, fenced-off enclave which costs $5 to enter after 5pm for the requisite cocktail hours. One cocktail is all right, two are too many and three are not enough.

The Moseley Beach Club will be open for up to 13 hours a day for the next three months so that people can go to an exclusive bar on a public beach and get shickered on expensive concoctions while lolling on sunbeds laid out by waiters working in the hot sun.

This will occur in the middle of a dry zone. On one side of the fence – the side for poor people – it will be illegal to consume alcohol, but on the exclusive side it will be mandatory to consume alcohol.

The public will have less of the beach to use. Glenelg Beach is about to endure an alcoholic apartheid – a financial and classist apartheid.

What of the hypocrisy that we move Aboriginal people out of public spaces, use alcohol as an excuse and create dry zones lest they want to drink there. As a society, we’ve been moving Aboriginal people away – and worse – for 230 years.

So the dry zone of Glenelg Beach will be compromised. It’s not as if Glenelg – a gloriously happy place at which all are welcome – lacks drinking outlets.

Indeed, beach-goers can – and do – stagger up Moseley Square sticky with salt and sand and get tanked. Now they can do it on the beach – and this son a beach is unimpressed.

Why is the council not investing in more and crucial beach safety rather than expensive drinks containing umbrellas? Naturally, every hotel and gin joint wants their bit of the beach bar bonanza and a chorus of “me toos” has resulted.

Glenelg beach could soon be a collection of private bars such as we see in other countries. Yuck.

When will the beach bars extend into the water? Next year?

Apparently this is a poll- driven innovation. If we listened to polls we’d have the death penalty. A brothel on Glenelg Beach or a section exclusive to white people would also be innovative and no more outrageous than a council-sanctioned, semi-permament beach bar in the middle of a dry zone.

Inebriation is highly subjective. It is illegal to serve alcohol to an inebriate but this law is rarely policed and often flouted by barkeeps.

There will be drunks on the beach in view of a dry zone. But this is apparently innovative and those who complain are reactionary wowser naysayers who just want a fair go for all on a free beach. Damn us.

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights on ABC Radio Adelaide

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