Peter Goers talks New Year’s Eve parties that he’s celebrated and slept through

Will you be searching the night for fun, or will you be sound asleep to the sound of celebrations? Peter Goers talks NYE parties over the years.

Happy new year! We all have hope in our hearts for 2025, but there’s one thing we can always rely on for next year – it will be worse. I jest, but who knows?

As the new year clicks over after all the joy and goodwill of Christmas and great relief that it’s over, New Year’s Eve is yet another signal moment in our (hopefully) long and fulfilling lives. The year changes and out with the old and in with the new.

Perhaps, come the stroke of midnight with the streamers and the hollering, you are surrounded by people you love rather than people you don’t care about.

Some people are alone on New Year’s Eve – lucky bastards.

Will 2025 be worse? Peter Goers remembers his past NYE parties, for better or worse.

In my long experience (and I’ll be 48 in 2025), New Year’s Eve parties are the hardest to give and the hardest to attend on the social calendar due to false expectations. Some of these parties are memorable for good or ill. What have been your favourite and least favourite New Year’s? Family and friends come together with mixed blessings.

In 1976, I was living at home with my long-suffering parents at Woodville and they went out on New Year’s Eve to see the recently-released movie Storm Boy. I was home alone and decided to surprise my parents with (I blush to say) a bottle of spumante. This was a big surprise because my parents were teetotal. As they arrived home I flourished the bottle out of the fridge, dropped in on the floor and it exploded. So, the first moments of 1977 were my mother and I (mainly my long-suffering mother) mopping it all up.

In 1979, I threw my first party at my (again absent) parents’ house for my drunken theatre friends and my parents arrived home in the first hours of 1980 to find chaos, including two people collapsed in their twin beds and a swimming pool full of food, empty bottles and more drunks. Happy new year! Not!

In the 1980s and ’90s I hosted New Year’s Eve parties at a beach house at Victor Harbor with an old Scottish friend who, annoyingly, insisted on the Scottish hogmanay traditions. I’d be dispatched at 11.30pm to find a tall, dark stranger who had to be the “first footer” into the house at midnight bearing coal, bread and booze. This was a challenging task but one year the randomly inveigled tall, dark stranger was not only very tall, dark and handsome but very obliging and became the life of the party until he disappeared at dawn, so sadly, never ever to be seen again.

That same night another friend came to the party after midnight announcing that 20 people from the party he’d just left were on their way to drink champagne. We dutifully poured out 20 glasses of champers and those people never arrived. We then drank their champagne.

Remember the strange millennial NYE in 2000 when we were all concerned at the failure of the internet and all computerised systems so we all filled baths with cold water and bought boxes of baked beans and then ... nothing happened. I volunteered that year (via the Sunday Mail) to fill in for a waitress so she could spend NYE with her family and caused consternation at the bar I replaced her at by offering all patrons complimentary Sex On The Beach – the celebrated cocktail.

Some of my best NYE’s have been spent merrily sleeping though them, stirring abed at midnight to hear distant cheers, and falling back asleep.

The Sydney fireworks are overrated. I look at them not with a bang but with a whimper for the squillions of dollars better spent on housing the homeless and feeding the hungry.

In my eight New Year’s Eves at my beloved Glenelg I’ve never seen those fireworks because work is more fun than fun, and I’ve worked with the glorious Anne “Willsy” Wills hosting a NYE movie at the beautiful Capri Theatre. It’s a popular, loving, accessible and cheap celebration and an easy and congenial way to spend NYE – with champers and laughs. Tickets are still available.

Hopefully your 2025 is blessed. Out with the “auld” and in with… er…. Trump. Good luck. We’ll need it.

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