Lazy childhood days amid the horrors of a beer strike likes of Kylie Minogue will never promote

It was the sign of a Christmas holiday nobody would want to promote, but many feared: the beer strike.

Australian tourism’s newest ad featuring Kylie Minogue, left, and a swiftly-disappearing beer, right. Pictures: Supplied

Welcome to the first in a series of stories of crappy Christmas holidays of my childhood, where holidays seemed to last forever, but sojourns even day trips were rare, and adventure was anywhere I could find it.

Certainly, these are not tales from an Australia that Kylie Minogue and others are promoting to the British.

To understand my childhood Christmas holidays, you have to understand beer. Not that I was a precocious consumer. It’s just that beer was omnipresent.

Until it wasn’t.

And to understand that we have to go back to a period before the school holidays to a vague spot on the Advent calendar where kids were still trudging off to school. By then the teachers had given up. Report cards had been written; the syllabus more or less ticked off. In these days before the final bell rang, the class would be marched out to the asphalt and a scuffed volleyball hurled in our general direction before teacher scuttled off back to the staff room.

And as each day passed, the threat rose.

Men wept in despair

The greatest peril for working class men in Melbourne was the pre-Christmas beer strike. You could set your clock by it, or at least you could run a line through the days in December before Christmas in the safe knowledge that on one entry or another it would occur. Melbourne’s beer stocks would be quickly drained to zero, leaving men weeping in despair, until through the magic of arbitration, the strike would come to an end and order would be restored. It happened every year.

These were the days where beer brewing ran strictly along state lines. In Melbourne, one either drank the various brands from the Carlton & United Breweries (which all looked and tasted roughly the same) or one didn’t drink beer at all and was subject to derision and ostracisation. Beer not from ‘‘round here’ was regarded with suspicion and distaste.

On reflection it was also one reason why we rarely if ever traversed the Murray River to our north for a holiday, lest my father be confronted with the horror of having to consume a pot of KB or some other amber fluid he regarded as a cocktail of vile toxins in a glass.

The monopoly also extended to the supply of beer. Back then H.D. Downey and Sons Pty Limited was an empire, a company that had stumbled into cartel status, at least in Australia’s eastern states, as the sole purveyors of beer distribution. They didn’t brew beer. They designed, engineered and manufactured the equipment that delivered beer into frosty glasses in pubs.

As you might expect, staff and management were heavy consumers of the sponsor’s product. Amber fluid coursed their veins. And not just metaphorically.

They were kind and generous people. Later, in my teens, I was given a job at the place on school holidays and was given make-work duties until, at the age of sixteen, they set me up on a lathe where I’d thread wing nuts all day long under the watchful eye of the factory foreman.

By adulthood I had developed the skills that would later get me work as a cellarman in a number of pubs around Melbourne, unscrewing the wing nut (possibly one I had threaded) and easing the extractor out of an empty 18-gallon barrel with a pleasing whoosh of CO2 released from pressure and often to the cheers of patrons before quickly tapping a new one for their immediate consumption.

Kevin Downey: Beer saint

It was like a cabaret show for drunks and it got me through university.

The oldest of H.D. Downey’s sons was the remarkable Kevin who had designed and trademarked an instrument that kept beer lines from icy constipation, a simple device that measured temperature until it plunged almost to freezing point at which point a light globe would spark up, creating enough warmth to keep the ice at bay.

Kevin Downey’s consumption of the sponsor’s product was legendary, peerless. There are many stories. Alas, too many for here and now. On one occasion, he was roughly grabbed by the hair and resuscitation administered by the short order cook at the Peacock Hotel in Northcote, a mere drunken stumble away from Downey’s High Street HQ, after Kevin had passed out and face-planted into the soup du jour.

Kevin was a frequent visitor to our home on Sunday afternoons when the pubs were obliged to close with a nod to the Rechabites. The wowsers then had been forced to relent over six o’clock closing but they sure as hell weren’t going to allow godless publicans to flog their wares on the Sabbath. Thankfully and perhaps ironically, they’re all dead now.

On these Sundays Kevin would arrive in a state of rich refreshment. So much so that years later when he turned up sober, I didn’t know who he was.

‘Who’s that?” I asked my brother.

“It’s Kevin. Kevin Downey.”

“No.”

I could scarcely believe it and I had to look again. Kevin had recently married. He was fresh-faced, the tracks of burst capillaries on his cheeks that had appeared like a roller coaster designed by Salvador Dali were gone. His eyes gleamed, his slurred voice replaced with a broadcaster’s authoritative inflection. It was like Kevin but somehow not Kevin. It would have made for a useful study of physiology and human behaviour but sadly, Kevin’s metamorphosis did not take.

Supreme hoarding

Like my father, Kevin regarded the Christmas beer strike as one might a visitation of the Black Death. But Kevin had learned how to endure it by assiduously hoarding beer throughout the year. He had constructed a trailer based on the precise measurements of a dozen cartons each containing a dozen long necks. A dozen by a dozen by a dozen by a dozen – quantity, length, width and depth.

Like a prohibition bootlegger, he would rush to the aid of the thirsty at times when the picket lines outside the Carlton & United Breweries would bear no breach. But Kevin was just one man. There was only so much he could do.

My father on the other hand seemed not to understand the concept of hoarding at least where beer was concerned. If a beer was there, it needed to be consumed. That was his view.

But he would pay a terrible price for it when the inevitable happened — the delivery drivers went out or the packers pulled the pin or some worker in the chain withdrew their labour. Melbourne quickly ran dry. Well, not dry. There was alcohol to be drunk – the products of the finest distillers, wines and fortifieds were still available.

Who can forget Penfold’s Royal Reserve Port as a stop gap, a port in the storm, so to speak? In the bottle shop it would sit just above the shelf of desperation featuring bottles of Brandivino, a cheap slurp so appalling that meth men would sneer at it, regarding it as less drinkable than their purchase from the hardware store with a little warm pineapple cordial as a chaser.

In the pubs and bottle shops the only beer available was the swill swiftly transported across state lines but these brands, too, would quickly be whisked off the shelves. Until there was just one left.

And that is my abiding memory of the gateway to my childhood holidays. My father, sitting sour faced in his chair, grimacing as he gulped the contents of a long neck of Southwark, a particularly nasty brew from South Australia, as if forced to drink poison at gunpoint.

It was a sign. And I knew what it meant. It was almost Christmas.