Girl About World: Welcome to the land down under

Laura Foster slaps the Goon as she discovers a world of cheap wine, random breathalysing and dogmatic door staff in Australia.

And so it’s sayonara Japan, g’day Australia on the next leg of this travel odyssey.

Australia is a continent that’s famous for serving its beer so cold that their taps have temperature displays, and for wine production on a massive scale.

While a significant amount of land is under vineyard – roughly 175,000 hectares – Australia is in fact a nation of beer drinkers, as one winemaker put it at a cellar door I was propping up the other day.

These beer drinkers actually have brands of preference according to their region – broadly speaking, the preferences I witnessed were Victoria Bitter (VB) in Victoria, Tooheys in New South Wales and Castlemaine XXXX in Queensland.

Australia is also a country that is trying to combat drinking problems and encourage responsible consumption. There are signs everywhere; pre-mixed cans such as Bundaberg rum and coke – a popular drinking option here – have been reduced in strength to just over one unit of alcohol per serving to control levels of drunkenness at large-scale events.

The government runs responsible drinking campaigns to increase awareness of its effects and to try and combat trouble in rural communities where alcohol-induced violence is apparently much more common.

Bar and club security will refuse entry to anyone they think is a little inebriated, even for a minor offence such as accidentally dropping an ID card in a queue, as I witnessed in Brisbane.

The ID factor is in fact very strictly enforced by all door staff, who will turn you away without blinking an eye if you have no proof of age – no matter how old you look.

Police breathalysing stations are also a common sight when driving along the road, popping up wherever they fancy to randomly stop traffic as it drives past.

The way alcohol is sold off premise is also more restricted than in the UK, with dedicated off licences, or ‘bottle shops’, being the only place to get your hands on it – supermarkets are a dry zone. These bottle shops are often attached to a bar, sometimes within the same room as those punters who are drinking on premise.

Music festivals and gigs are similar to American ones wherein everyone has to show ID to show their age and gain a wristband, entitling them to gain access to the area within the venue that sells booze.

Yes, alcohol consumption can be prolific here, and it is celebrated by many. A walk around Brisbane on Australia Day displayed much evidence, with T-shirts being worn with the proud slogan ‘I’m not an alcoholic, I’m Australian!’ and girls yelling ‘What time is it? Beer O’clock!’

Having said that, the behaviour wasn’t so dissimilar from that of a group of drunken lads and ladies in the UK…

Backpackers themselves – and there are many of us circulating the well-trodden paths of this vast country – have developed an interesting drink subculture here in the shape of ‘Goon’.

Goon is the rather interesting-sounding nickname for cheap, boxed wine. Seeing as it’s being sold for around $10AUD for three, four or five litre boxes of the liquid, it’s no surprise that it’s so popular on the backpacker scene.

Urban myths abound concerning this revered product – the name apparently comes from one of the aboriginal tribes’ words for ‘pillow’, as the silver sack that holds the wine can be inflated and slept upon once empty. Research has so far been unable to verify this, and I suspect it is more likely to come from a shortening of the word ‘flagon’.

The back of these cartons contains a list of ingredients, including the immortal words ‘May contain traces of fish or egg products’. To those on the backpacking circuit unfamiliar with wine and its production techniques (and let’s face it, there’s a few), these ingredients only add to the perceived grotesque glamour of consuming this insipid drink.

So intrinsic is Goon to travelling around Australia that games and characters constantly spring up. I met the ‘Goontender’, who boasted a bar of many different types of Goon within his hostel room, while a friend encountered the ‘Goonmonster’. T-Shirts featuring slogans such as ‘I heart Goon’ and ‘Slap the Goon’ are also sold everywhere, and worn with pride.

My favourite game was the ‘Wheel of Goon’, a take on the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ where a Goon sack is tied to a spinning washing line. The participants of the game stand around the line, which is then spun. Whoever the sack lands on has to drink from the hanging bag before the wheel is spun yet again.

While I’m sure consuming the kind of quantities that many travellers do here is never going to do anyone any good, many claim rather unbelievable side-effects from Goon consumption, including hallucination. Absinthe eat your heart out.

Many different mixes have sprung up to try and mask the diabolical taste of many of these boxes, including white wine and lemonade and red wine with blackcurrant cordial.

The concept of boxed wine was actually invented here in 1965, so it seems fitting that it has been so eagerly adopted by the travelling fraternity here. I’m not sure what good it does for the reputation of the Australian wine industry, however.

Laura Foster, 23.03.2010