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Sober-Talk-SA - Adelaide Arthur 60th Anniversary · Sober Talk SA

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Welcome to Sober TALK. I'm Dennis and I'm an alcoholic.
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Soap dear. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous.
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If you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, please
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call Alcoholics Anonymous on 1300 double 22222.
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I'll visit their website ata.org dot AU.
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I'll just run through the preamble of Alcoholics
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Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous is a
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fellowship of people who share the experience, strengthen hope
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with each other that they may solve their common.
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Problems and help. With us to recover from
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alcoholism, the only requirement for membership is a desire to
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stop drinking and no dues of fees.
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Fair membership. We are self supporting through
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our own contributions. He is not allied with any sect
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in omission politics, organization or institution,
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does not wish to engage in any controversy, either endorses or
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oppose any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay
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sober and help other Alcoholics are chiefs of Brady.
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Peter and Arthur, I'm alcoholic. And April, April 1965, I was in
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the Adelaide Hospital and Mary W, some of you know her, was one
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of the little nurses who had to scrape dirt off me.
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Not that I looked so dirty, but it was just that I didn't want
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to shower because I was like always, I was afraid.
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I lived in fear and I was afraid of the water.
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And I remember very come to see me, a guy, a guy called Cheeky
1:45
CC Hanson, and he didn't get such a, you know, warm welcome,
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you might say, when I bit him on the wrist, when he handed me the
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literature. And that sort of was this kind
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of mental condition I was in, just like I had become like a
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bee, like a beast actually. And but he got me to agree to go
2:11
to another hospital, which I was happily.
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It didn't happen. I wanted to do that happily
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because there wasn't anywhere else to go.
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I didn't have any home. I had no room, I had nothing.
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I had a tiny little suitcase which was lying down in some
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cafe or club down at Hindley St. and that was my my worldly
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possessions. I wasn't always like that.
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I was an executive salesman for some of the biggest companies
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here, John Martins and Car Cycle.
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But the rapidity of my decline, well, no one really noticed it.
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But on reflection, I see that it was just, you know, alcoholism
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took a real sharp turn for me at the age of 25.
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I went to this other hospital and it was called Hillcrest
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Hospital. It was a mental hospital and was
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quite well known. Not as notorious as Parkside,
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but it was bad enough. But it's a strange place to feel
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at home in a mental hospital. But I sort of felt at home there
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when I was introduced to this group of guys who were all
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Alcoholics in this particular ward called Ward 2A.
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It was a a revelation for me to know that there were other
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people like me. I mean, I didn't think there was
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anyone like me at all. And they were telling me I
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didn't realise also that I had been certified.
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I didn't realize how sick I was. I was suffering with what's
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called cerebral palsy. I had lost my short term memory
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and the skin was rolling off my face through malnutrition.
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I was 6 1/2 stone and I had to hang onto the wall to go
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anywhere. Everywhere I went I staggered
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and I had to hang onto the wall. My eye had sunk inside my head
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through the muscle being collapsed through the palsy.
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And, you know, it was really the end for me.
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And in those days, alcoholism was only beginning to be
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accepted by the government. It was the Americans that told
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us that these people are not sick because they drink.
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They, they, they drink because they're sick.
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And that there is a predisposition to this vicious
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mental illness that we have. It's so subtle, so cunning, so
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powerful and so baffling. And the one who suffers it most
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is the last person to actually see and to accept the condition
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itself. There were no, we're talking
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about young ladies. There were no young women in
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there in those days. Everybody looked shattered, the
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women and the men included. You were a bit hard to
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distinguish who was who sometimes.
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It really was the robust of rough times, I can tell you.
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And but there I was in this, this hospital.
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I just didn't know why I was there.
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I was put in a corduroy suit and I was left to myself.
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There were many men in corduroy suits.
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Most of the Alcoholics were in ordinary sort of clothes.
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But I was put in this corduroy suit because they never thought
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I'd ever leave there. And all of the Korsakovs who
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were there, they never left there either.
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We were Alcoholics. Some of them.
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The water had gone over the lip of the little basin that the
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brain sits in. And that's finished.
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You're finished. There's no recall.
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And that was a condition I was in in 1965.
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However, I was given information regarding my alcoholism.
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I was told that 70% of Alcoholics are neurotic.
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And, you know, I heard things that from other members or other
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patients there that I had kept secret within myself.
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I kept a lot of secrets. I repressed a lot of truths.
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I didn't like who I was. I wanted to be someone
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different. And they were telling me that
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material, these inner realities that seemed to be the expose in
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my own mind and heart too early in life.
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I just didn't have the ability to cope with cope with them, the
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dreadful fear that I suffered. And we had I suppose in some
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justification for the fear I had and repressed because, you know,
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we had the German bombers flying across the skies and across our
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roofs and, and they were dropping bombs on top of us.
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And and that'll make you feel unwanted.
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I can assure you that. And you know, we, my mother, my
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mother, she said to me, she says there's something something
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wrong with you. Well, she didn't have to really
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tell me, but she says you are different from the rest.
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I says, well, yeah, that's that fitted because I was brought up
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with all these young, beautiful young girls and guys, all my
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brothers, sisters, cousins and all that.
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But I never felt at one with any of them.
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I never felt at one. I mean, I sort of mixed with
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them, but I, I was always searching for somewhere, you
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know, that I might feel at home, I suppose.
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Well, was there an answer to the inner things that were going on
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in my wife or I couldn't analyse?
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It's a lonely place that being erotic and being full of fear
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and feel threatened perpetually. And when my father decided to
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give me a little bit of hot toddy, it was my first drink.
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Hot toddy, good for the body, you know, it's hot whiskey and
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sugar that made had such an impact on my mind.
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An indelible impression was put into my mind when I drank that
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hot toddy. All of the fears, all of the
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guilt which I suffered had never done anything at all to merit
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the guilt that I felt. That all disappeared instantly
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when I had this alcohol. So I didn't make a marvelous
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impression on me. I was brought up in the Roman
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faith, the Roman Catholic traditional faith.
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And of course they tell us all about sin and hell and fire and
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all that sort of thing. And I seem to also again, absorb
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and unnaturally absorb these fears with this deep anxiety.
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You know, I really didn't have a, have a chance to make any
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kind of a, you know, decision based on, umm, something with a
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true equilibrium. I never no balance.
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There was no balance. And so that was just the I had
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to, I had to, I abandoned my faith eventually because of
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these fears and then joined the Royal Air Force.
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And I suppose that's was a bit of a diversion.
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Got it at the Royal Air Force, didn't reasonably well in the
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firearms department. I was marksman there and that's
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a high, well, quite a high thing in the Royal Air Force where
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everywhere I ever went I was running away from my inner self
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no matter what. The only relief I ever got was
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drinking and the OCD nature of alcoholism, the obsessive
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compulsive disorder, that tells you you it doesn't.
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It tells you you don't have it, you don't have a problem, but
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it's there and it was there for me.
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I couldn't see anything objectively.
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I was subject to all my feelings and particularly my imagination.
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I wasn't the brightest of character, although I did get
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good marks. You have to be reasonably well
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educated to get into Royal Air Force and, and, but I never had
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any solid base. I was a person who constantly,
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not so much even in the beginning, but later on needed
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approval. I really loved approval, an
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approval seeker, someone what they call in in modern
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Psychology Today. I had the deprivation syndrome,
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the need for affirmation, the perpetual need for affirmation
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until such time as that part of me, that deprivation syndrome
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was sort of allayed by, you know, the people that I was
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involved with my, my little woman.
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She would support me and I would support her sort of thing.
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And they and, and, and my swabber years are right through.
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Anyway, I got into John Martin's here.
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I did quite well there until I decided to take some of the
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property that wasn't mine. And then they sent the, the
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police after me and they put me in the court.
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I lied my way out of court. I was living with a Bulgarian
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woman and you know, I was living a life there.
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I never saw I'd lived. We see we this alcoholism just
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took me over, took me over because all the time I knew that
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I wasn't living right and I wasn't doing the things I should
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do. And but my fear with her soon
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ended when her boyfriend turned up from mad Nabuka with a box of
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a shoebox full of opals. So and I got relegated to the
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backroom and that wasn't quite, quite so good for me.
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But anyway, I met a Scotsman in the pub there in Adelaide and he
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decided that perhaps I could sell motorbikes and I thought I
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could. I remember going up to the
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Cornells and Perry St. I had never ridden a motorbike
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in my life and I told the boss I had.
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And you know, he says well here's the machine as an
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address, go and sell it. And I didn't know what to do.
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There was a machine standing there and I had to get on it and
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never been on it before. But I went around to the pub
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there and had three last Brandy's could have flown an
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aeroplane afterwards, you know, and motorbike was nothing.
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Yeah, you know. So that wasn't the 1st.
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That was just one of the first humiliating things that I had to
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encounter. The second one was a woman.
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It was a woman there and she, she could see, or she thought
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she could see a future in me. She thought that.
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And she took, I was living in half a door with I was living in
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half a room down there in North St. in the city.
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It was, it was just a pig house. It was, it was terrible.
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It was a whole room with a petition down the middle and one
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guy had a bed and one side now had a bed on the other side.
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It was so small you couldn't fall on the floor.
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The bed took the whole floor up and I used to slip it in there
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at night and it's, it's convenient.
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You could just drop into bed if you were drunk.
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And that was usually the case. You know, I'd say this woman
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offered me a nice place down at Calendula.
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I thought, well, I'll try it out, try it out.
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God, she wanted me to get married.
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And I thought, all right, fair enough.
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I didn't want to go back to the half a room.
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So I stayed with her and for about a few days and then we got
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married and it was the worst thing I've ever done.
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She made three attempts in my life in 14 days.
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And I can remember 11 morning, she came at me with a bread
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knife. Bread knife, so big, nice bread
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knife. And she's ready to push, push it
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into my head. She's screaming as well.
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And I'm standing there, you know, and she stops all of a
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sudden and she dropped the knife and she ran away.
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And it was just one of those times when I nearly got murdered
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or nearly got killed in Northern Ireland or something like that.
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There was always something looking after me.
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It seemed as if there was always some power around.
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When the crisis became, you know, deadly Tarta thing, I
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thought, of course she's dropped a knife and must be my dynamic
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personality sort of thing. You know, we're just great.
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I was just just mad. Absolutely no.
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It's pathetic, even when I think of it.
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Anyway, that's how it was. And when you've got to go back
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to your place of employment, when you're working as an
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executive salesman and you've just got married a fortnight
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before and you go back and you have to tell everybody,
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everybody's asking how the honeymoon went.
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God, there was a story on that honeymoon, let me tell you, and
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I had to tell them it was all finished and oh God, it was
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awful, it really was. That's anyway I went from bad to
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worse, as the saying goes. I was driven and I finished up
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selling Japanese needles around the Dorset in Adelaide.
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I sold millions of these needles, literally, and I used
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to buy them in Coles, big bundles of them and sell them
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for four times what they were worth.
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Everybody thought they were getting a bargain.
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But anyway, that was how it was and that's how I lived in the
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last 12 months of my drinking. I was eating off the pie cart.
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That's the way I I sustained my body.
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My mother had told me when I was young that peas are good for
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your complexion. You know, they asked me standing
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at the pie cart with no underwear on, thinking about my
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complexion and stuffing and stuffing these peas into my and
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to mine because I wanted them to look all right.
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No underwear on. Ah, yeah, that was a pair of
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thongs and a play pair of check trousers I had on.
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It was awful walking up and down and the new Australian people on
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I'm Lee St. They just should just give me
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money to I think because they felt sorry for me.
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I think that might have been. Yeah, I sold a lot of needles, I
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must say. And that the fears, the fears
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were always there. I began to feel haunted.
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And then I began to feel worse than haunted.
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I've been panic to feel haunted, as if there was a monkey on my
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back. You've heard that in AAI.
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Suppose this dreadful feeling, this desolation of something
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chasing you, that was how it was for me in the very end.
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It was awful. And you know, I was frightened
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in terror most of the time, and yet trying to look.
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OK. Anyway, back to the hospital.
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I went to the I went into the the alcoholic ward and a man
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there I had a guard looking after me because I I could never
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find my way back where I was going.
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Horsebreaker Steve was there. You miss some of us remember him
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And of course Chica Charlie was there all the time.
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And but, you know, they asked me to put up the steps, the AA12
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steps to, you know, to, for the, in a big room there at
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Hillcrest, so the big recreation room.
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So I've put up these steps that were massive steps.
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So I think the Robert Salisbury now, that's 60 years ago and
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they're still there, but we Robert Salisbury there now and
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we put them onto the wall and I sat back to see if they were
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straight, if everything was straight, you know, because I'm
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like that. I'm a perfectionist and I like
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everything straight. I've got a beautiful house these
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days and I've got Fortier pictures on the walls.
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Perhaps they're all straight because I checked them.
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You know, I've got all these pictures all straightened.
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But I looked at the steps and I was on my own.
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There was nobody there in this big massive hole.
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And I saw it was suggesting to turn my will and my life over to
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the care of God. I couldn't believe it.
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I was like, what sort of religion is this wasn't
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cartridge religion, it wasn't Hinduism.
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It was they were saying give everything to God.
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And I thought, I wonder if that would work.
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I wonder if that would work. And you know, intuitively all of
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my life, I really did feel as if I needed to do something just
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like that if everything had a higher power.
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And I did that that Friday afternoon they sent me into I
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got a day, I got a day out and I came back, you know, try leave
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type of thing. And on the Sunday morning, they
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people came up from Saint Monica's church and they took me
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down to Mass. The priest had been there on the
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Saturday. I went to my confession, which I
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Roman Catholics do, and and then I went to this Saint Monica.
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There's church at Hillcrest, Hilcrest there.
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It's still there. Of course, I was the lady to
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find out that Saint Monica was the mother of Saint Augustine
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and that Saint Monica was indeed an alcoholic.
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She used to go down to the cellar to bring up the wine and
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couldn't make it back up the stairs afterwards.
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She couldn't. That was said to her, you know,
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Saint Monica's had to be taken to North Africa by Saint
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Augustine, but that's another story.
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Anyway, I came back from Saint Monica's walking across and
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there was something strange. There was some something
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pending. I could feel it walking across
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the the lawn there I went into the ward gives us clothes I had
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borrowed to the man who went into me them.
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I sat down at the card table there at Hillcrest and it was
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there this power, this power that I have come to know and
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love in the last 60 years. This power poured into my life
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from what we know in a a as a spiritual experience.
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And truly, I described as the indescribable ecstasy.
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This power came into my life that Sunday morning and April
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1965. And I haven't had a drink since
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that day. God did for me, or I couldn't do
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for myself the insatiable craving that I knew.
19:36
Even as a little boy, that craving for alcohol was lifted
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out of me, a root and branch. It's never come.
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Back. To this day, I've never had the
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temerity to take any credit for staying sober either.
19:48
I was to learn that the problem for alcoholic Cent is in the
19:50
mind. I was told that we have a
19:52
physical allergy coupled by a mental obsession arising out of
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an emotional compulsion. We don't have the disease it has
19:58
us. We are truly powerless over the
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actual centre of the problem in the mind.
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And I was lucky when I say lucky I was.
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It was providential then. I was with the people who had,
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who knew all about the spirit of experience.
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The doctor in charge of the hospital, Doctor Robert in the
20:18
ward. Doctor Robertson, he had.
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A similar, if not identical, perhaps same spiritual
20:25
experience. And you know, I was really
20:28
transformed, transported. They took me down into death row
20:33
and I spent a week in death row in a situation that I have never
20:37
ever been truly able to, trying to think of the world the word
20:44
describe. It was a mystical experience of
20:47
the highest order and it's it changed my life totally and
20:51
completely over the years that I have been with you people.
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You people accepted me before I could accept myself.
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All of what was wrong with me was still with me then, but it
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was all buried. I had to see and accept and see
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all of these different things within myself over the years
21:11
that God has been in control of my life.
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We have a complete psychic change in a A I'm not the same
21:18
person who drank. I'm not the same person who was
21:21
before I drank. We have a complete psychic
21:23
change. The book tells us that that has
21:25
been the case for me. If you fall into the hands of
21:28
the living God, then it would be best you prepare yourself for
21:31
future conflict. I've had conflict after
21:34
conflict. I thought I was going to have a
21:36
completely peaceful, wonderful, problem free life.
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That's it. There's no such a thing.
21:43
If you live a spiritual life, you get trouble.
21:45
God doesn't leave you in peace. I can assure you of that.
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He's never let me in peace. I've had peace.
21:51
I've had utter security. I know it.
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I I never take anything for granted.
21:57
You get almost flattered by the way God looks after you as if
22:01
made me feel anyway, as if I was the only one in the world that
22:06
mattered to him. And that's the love it.
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That's not just of that's divine love and that's, that's what's
22:13
your consensus when this higher power takes control of
22:17
everything. I met a little woman in AAI met
22:20
her up at North Adelaide. I looked at her and it wasn't a
22:23
rehab romance room like that. I looked at her and she looked
22:27
at me. We knew we were meant for each
22:29
other. That was it.
22:30
We just knew. Well, we never got married, but
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we stayed engaged for 46 years and that in itself was proof
22:36
enough. And we lived apart for 46 years,
22:39
set for a little period that when I gave her a room at a
22:41
place that I was had but and she came to Adelaide and birds say I
22:46
found, you know, she said, I said to her one day that after
22:52
some years, I said, look, I don't think I love you anymore.
22:55
This is the sort of thing unmanly men say to women.
22:59
But I said to her, I don't think I love you anymore.
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She says, oh, that's interesting.
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And she looked she she stood there.
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She was very pretty and very prim, prim in Papa, you know,
23:09
she says, you don't love me anymore.
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I says, Nah, she says, you mean you don't have that nice happy
23:15
emotional glow about me? I said, yeah.
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She says, I don't want that rubbish.
23:21
She says, I want commitment. I thought commitment.
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How do you spell that, for God's sake?
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And but see, I I was man enough to know that she was usually
23:31
always right. Everything I did, every, oh, she
23:34
got me out of heaps of trouble because she was an intellectual
23:37
and I got into one or two troubles, you know, not bad
23:42
troubles or criminal trouble, nothing like that.
23:44
But she was always there to help me.
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She was always there to point out where and when I should act.
23:52
And I and I buried her about 12 to 14 years ago.
23:56
And, you know, I think there's not a day going past what I
23:59
haven't thought about her not to do.
24:01
Eddie's sitting there. Eddie got, I'm not saying Eddie
24:04
was on the wrong track, but Eddie got pushed onto the right
24:06
track and put it that way. But this little, this little
24:09
woman, little tiniest failure woman and he loves, she loved
24:13
her Eddie and, and thank God she loved me.
24:17
I'm a happy man today. I've got all of the material
24:20
things I need. I live in a beautiful old
24:22
bluestone cottage. I've got all what the old
24:24
English like big Chippendale chairs and all of that sort of
24:28
stuff. I don't look for approval.
24:30
I don't try. I just be myself.
24:32
I always try to make people like me.
24:34
I don't do that. Now, if you don't like me, Duff,
24:38
I don't like me. So this that's so.
24:41
So you're not the you're the first on the line.
24:44
All right, that'll do me. A A has more than two million
24:48
recovering Alcoholics throughout the world.
24:51
In Australia there are about 18,000 members.
24:56
They're made in over 2000 local meetings spread around the
25:00
country. Meetings range in size from a
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handful in some areas to hundreds or more in larger
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communities. And once again, if anyone you
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know is struggling with alcohol issues, please call Alcoholics
25:15
announcing 1300 Double 22222 or visit their website on aa.org
25:23
dot AU.