Chapter 4: Towards a History of Deviance: Policing Drunkenness in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New South Wales

On 22 December 1849, Bell's Life in Sydney reported on the arrest of Amelia Beard for the crime of public drunkenness. Described as a ‘young lady … known to the police as a keen shaver’, Constable Halliday initially ‘found it necessary to remonstrate with her on the impropriety of her conduct’, but when she responded with ‘a volley of abusive language against him, accompanied with a pantomimic exhibition of talons and legs, which left most remarkable notice of her visitations upon his person’, she was promptly arrested and charged with ‘with being excessively drunk and disorderly in one of the main streets of the metropolis’.¹ Beard was one of the thousands arrested by the New South Wales police for public drunkenness or causing drunken disorder that year, and she herself was arrested close to a 100 times during her life for minor offences including drunkenness, vagrancy, obscene language, minor assault, receiving stolen goods, robbery, damaging property and soliciting.² But understanding this incident – or the offence of drunkenness in general – as simply a crime fails to do it justice. This kind of policing was merely the formal expression of a much broader contest over public order in which the offence of drunkenness had a symbolic role. As I argue, we can use the concept of deviance to help understand Beard's arrest and read the policing of drunkenness as a crucial form of modern urban social control.