Concern At Drinking, Violence Among Australian Teen-agers

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31236, 7 December 1966, Page 27

Concern At Drinking, Violence Among Australian Teen-agers

(Special Crspdt. N.Z.P.A.)

SYDNEY, Dec. 6.

Australia, where nearly half the population is under 25, is often described as a young country for young people, but never before have teen-agers and people in their early twenties dominated the news as much as they do now. Young people are currently capturing the headlines across the length and breadth of this vast continent, and they are not coming out of it very well.

Sample newspaper headlines during the last few days read: “Police Hunt Wild Teen-agers’ Gangs,” “Teen-agers on Loose in Town of Sin,” “Students Louts and Thugs, says M.P.s,” “Teen-age Sex Blamed for V.D. Rise.”

Teen-agers are being slated from Perth to Brisbane to Sydney, but the Victorian capital of Melbourne has shown up as the main city where “the young ones” could be dubbed “the wild ones.”

The Melbourne police have set up a plain-clothes five-man “street team” to reinforce

regular patrols trying to restrain a growing wave of teenage violence, which is, according to some reports, turning Melbourne into a city of terror. This follows continued mass brawls between rival groups of “mads” and “sharpies,” a wild shooting affray, an openair drinking orgy by 2000 youngsters, and running battles by marauding teenagers, some of them armed. On top of this, Melbourne University students were described as “educated louts

. . . uncouth hooligans . . . young thugs . . . unwashed, undesirable, unkempt, uncultured and unprofitable” by members of the State Legislative Assembly. The attack came after student demonstrations against President Johnson when he visited Melbourne in October. The secretary of the Victorian Police Association, Inspector W. D. Crowley, added his views on the demonstrations when he said: “Throughout the world, rest-

less groups of young people are supporting all types of causes and banding together to generally express dissatisfaction.”

Sydney has seen its expected outbreak of violence, which usually coincides with the opening of the surfing season, with brawling, drunken knife fights around popular ocean beaches. Brisbane police and church authorities are still trying to stamp out under-age drinking in the city, with decreasing success as hotels and beer gardens get busier in the warmer weather.

And from Bunbury, 120 miles south of Perth in Western Australia, came a claim from church leaders that the town was morally sick, teenagers as young as 13 and 14 helping to produce more illegitimate children a head of population than any other town in Australia. New South Wales was told that cases of venereal disease in the State had doubled in the last seven years, mainly

because of increased teen-age sexual promiscuity, and Victoria was warned of “an alarming growth” in shoplifting, mainly by teen-age girls. On the brighter side of youth, political coroners reported that young people had never played so influential a part in an Australian election as they did on November 26, and Australia’s youngest member of Parliament, 22-year-old Mr Andrew Young, of Adelaide, said: “I would never have won without the help of the Young Liberals.” Nearly half of Australia’s six million voters are under 35, and observers noted that young people were taking more interest in politics and doing a lot of work in the party machines. Next week, at least one young man will capture kinder headlines when he is declared “youth of the year.” He will have been selected by the Lions organisation for his academic, sporting and leadership abilities.