Existential Concerns at Dunedin's Captain Cook Tavern

the captain cook tavern — Image credit: Canva

In the golden days of Dunedin student life, on the corner of Albany and Great King Streets, the longest-running bar in Dunedin stood in a grey brick building. The Captain Cook Tavern was a reliable choice for local students — Scarfies, as they are often called because of the scarves they wear in the frigid temperatures — who were looking to get completely wasted on any day of the week. We lovingly called it The Cook for short.

The Cook was a landmark and a historical site, to say the least. It is my belief that it had been in operation for over 100 years just like the university’s Capping Show and its all-male Selwyn Ballet. My professors drank there when they were students. There was no one in the vicinity who wasn’t very familiar with its establishment and culture. I took my parents there on my graduation day because it was such an important part of my life at Otago.

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It was especially popular among the first-year students, meaning that at night, it was generally filled to the brim with eighteen-year-olds and nothing else. Inside The Cook, you could lose not just your dignity, but your very humanity. That kind of thing is pretty fun for the youngsters.

The Cook held happy hours that would now be the envy of the world— pints of beer for two dollars. If you got a whole pitcher for eight dollars, you had the privilege of standing on the concrete floor holding the glass in one hand and the plastic pitcher in the other while you mingled with your friends, hoping nobody in the crowded room would bump into you and make you spill it all over your shirt. For just eight dollars, you could drink until you were dizzy and forget that you were ever an intelligent human enrolled in a prestigious university at all.

Back then, students were exactly whatever they wanted to be with no limitations. We were wild.

A small city in the South Island of New Zealand, where half the population disappears when the university is not in session, Dunedin resembled something like the mythical Tortuga in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. University students were free to do almost anything they wanted, and we wanted to party hard. There were pubs galore, houses overflowing with parties, and endless nightlife of the sleaziest and cheapest kind. It was whatever we could afford on a student budget.

I heard that several years ago, just after I had graduated, the university cracked down on the fun and put an end to the couch-burning, bottle-throwing riot-like atmosphere that used to liven up Castle Street. That was depressing news. I’m sure it’s never been the same there.

Personally, I think it’s very important to allow young adults to test the limits of their livers and disgrace themselves in public over and over before they emerge into the world to be a functioning part of society.

I was a philosophy student. I was looking for answers. My philosophy textbooks only took me so far. I needed to get drunk, too.

Every time I got close to enlightenment or a breakthrough, I would instead turn my attention to partying. Whether it was a low-key happy hour at the campus-owned pub or a wild night at a reggae concert, I wanted to lose myself in the crowds of insanity. I just hoped that on the other side, I’d find myself again — or maybe I’d find something else.

The Captain Cook Tavern was the perfect place to completely devolve into a pillaging, inhibition-free, primitive-minded adventurer. You wouldn’t wear your best clothes to The Cook in case you had liquids spilled all over you or you accidentally fell on the beer-and-vomit-covered floors. You didn’t go there to have intellectual conversations, only slurred sentences and laughter of the most mischievous kind.

Upstairs there was a dance floor, and inevitably, the subpar DJ would play a remix of John Denver’s Country Roads followed promptly by Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On a Prayer. Girls in tube tops that barely resembled single pieces of plastic wrapped around their torsos would stand on chairs screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs. Downstairs, there was a line outside down the block to get in. If you got there late enough, you got to witness the vomiters and their friends trying to get them home, walking back to their flats on the cold streets at three in the morning.

The next day, we’d all resume our studies. Some of the most drunken, embarrassing, and dirty of the regulars you’d find at The Cook were highly intelligent law students — I know them personally. They’re now members of parliament, high-ranking NZ diplomats, and law firm partners. The law students knew how to enjoy drunken debauchery better than any other major. They knew how to liven up their existence on Earth.

I wanted to learn philosophy, and I wouldn’t miss a class for anything, even a hangover. Half the students in the lecture theaters were red-faced, dying, and in the same boat, as were the professors from time to time.

One of my favorite Philosophy 101 lessons was about Pascal’s Wager, where we considered the pros and cons of believing in God. Is it better to believe in God and turn out to be wrong or better to be an atheist and find out after death that God exists?

Another one of the best lessons was about Paley’s watch. We had to consider whether the universe seems to be constructed as a result of intelligent design rather than randomness and meaninglessness. I taught these lessons as a philosophy tutor in my postgrad years. I loved to watch the first years arguing and debating about the existence of God, an intelligent designer. And then we’d all go out for drinks. That was the most important thing.

Imagine spending the academic day thinking and writing about whether it’s a good idea to believe in God and then going out to drown your rationality in Speight’s beer at The Cook. Imagine attending a workshop about metaphysics and the deepest questions of existence, then living totally on the surface all night long.

Imagine considering whether all of life is part of a great tapestry of intelligent design and then going out on the town to act out of total lack of intelligence.

Sometimes, if you were lucky, you could disappear into the darkness of these suffocating crowds at The Cook and actually know yourself for a minute. In the fuzziness of the binge, you could actually get some clarity at times.

I outgrew the Cook when I was in my third year. After too many times walking its sticky floors and pushing through the wall-to-wall crowds, having my drinks spilled countless times, and almost getting in fights with drunk girls, I was ready to graduate to more orderly venues like Eureka, a pub a few blocks away where the older, more sophisticated people drank.

I felt that I had risen above the debauchery of the lowest mental levels of humanity. Sometimes I went back to The Cook for early afternoon drinks, but it wasn’t the same.

Dunedin was a lively spot on the map of the globe where humanity was free to express itself exactly as it wanted to. It proved that one could consider existential dilemmas and then have total meltdowns at night. Student life there mirrored responsible adult life. One could be highly intelligent, as humans are, and also highly idiotic. It’s fun to act out of your basest animal instincts sometimes, you know. To just let loose.

The Captain Cook Tavern is now gone forever, replaced by some other kind of bar that can’t possibly be as legendary. The Cook will never be forgotten. We rose to the heights of academic and intellectual human thought on campus and went there to descend to the depths of drunken fog. The university put an end to this possible experience for all of eternity; it is no more.

I attended an alumni event a few years ago and found that the values of the whole place had changed. The campus is now a place of highly prestigious learning and nothing else. There are all kinds of rules now preventing people from indulging. But those of us who attended the golden days of the Scarfies know that it’s important to experience all the corners of the mind’s possibilities in order to grow.

Being a student requires learning about your own base and disgusting potential alongside your highest good. We have to know our own duality to go forth into the world with a degree in life.

Existential meltdowns aren’t possible in the darkness of a pub on a Friday night without the contrast of having touched the mind’s powers of reasoning in the daylight. I hope that someday Dunedin returns to its glory days where eighteen-year-olds are free to explore all corners of their humanity in order to be useful citizens of the world.