Maurice White: There was a recent Auditor General’s report[65] that showed that rural people have more cavities than those living in fluoridated areas.

John Rogers: Six year-olds in unfluoridated rural areas have 40% more dental decay than same age children in metropolitan Melbourne.

Gerry Dalitz. It’s interesting that it’s nothing like what was talked about before fluoridation – the claim was made that there would be mass caries – which indicates that all the other influences like education and oral hygiene do have a bearing. It’s surprising the number of good mouths there are. There is plenty of scope for research to identify the major factors [in the prevalence of dental caries].

Peter Reade: About 20 years after fluoridation was introduced here, a comparison was made between Queensland, parts of which were fluoridated, and Brisbane, which was not fluoridated. The study[66] showed no difference in rates of caries, an interesting result which was thought likely to be due to the introduction at about the same time of fluoride in toothpastes.

Gerry Dalitz: In dentistry generally, immediately post-war, we had an enormous change in attitudes to teeth among both the profession and the public. People wanted to keep their teeth rather than have dentures. So a certain amount of sociology is also involved.

Ann Westmore: How did the fluoridation debate affect those of you who were dental students at the time?

Don Dalley: We cleaned the teeth at Luna Park quite often, in Dental Health Week!

Owen Crombie: As a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was quite clear that the staff of the University and the Dental Hospital believed fluoridation was ‘a good thing’. We were given various assignments in which we looked up fluoridation experiences in different places, and were fairly comprehensively brain-washed that fluoridation was a good idea.

When I started working as a dentist in 1974, you could almost predict how much amalgam you would have to pour into a six-year-old child’s mouth. About five years later, when fluoride had been in the water for their entire lives, you started to see young children who didn’t need amalgam. It was almost as if someone had turned off a switch.

The next thing that happened was that there was a certain amount of panic among dentists in the suburbs who’d been used to the river of gold [that dealing with dental caries provided] about what we were going to do. That’s been taken up nicely with the explosion in the number of orthodontists and oral and maxillofacial surgeons taking out wisdom teeth.

John Hales: You only have to look at the Yellow Pages to become aware of what is current in dentistry.

Jeremy Graham: I have the same recollections as Owen in relation to fluoridation. After leaving the Navy in 1980, I got a job in Springvale, treated kids up to seven years. I left in 1986. We of course had to keep figures for the Dental Hospital about the number of referrals for clearances, which halved, and for fillings, which also halved. It was the effect of fluoride coming through.

I myself started having fluoride tablets when I was about six, as my father was a dentist. As Owen said we were well and truly brainwashed about the benefits of fluoride here at the hospital, and still are.

Another recollection of Phil Sutton, he had enormous hands.

Hector Orams: Television advertisements also emphasise whiter teeth and people are much more aware of their teeth.

Peter Reade: To go back to Phil Sutton, talking about extractions. I inherited him as a staff member and learned something from him, his technique of extraction, which went against everything I was taught. He used to do “pot stirring”, which involved rotating the weakened tooth, rather than the way most people were taught which was to expand the bone by buccal lingual movement.

John Harcourt: Bill Smith,[67] the Chief Superintendent of the Hospital for a long time, used to do that too and he was superb at extracting teeth. But, unlike Sutton, he was a very small man.

Jeremy Graham; The W.T. Smith award[68] was named for him.

Ann Westmore: To what extent did the debate about fluoride, and the frontline place that dentists took in it, stimulate dental research?

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine