I’d like to start with an overview of Witness seminars so that you know a little about them and why they are important.

If you think about the experience of living as a human being, biologically speaking, it’s clear that medicine and science, often backed by political action and public education, have transformed that experience, most profoundly since the 1920s. Much of the work that has underpinned this transformation is still within living memory.

Australian researchers and clinicians, public health activists and politicians have played an outstanding part in the associated knowledge explosion, far out of proportion to the size of our nation’s population and in spite of its geographic remoteness from centres of learning with which we usually compare ourselves.

So much has happened in Australia. Yet too little of it has been recorded and evaluated. An intellectually rigorous and well-informed oral record is vital for current and future generations.

This Witness seminar is based on a tradition going back several decades in the UK and about a decade in Australia. Through such day-long seminars and round-table discussions, key participants in a particular area of science or medicine reflect on their work and review its consequences.

The seminars are an exercise in peer reviewed oral history, a means by which the recollections of witnesses can be stimulated and the drama of their work relived.

The seminars are recorded - so I hope everyone will speak up and try not to speak over each other - and then the day’s proceedings will be converted into an electronic form and put on the web for wider dissemination and future research.

After today, the transcript will be sent to all participants so that you can ensure you’re happy with what you’ve said or make any corrections or alterations as necessary. We’ve had a few late withdrawals from today’s seminar and we will send the transcript to them also and to others who couldn’t be here. We’ll include their input either as footnotes to the transcript or as appendices.

We hope today will bring out the inner workings, the ideas and the debates that never reached the academic literature, material that may be crucial to the history of the field but which is normally lost to the historical record.

In this way, seminars such as we are part of today can make a profound contribution to the public understanding of science and medicine. I look forward to working with you to bring it to completion.

I have a framework of themes for discussion today and, as we proceed, I want you all to feel you can contribute any recollections, anecdotes and comments that you may have.

By its very nature the discussion may go in unforeseen directions. That’s one of the wonderful things about Witness seminars. They can open up hitherto unexplored territory, posing questions and providing explanations that were not predicted.

Let’s start by looking at the rationale that was built over time to underpin the work of tobacco control.

As long ago as 1950, and even before,[7] there were studies by researchers overseas that provided evidence of the impact of smoking on health.

These were used in Australia in the early 1960s when small-scale research started in earnest. For example local researchers measured the tar content of cigarettes and smoking rates in sections of the Australian population. Others assessed knowledge of and attitudes to smoking and to the advertising of tobacco, while still others monitored the tobacco industry’s voluntary code of conduct.

I thought we could start with some of our elder statesmen, Mike Daube[8] for insights into that early international perspective, and David Hill[9] and others for his recollections of the early local response.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine