Tom Roper: In those reviews we started to prepare for health promotion exercises and we recruited people like Linda Stephens[42] from NSW. She took the health promotion role in the Victorian Health Commission, providing some oomph in that area and also in other areas, including the AIDS area. I was very fortunate to have huge backing from my Cabinet colleagues, and in particular our health policy committee.

It’s not directly related to this, but just a month before our first election the Cabinet agreed that I could fund a gay health service, which is not the kind of thing that political parties and Cabinets often do. So I had a lot of support. And it was a bit of a stand-up start when David started to get the Quit material together.

John Cain: What about Phillip Adams[43] and the healthy lifestyle (‘Life. Be in it’) campaign?

Tom Roper: That was under Brian Dixon.[44]

John Cain: So the late 1970s? Right, OK.

Harley Stanton:[45] While I wasn’t involved in the political or advocacy side of things until after 1980, I ran the first Quit smoking programs associated with the Adventist Church in 1969.

That had started when a number of church leaders who had an interest in medical and health matters attended the First World Conference on Smoking and Health in New York. At that time, Wayne McFarland and Elman Folkenberg established what they called the ‘Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking’.

The Five-Day Plan was widely disseminated around the world, including in developing countries. It was quite influential at a community level in raising awareness of the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and the harms associated with smoking.

The Adventists involved produced a large amount of media material including 1 in 20,000, a very early film which may still be available in the Adventist headquarters’ office.

Those Five-Day programs were run widely in the community all across Australia. And I think probably many hundreds of thousands or people – very large numbers – would actually come for five days. You can question the evaluation of it over a longer time, but I think it did raise a lot of community awareness.

It went on television and there’s a TV documentary from Sydney made in the late 1960s or early ‘70s by a young American named Dr Siegfried Kotz. He was a very innovative and influential person in disseminating a lot of this information. I think at a community level that had a significant influence in those early days until it was gradually superseded.

Michelle Scollo:[46] I’d like to ask David a question. I was looking through some Cancer News issues from the 1960s and ‘70s the other day. I had been under the impression that the Quit Campaign was the first group in Australia to do sponsorship of sport involving sporting heroes with an anti-smoking message.

But I see that David was actually doing that with footballers well before then, in the 1960s.

David Hill: Yes, that’s right. Does everyone remember Harry Beitzel? [47] For those unfamiliar with the name, he had been a football umpire and he was running a PR company.

After talking with Nigel, he asked all the leading VFL (Victorian Football League) players who didn’t smoke if they’d sign up to a stop smoking campaign. Flyers were produced along the lines that ‘Peter Hudson doesn’t smoke’ with a nice picture of him. So the idea was that the kids would collect these cards of non-smoking players. I’d say that would be from about ’67.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine