David Hill: That reminder is a little embarrassing. (Laughter) Garry {Egger} and Simon {Chapman} in particular will remember that we were taught at university that fear arousal was counter-productive. We were quite carried away with this evidence, such as it was. Looking back it was Micky-Mouse sort of research. But it was certainly a strong, prevailing academic view that fear arousal didn’t work.

Simon Chapman: We all had it drilled into us.

Garry Egger: In my experience it was challenged first by John Bevins[48] with the sponge ad. He and I were working on it and I said, ‘You can’t use fear, it doesn’t work.’ He said, ‘I don’t believe that. I believe it works under certain conditions.’

After that, the research changed. So that experience provided a good lesson, that you don’t always follow research that doesn’t have a practical basis.

David Hill: I always thought you should ask the common sense question which I didn’t do. None of us I think did much. Can an advertisement create fear? Fear is what you feel when a dinosaur or a lion is chasing you. Obviously advertisements arouse concern and a bit of anxiety. Eventually we learned that lesson.

Rohan Greenland:[49] Politicians understand this of course with their negative advertising in election campaigns. They know that to change behaviour, that is votes, you’ve got to scare people.

Simon Chapman: If you go back to the 1950s something like 70 per cent of males smoked post-war in Australia.[50] By the early 1980s, it had gone down substantially by about 30 percentage points. So what was going on in that interim period? We’ve picked out some influential reports and a few NGO campaigns and so forth.

I went through a period where I did quite a lot of expert witnessing for asbestos cases where the asbestos industry was trying to sheet home responsibility for illness to the fact that asbestos workers smoked. So they {Public health people?} gathered up a lot of material from newspapers and magazines like Pix, People and the Reader’s Digest. I’ve got a folder of it.

In fact, there were a lot of articles in the 1960s in newspapers and magazines., saying, ‘More bad news on smoking’ and things like that. That acted as the effective intervention and people were taking notice of it.

Harley Stanton: On that topic, back in the late 1960s or very early 1970s, Choice did a major report on smoking and health. I have a copy of it somewhere.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine