Simon Chapman: I think the idea, and the killer facts that strengthen the evidence, are critical. But I think there’s a step we’ve left out as well.

I think a lot of this was down to B.U.G.A. U.P.[58] in the late 1980s. What I noticed myself was that in the pre-B.U.G.A. U.P. period of my tobacco involvement if in social situations you said to people that you worked in the tobacco control area – well, you didn’t use that expression for a start, it was anti-smoking – they’d move away from you. At parties, they’d expect you to turn the music down and wouldn’t expect you to have a second drink.

After B.U.G.A. U.P., it brought ‘small l’ liberals and lefties into the picture. It also started to slowly radicalise, that’s probably the wrong word, energise conservative medical groups like the AMA[59] who’d done nothing up to that point other than to say we need more information. And then the Colleges[60] and the AMA started including legislative reforms in their submissions.

I think there was a cultural shift brought about by the undeniable humour and hard-hitting political messages of B.U.G.A. U.P. which was active mainly in NSW, Victoria, and WA.

Harley Stanton: I was going through some of my files and I have some of these MOP UP newsletters from the early 1980s in Victoria. I don’t know who started that here.

Simon Chapman: We started a group called MOP UP. Our main claim to fame was that we got Paul Hogan[61] out of Winfield advertising. We wrote repeatedly to the Advertising Standards Council and eventually we had a hearing under Sir Richard Kirby, the Chairman of the Industrial Relations Commission. He basically agreed with us and Hogan went.

Members of B.U.G.A. U.P. came to our first meeting. They were anarchist-kind of guys who said, ‘All this letter-writing stuff is great. You do that and this is what we’re going to do.’ You can now see their work catalogued on a fantastic web-site.[62]

They started off as a bunch of bearded anarchist types and then professionals started getting involved. People like Jo Cavanagh down here, and Andy Zdenkowski, a GP in Newcastle who got arrested.

Garry Egger: Initially B.U.G.A. U.P. was just defacing billboards. Then Phil Rubinstein,[63] the ex-advertising guy, talked to them and said, ‘You’ve got to make the message mean something. Change what they’re saying to something that’s negative.’

David Hill: It was very helpful to have some of these doctors among the ranks of B.U.G.A. U.P., especially when they came before magistrates in the courts. One of them in Victoria was a leading plastic surgeon, John Anstee[64] who’d been mentored by the iconic Benny Rank.[65]

Simon Chapman: In the very early days of B.U.G.A. U.P. I used to get all sorts of messages along the lines of ‘You’ve got to stop this. It’s going to ruin everything’. But soon that message changed quite quickly to ‘This is fantastic. You’ve got to do more of this.’

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine