It’s notable in Australia that there’s never been a Chair of Tobacco Control or a Chair of Tobacco for the country’s most important health issue. It’s not getting institutionalised by groups who don’t understand the broader nature of the problem.

I think that’s been a really important advantage we’ve had that the alcohol and drug people, and the obesity people, don’t have because they’ve got all these little experts.

Garry Egger: It’s been tried. Lyn, you were involved bringing together all these silos, the Heart Foundation, the Cancer Councils and metabolic health silos for example.

Lyn Roberts: Yes, (laughter). It is hard. It is a challenge. But we shouldn’t get too distracted by the overweight and obesity discussion today. I feel a bit more positive about it because we are starting to get the building blocks in place now. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Mike Daube: One area that over time in tobacco I always worry about, but that worry never materialises. That is about the next generations of campaigners coming through. We know in this area it doesn’t need all that many people.

Simon Chapman: Although the average age in this room is pretty advanced. (Laughter)

Mike Daube: To pursue two themes for a second. Throughout this era, there have never been very many people involved. Compare us with obesity. Compare us with alcohol and drugs.

And, regarding the next generations coming through, I find that really exciting and it’d be nice to trace that through the decades.

Simon Chapman: Another broad theme is that if you compare the rhetoric and attention to community-based, bottom-up stuff in those other public health and health promotion areas, it’s far more pronounced than in tobacco control.

We are quite concentrated in top-down strategy. The talk I always give to students about this is to say that with chronic disease you’re not going to get communities revved up in the same way they are about road safety outside a school, for example. So you’re there for the long haul to do it, and therefore it has to be professionalised. Because people are not going to vote on it, and they’re not going to come out to a public meeting on it.

So the model of the Non-Smokers Movement, Brian McBride etcetera is not really on. I went to a couple of their meetings and that was enough. They are a very, very atypical bunch of people, if I can put it that way. They are people who eat, live drink, and breathe tobacco control.

Dorothy Reading: I think the point at which that (community-based involvement) changed briefly was when passive smoking became a legitimate issue you could complain about. Before that, all of these non-smokers were not allowed to open their mouths about this issue and were shunned at parties, as we know.

With Peter Wilenski’s passive smoking ruling in the public service,[181] and Hirayama’s incredible study about the non-smoking wives of Japanese smokers,[182] suddenly it was perfectly legitimate for non-smokers, who were the vast majority, after all, to do something and to say we want non-smoking restaurants and so on.

Simon Chapman: They were going to do it for their office and they might have ahemed to the waiter. But they wouldn’t organise their opposition.

Dorothy Reading: Well no, they did it in schools, where staff rooms became non-smoking. And in hospitals, when I started at Quit, there was still smoking. They had to get non-smoking areas, then smoking areas, and then no smoking at all. I think the smoke-free environments area made great gains because the non-smokers were able to say something.

Simon Chapman: If you open a text-book by Fran Baum,[183] there is nothing in common with what she says we should be doing and what we do.

Garry Egger: Yes but there is in other areas. I don’t want to bang on about this.

Dorothy Reading: You have. (Laughter)

Garry Egger: But surely the point of the day is to learn lessons.

Lyn Roberts : No. We’re trying to document a history, though we’re happy to pick up the lessons along the way.

Garry Egger: All right. I won’t bang on about it.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine