In the 1960s, many Australians were smokers. According to Cancer Council Victoria, in 1964 58 per cent of men and 28 per cent of women smoked.
At the time, tobacco advertising was allowed. And, while countries like the US and the UK had banned it, major tobacco companies took full advantage of this in Australia.
That is until Victorian GP Dr Nigel Gray decided to devote himself to raising awareness of the dangers of smoking and to push for the end of tobacco advertising.
Dr Gray become a pioneer in tobacco control, both in Australia and abroad, and he's a key figure featured in a new ACMI exhibition about anti-tobacco advertising, which recently opened in Melbourne.
The exhibition shows how campaigners like Dr Gray fought back against the tobacco industry and their powerful advertising.
"What was clear, from just a number of studies throughout the 60s, particularly in the UK, was that smoking advertising, even if it was geared towards or notionally pitched at adults, portrayed smoking as cool, as sophisticated, as something that marked you as a fully grown adult, and so therefore appealed to youth and teenagers in particular," historian Thomas Kehoe tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
Dr Gray was determined to address this misperception across a wide audience, so he pushed for humorous anti-smoking ads, along with some confronting ones.
He roped in high profile comedians, including actors Fred Parslow, Warren Mitchell and Miriam Karlin, who would all feature in iconic 1971 anti-smoking ads. Many did it for free.
"The aim of that campaign in 1971 was to create a bit of a public and media storm to convince the federal government at that time to ban tobacco advertising on television," Kehoe says.
"But the ads themselves were meant to elicit a hostile response from television channels."
Which they did, Kehoe says.
Some TV channels refused to air one particular ad. It featured Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the Australian virologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1960, and who was also the first Australian of the Year.
"When the ads were rejected by the TV channels, [Dr Gray] went to the press and said, 'The channels are preventing the first Australian of the Year from telling the public this important public health message'," Ketoe says.
"And of course, this created the exact kind of firestorm that he was hoping they would create and forced the government to … allow them to be aired."
The sponge ad
In 1972, Gough Whitlam became prime minister and one of the first things he did was ban the broadcasting of tobacco ads. This was to be phased out over three years from 1973.
But print advertising was allowed to continue.
So, by the 1980s, anti-smoking advertising became more confronting. Many tapped into the loss of family members from smoking-related causes, and highlighted other significant smoking-related medical facts.
One memorable example was the ad featuring a sponge.
"So the sponge ad [has] really become an iconic anti-tobacco ad, not just in Australia but around the world. It shows a sponge wringing out the amount of tar that the average smoker inhales [over] a period of a year," Kehoe explains.
"[It has a] voiceover explaining that that is the accumulation of toxic chemicals in the body. So it's the first kind of visceral, shocking ad that aired on Australian television."
Finally in December 1989, the Smoking and Tobacco Products Advertisements (Prohibition) Act was passed. It banned all forms of tobacco advertisements, including those in print media, on billboards and in sporting sponsorship.
Work continued
Anti-smoking campaigners had more action planned. In 1997, the first national campaign Every Cigarette is doing you Damage was released. It was aimed at 18-40-year-old smokers – and it worked, helping to dramatically reduce the number of young smokers.
Since then, there have been a number of anti-smoking initiatives, including the introduction of plain cigarette packaging and restrictions on where smokers can smoke.
Now Australia has one of the lowest smoking rates among OECD countries .
"People have seemed to have cottoned on to the idea that smoking is incredibly bad for you, and likely to kill two-thirds of the people who do it," Kehoe says.
"But I think we've got to take into account the suite of measures that were deployed in Australia to bring people to that resolution."
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