Cigar Weekly

Some grandly unheroic public smoking is needed if the habit is to be quelled, writes Anson Cameron.

WHEN I WAS NINE I attended a rural pantomime in which my horse-faced aunt stepped from stage left onto a briny deep of hay bales to sing a sea shanty and wrestle a scaly serpent. The aunt was smoking a pipe. Perhaps she believed sailors obligated in this regard, but the pipe was lit - smoke choofing from its bowl with every verse she sang. There was no need for this. As embers crackled and leapt from its bowl her moustache began to smoulder and the smell of burning whiskers overpowered the aromatic tobacco.

That day a fever of repentance broke out among the boys of my town. We decided to hand in our smokes. There followed the greatest reimbursement of treasures since the Spanish were forced to give back Montezuma's gold. Cigars were smuggled back into fathers' golf buggies; pipes reappeared in the gloveboxes of utilities; menthols were returned to mothers' handbags. I remember my own father rearing back from the top drawer of his desk and snatching Gunna, his favourite pipe, from in among the rubber bands and Quick Eze there and twisting it slowly before his eyes to examine its authenticity, before asking that pipe, "Where, in the name of Dickens, have you been?" In a wide hinterland surrounding that theatrical disgrace a survey among the young would have revealed smoking as a lost vice.

It was simple. If an old trout like that was going to take her thrill at the business end of a Meerschaum Large Acorn with silver inlay, then we felt a sudden urge to abstain. Smoking, for us, was debased as a pleasure. We were quitting cold turkey.

It will come as no surprise that the director of this pantomime, in which my aunt was cast as an old salt, was a doctor. Not content with battling microbes and epidemics, doctors are tireless social engineers. Lurking in every medico is a dictator. Doctors paddle upstream from the liver to the appetite. They paddle upstream from the lung to the addiction. The moment they take ownership of your affliction they track it to its source and if its source is your behaviour then ownership of your behaviour naturally follows.

In this case Doctor Ferguson had diagnosed attractive people as the problem. The cool and the beautiful were leading us to a ruinous addiction that was affecting our lungs, and our lungs were his bailiwick. Audrey Hepburn with her foot-long cigarette holder. Jean-Paul Belmondo with his filterless French cigarettes and his pitiless stare. The gods smoked. The antidote was my aunt. If Audrey could make you take em up, then the horse-faced aunt could make you give 'em up, was his theory.

Doctor Ferguson was a far more accomplished social engineer than his contemporary replacements. He took on Big Tobacco at its own game. Back in those days a medico had some idea of how to manipulate public thought. But doctors, it seems to me, since the days of Goebbels and Ferguson, have lost their appetite for total control.

The Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association has called for the cessation of all government funding for films and plays that display scenes of smoking. This is the weediest censorship imaginable and suggests its members are a gutless pack of ghouls standing by mumbling half-measure solutions while we smoke ourselves like kippers. One must ask oneself: do they care any more? Have they lost their urge to propagandise?

I only mention Alexander Downer because while he may not have my aunt's moustache, he matches her brimming reservoir of uncool megalitre for megalitre. Of course, he won't be playing a lone hand. The repulsive abound. Farnham, Costello, Newton, Sandilands, Bishop, Brereton, Hanson . . . the roll-call of the hideous is long. Horse-Faced Aunts are a-dime-a-dozen, so to speak. A cornucopia of the uncool must be cast in blockbusters and supplied with the makings. The ugly must be paid to choof it up on the big screen. Government grants must be given to fatties to suck on cigars, contracts drawn up for the gawky and buck-toothed to roll their own. And let doctors, if they are intent on wielding our cinema like a scalpel, help fund these many disfigured idols.