smoking ban

This is from the Age's Good Weekend magazine on 9 December 1989, in a kind of 'farewell to the 80s' article called 'Remembrance of things passed' (p. 126+) by Anthony Dennis and David Monaghan. I dug it up because I was having a think about when smoking began to be banned in earnest in public places in Victoria/Australia (ironically, within an hour or so of being interested in this, I saw a headline in today's paper which mentioned a Crown employee suing that organisation as he had contracted lung cancer, he alleges, from working in a part of the casino that allows smoking still). 

I was only reviewing the Age in the 70s and 80s searching on terms like 'smoking ban' and not getting that far, but marvelling at yet another example of the ways in which general attitude appears to have been 'this is how it has always been, people smoke everywhere and that is what we are used to, so there is clearly no way it can ever change'. 

What surprises me I guess is the way that a lot of the reportage is taking the side of smokers eg the piece above. Maybe it's because smokers are so bad tempered, notoriously. I remember complaining to a worker at the Gladstone Park Woolworths that smokers were always getting served ahead of everyone else at the 8 items or less counter and she said it was because they got shitty if they didn't get immediate attention.