Deadly Enemies

Ian Tyrrell, who teaches at the University of New South Wales, is well known to U.S. historians for his studies of temperance and environmental subjects, often presented with an international perspective. This book, which investigates Australia's relationship with tobacco products, has a similar broadened focus, in this case making comparisons with the course of tobacco-related history in the United States and occasionally England. What readers will find is a balanced yet provocative presentation in which Tyrrell assesses pro- and anti-tobacco forces, personalities, and issues in Australia in ways that also inform our understanding of tobacco-related controversies in the American experience. The saga of pro- and anti-tobacco activity in Australia dates back well into the nineteenth century. The consumption of tobacco took many forms (chewing, snuffing, smoking pipes and cigars) and culminated in the emergence of the cigarette in the late nineteenth century. Cigarettes served to galvanize anti-tobacco forces in what seemed to represent an outburst of "'moral panic'" about "the newly popular 'coffin nails.'" Tyrrell stresses, however, that much more than "wowserism," an Australian version of repressive fundamentalism, activated early anti-smoking activists. As in the American experience, health-related considerations, ranging from concerns about stunted physical and mental growth to developing "tobacco heart" and various forms of cancer, were especially important in the early reformist campaigns against such despised tobacco commodities as the cigarette

Coca · Consumption · Tobacco industry · Australian History and Society · Canadian Identity and History