When a footpath cafe, believed to be Melbourne's first, sparked controversy in 1958 outside The Oriental Hotel in Collins Street, threats to its continuance would not have alarmed smokers. In Australia then, as in the America of Mad Men, smokers could fag on almost anywhere they pleased: in pubs, offices, trains, schools and into the faces of fusspots who had not taken up the habit. Smokers could even light up inside a restaurant, which now seems astonishing.
As tougher laws and social stigma have gradually encircled their nicotine-stained butts, smokers have largely been forced to inhabit the great Aussie outdoors. That's a big place, but outdoors in this city of famously fine dining includes abundant al fresco restaurants and cafes - places now beset by drifts of cigarette smoke. Take a walk along Acland or Swanston streets or past seafront venues and experience the concentrated waft from kerbside tables.
It means, ironically, that smokers now tend to get the best seats in the house during warm weather: ocean views, cooling breezes, summer sights and (if they could smell them) the fragrances of jasmine, honeysuckle or salty sea spray.
The state's Tobacco Act allows smoking in outdoor dining areas unless they are roofed and have walls that cover more than 75 per cent of the ''notional'' wall area. Yet smoke seeps, annoyingly: it can foul your Angus steak, pollute your panna cotta. ''Would you like some carcinogens with that?'' wait staff might as well inquire as you order a caesar salad.
In 2006, the Queensland Government banned smoking in all public places serving food. Fiona Sharkie, executive director of Quit Victoria, says the laws are so tight that pretty much the only unrestricted space is in smokers' homes. In Victoria, diners tempted outdoors by warm weather face a dilemma unwittingly emphasised by anti-tobacco laws: to eat outdoors with irritating cigarette smoke on the breeze, or to retreat indoors and sacrifice one of the delights of summer? As one fellow gourmand told me, food mysteriously tastes better outdoors - so long as smokers are not about.
State legislators are used to juggling the rights of non-smokers (83.5 per cent of us, according to the latest Quit survey) against the right to use this legal, if incredibly harmful and addictive drug. But how far should quarantining smokers go? Should these pariahs be bundled into smoking rooms, as at some international airports? Or should they be subject to so many restrictions that they just stay home?
Victoria has had much success, thanks largely to Quit and to laws that have banned smoking inside restaurants (2001), workplaces (2006), and pubs/clubs (2007) - and Sharkie says the bans are good for business, with sharp increases in patronage since the bans. This year, smoking was banned in schoolyards and, over the next year or so, anyone smoking in a car carrying under-18s will be fined.
A 2008 survey by the Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer, for Cancer Council Victoria, found that 67.3 per cent of Victorians agreed smoking should be banned in outdoor restaurants/al fresco dining areas, a move Quit advocates. Smokers themselves, reports Sharkie, generally support restrictions and in that same survey, 42.3 per cent of them agreed there should be bans in outdoor dining areas.
Is that so surprising? It has been 20 years since I had a cigarette, but I can still feel the sly dormancy of addiction, whose chief wile is to make you think you are in control - not only of the physical cravings it exacts, but of the psychological and emotional fish-hooks it sinks in.
Someone once said to me that every puff on a cigarette is an inhalation, unconsciously, of self-loathing. Fortunately, I had support from friends and from Quit, but imposed limitations on where I could smoke would surely have helped, too.
Being in a milieu where smoking is not acceptable, where healthier experiences boost self-esteem (I took up swimming) helps prevent picking up that first cigarette. Compassion from non- and former-smokers helps, too.
I wonder how I, an asthmatic, ever smoked: the joy of being able to smell, taste and savour food has been one of the richest rewards of stopping. Especially when eating outdoors on a balmy summer evening.
Andrew Stephens is an Age senior writer.
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