The never-ending draw of burning love

It was unpleasant but not so unpleasant, I'm disturbed to admit, I had to grope for the exit and come up for air.

Instead, I just sat there, shrouded in a smog of familiarity, struggling to sneak a word in between paroxysms of crepitant sputum-generation courtesy of my mate's pack-a-day partner.

Eventually, she pocketed her hideously expensive tailor-mades and left both of us reformed puffers to it for the afternoon but not before her vaporous incursions had stirred something dormant inside to mount another sly, synaptic seduction of my subconscious.

That night, I was visited by the tangible anticipation of a fresh deck (cellophane, cardboard, foil). I dreamt of exquisite rods balancing between my fingers. I dreamt up an entire percussion section of hinged lighters snapping open and shut in a stainless-steel orchestra. I dreamt of precision, ignition, nutrition ... inhalation ... exhilaration ... exhalation ... domination.

Repeat.

It wasn't the first time in the past 14 years I've dreamed a dream of durries and I woke, as I always do, ashamed.

Had I found myself covered in someone else's blood, I would've felt less guilty than I did that forlorn Sunday morn, fearing my dream was real and, somewhere in the previous several hours, I'd succumb to the wheezing siren song of a gasper, the break-glass reliability of a rollie, the sexy sting of a cool-as-ice dart (menthols ... so wrong, yet somehow so right), the finality of just one more coffin nail before I die.

Such is the hold cigarettes have on those of us who quit, not because we wanted to, but because we knew we had to (the guilt trip of impeding fatherhood is powerful stuff), barely a day goes by without at least one or two flashbacks reminding us of that charismatic/aramotic/asthmatic former life.

When I was trying to let go (it took several attempts), I found the internet, like an alcoholic's sponsor, helpful in that it would convince me I was on the righteous path. I'd search for something along the lines of "benefits of quitting smoking" and be bombarded with aphorisms covering everything from phoenix-like cardiovascular resurrection to yearly savings equivalent to an overseas holiday.

And the internet continues to be a source of reassurance. A quick search of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare site shows, as of July last year, only 11.6 per cent of adults smoked daily in 2019. That's down from 12.8 per cent in 2016 and, since 1991, when it was 25 per cent, the smoking rate has effectively halved.

Of course, there's always another side to every story, and it was sobering to read this week the results of a study led by Australian National University researchers which showed smoking-related illnesses cause half of all deaths of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders over the age of 45.

According to the study, one of the reasons smoking, literally, maintains such a stranglehold on black communities can be traced back to the colonial practice of paying Indigenous workers in nicotine rations, something which continued until the '70s.

As a white kid who grew up in the era when that connivance was just ending, I can't comment on the scourge of cigarettes on Aboriginal existence, but I can certainly trace my own collision with addiction to that period because smoking was rife.

From those celebrities and sporting venues instilling the sterling idea to ("Anyhow ... ") go poison ourselves, to being groomed with kiddy-sized packs of glow-tipped musk sticks and paper-wrapped tubes of chocolate available from the corner shop before we were legally old enough (16!) to purchase the real thing; to being hermetically cocooned in the Kingswood as both parents populated it with clouds heaving with 7000 different chemicals, all those Gen-X legends of nicotine-associated child abuse are true.

If it weren't so detrimental to the national health bill, it's laughable to think of what was deemed acceptable back then.

My favourite totem of early '80s ignorance and the truly grotesque was the spinning ashtray mounted on a metal stand we kept in the lounge room. Thanks to its generous receptacle, you wouldn't have to empty it of spent butts and cinders for about three days, so it just stood next to the sofa reeking like a sawn-off, art-deco hobo until it became so chockers, the spring-mounted plate could no longer be depressed and you'd be forced to intervene. Trouble was, because the hollow base was generally filled with concrete, you could barely move the thing, so, as if you lived in a pub, you'd bring in a bucket for the disposal operation, allowing all those fugitive emissions to add an extra layer to the jaundiced film of filth atomically fused to the interior paintwork.

On the bright side, should all that ugliness become too much, the cumbersome semi-fixture could be used to smash a window and enable escape, just like Chief Bromden did with that hydrotherapy fountain in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest after he smothered Jack Nicholson with a pillow.

But perhaps most extraordinary of all for a cohort brought up with a packet of ciggies secreted under the tight sleeves of our Life. Be in it. T-shirts, is how our own children are being raised without a whisper of smoke polluting their lives, or their lungs.

As the heatwave forced our family into air-conditioned iso last weekend, we stumbled upon Puberty Blues (the 1981 film directed by Bruce Beresford, not the TV series).

We were transfixed, especially our girls, who, quite hearteningly, found all that chauvinism and misogyny completely foreign and were thrilled by the ending when Nell Schofield's Debbie triumphantly masters the Cronulla surf in defiance of the board-shorted dropkicks up on the sand.

But even more foreign to our children was all the smoking.

They were genuinely shocked to see uniformed students spark one up at the bus stop or bum-sucking in the toilets before flushing away their contraband when warned of the teacher's arrival by a junior press-ganged into look-out duty.

Obviously, somewhere in the decades since Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey shocked the establishment with their true tales from the Shire, we've done something right, because, just a generation later, our kids view smoking as the exception, not the rule.

Mind you, not all progress is positive.

They'd never heard of a Chiko Roll, either.