Hero erased from history, aye
RIGHT leg cocked, elbow gracefully propped on a knee while his still youngish buttocks rested on the wooden steps of a quaint old Queenslander, John Williamson stared down the barrel of the lens.
The country music virtuoso had just wandered the back yard, feverishly tipping over every water-gathering receptacle in sight to annihilate a larval generation of future disease carrying vermin.
You could see it in his mad eyes. This bloke hated mozzies.
He paused for effect, and it was a most effective pause indeed. “Stop dengue now, aye.” If you survived the 1990s in Far North Queensland and owned a TV, chances are you remember John Williamson’s heartfelt community service announcement about the joys of capsizing dog bowls and stagnant pot plant saucers.
It was one of the longest-running ads getting around, probably only trumped by that RSPCA “for all creatures great and small” clip with the bandaged wombat joey, and ye olde “slip, slop, slap, badaaah” ditty.
Why Sid the lisp-spitting seagull needed sunscreen on his beak is neither here nor there.
The Stop Dengue Now campaign was the greatest piece of theatre ever to illuminate Australian television screens, besides Red Symons’ trademark savagery on Hey Hey It’s Saturday’s Red Faces segment. It was also ridiculously effective. As kids, we ran around searching for any inert puddles ripe for the draining, excessively and annoyingly reciting that mantra.
Yet there is absolutely no digital record of it on the world wide web.
A Google search for “John Williamson” coupled with “stop dengue now” pulls up three results.
And it is completely absent from YouTube.
In a world where I can find three million clips of someone throwing a handful of jelly through a tennis rac- quet at a purple armadillo, it makes no sense. The mind-shaping chunk of propaganda was steeped in folklore.
They reckoned Williamson, a Melbourne fella whose other chief link to the Far North’s pathogen transmitting insect population seems to be his 1994 classic Tropical Fever, recorded two versions of the advertisement – one aye-laden edition for us up north, and another for southern folk, minus the “aye”. Stop dengue now. Dead silence. Just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
My memory of his cocked leg and smouldering stare is probably flawed but there is no record to check it against, and that is bloody criminal.
This ad campaign is a unicorn, spoken about with hushed reverence but basically a mythological creature. The time is ripe to bring it back. Just yesterday another case of dengue fever was detected on Masig Island in the Torres Strait, bringing the number of Far North infections to eight this year, not including a further 11 contracted overseas and brought back to our shores.
The message is obviously not getting through, and if our politicians fail to resurrect Williamson’s “stop dengue now, aye” message they must be held responsible for gross negligence.
At the very least, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk must personally trawl through the VHS archives and upload a version to the internet.
Lives are at risk and the crooner who brought us Old Man Emu is just the hero we need to set us back on the righteous path of upturned buckets.
Come to think of it, the Far North had another notable health announcement that has been erased from history.
Cairns City Council (from memory) ran the “Choice” TV ad campaign during the 90s, targeting kids considering all branches of unhealthy behaviour from smoking cigarettes and glugging booze to playing in drains.
Choice was the claggiest-looking 3D character on the planet, sporting a whopping noggin, very cool sunglasses and an unassailable sense of right and wrong.
He would turn up at places like Barlow Park, where unkempt looking fellows would suggest things like “Hey Choice, come have a smoke”.
He was always too smart for those creeps, deciding in the end that mixing sport and durry-munching was “not a choice to make”.
If only we listened.