Menu

How satirists with spray cans defeated Big Tobacco

Australias world-leading tobacco controls were inspired as much by satire and spray cans as any political vision.

BUGAP pays tribute to Bill Snow

Bill Snow, known by many as "BUGAUP Bill", or "Billy" passed away on 8 March 2018.

Gallery slideshows of billboards

New gallery where you can scroll through some of our greatest hits.

NOT A GROUP - A MOVEMENT

A lot of paint has sprayed from the can since the inception of BUGA-UP in October 1979. Since then the number of graffitists actively involved in BUGA-UP grew from three people working in the inner city of Sydney to people working across Australia, and across the world!

People from 8 to 71 years old were active in BUGA-UP. These included entire families - carpenters, domestic and health workers, graphic artists, hairdressers, taxi-drivers, a wrestler, journalists, students, pensioners, research and metal workers, kindergarten teachers, technicians, public servants, unionists and clergy - to name but a few!

Originally the BUGA-UP campaign was broadly aimed at all unhealthy billboard advertisements. However, in response to public opinion we soon focussed our attention on tobacco & alcohol promotions and other promotions that were socially and visually assaulting.

This was one of the earliest examples of Culture Jamming in the world, and certainly in Australia.

This site is dedicated to the activistes who have not only risked arrest, but injury through fence-jumping, scaffold-climbing, dog-chasing and the dreaded spray-back on those cold windy nights.

FURTHER READING and ONLINE ARTICLES

For more about the history and development of BUGA-UP read BUGA-UP BEGINNINGS and BUGA-UP PROGRESS. A later article by Frances van Zinnen, was published in Overland magazine in August 2012.

Online articles:

The Billbored Newsletters - 1982-1985 in the Publications section provide a chronological documentation of many BUGA-UP activities, and provide a good historical record of the movement.

The essay Civil Disobedience and Tobacco Control: The Case of BUGA-UP by Simon Chapman in 1996 [PDF 2,612 KB] provides some additional information about the history of BUGA-UP.