Resistance to cancer sticks in memory
Mark Duncan-Smith AMA (WA) President recalls activities of BUGA UP, Medicus May-June, 2023.
During 1985 in Inner West Sydney, a loose knit group of feminists took delight in buggering up the Channel 10 sexist Billboards promoting Monday Night Live League Football. April 2023
The cities going billboard-free
An increasing number of cities in the UK and Europe are campaigning to be free of billboard advertising and instead showcase art, nature and ad-free space as alternatives to corporate outdoor advertising. ABC, Radio National, 05 October 2022.
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, BUGA UP � You�ve come a long way baby was published in Overland magazine in August 2012.
- Global Media Journal Milissa Deitz, Cut and Paste: Australia�s Original Culture Jammers, BUGA UP, 2017
- Branded cities: outdoor advertising, urban governance, and the outdoor media landscape Kurt Iveson, 2010
- How to Make Trouble and Influence People BUGA-UP interview, 2009
- Civil Disobedience and Tobacco Control: The Case of BUGA-UP essay by Simon Chapman in 1996
- Rushn Health - Media Articles, 1995
- Buga Up Four Years On A. Chesterfield-Evans and Gavan O'Connor, 1988
- The Art-Crime Archive " ...altering the public's view and disrupting media culture and mainstream cultural norms..."
- Possibilities for creative resistance "What possibilities exist for creative resistance..."
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.