Review of the impact of the TriState community fruit fly awareness programme on road travellers - 1999/2000

Travellers entering the Fruit Fly Exclusion Zone at Kamarah, the Sturt highway, and Broken Hill were asked questions about their knowledge of fruit fl y issues and their vehicles were examined for fruit. Of the travellers examined 90.2% had heard of the Zone before entering, and of those 97.3% knew not to carry fruit or to dispose of fruit before entering the Zone. Only 4.3% of travellers who had heard of the Zone prior to entry carried fruit, while 24.7% of travellers who had not heard of the Zone carried fruit. There was a highly significant negative relationship between the proportion of travellers found with fruit and the frequency of travel. In this roadside survey, 96% of travellers recalled seeing the road signs, while 15% learnt about the zone by 'word of mouth' or 'local knowledge' and 10.7% and 3.1% of respondents obtained their information from television and radio respectively. There were, however, differences between sites. Only 31.8% of travellers could correctly recall the value of the two penalties advertised on the road signs however 44.5% and 34.5% recalled the two individual amounts. 18.4% of those who claimed not to know about the fines carried fruit compared with about 3.5% for those who remembered some penalty. Tomatoes were frequently not thought of as being fruit and this confusion needs to be addressed. Different risk groups were affected by different awareness tools and a variety of awareness tools need to be used in a public awareness campaign. Any travel or risk group which recalled an awareness message invariably were less likely to carry fruit. Any improvement in the delivery of the community awareness campaign will improve the overall management of the quarantine zone.