The beginning of Australia’s exposure to the worldwide AIDS pandemic dates from 1981. The first Australian case was diagnosed in Sydney in November 1982 with a second appearing in Melbourne shortly afterwards. By the mid-1980s, over 3000 HIV infections were occurring each year. But then a surprising development occurred. Australian rates of infection and of new diagnosis dropped dramatically and dropped again. There were 750 diagnoses in 1988. By 1992, there were around 500, an annual rate that has been maintained ever since. Of concern, however, is that rates of HIV infection have again begun to rise in Australia with a worrying trend of increase in figures from New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.
While this recent rise poses questions about the need for new strategies of refreshment in education and prevention, Australia’s success historically in dealing with HIV/AIDS is remarkable. Graham Willett, historian and activist, has posed the question ‘how did it happen?’ How did Australia manage to reduce its rate of HIV infection faster than any comparable country — and, in so doing, save the lives of thousands of people (gay and straight) and avoid the social and political backlash against gay rights that seemed for a time to be imminent?
From the outset in the 1980s, it has been remarked that Australian educators, working with gay and bisexual men, developed a ‘significant expertise’ in devising and delivering educational programs on HIV/AIDS. Indeed, since their establishment in 1985 and their success in securing public funding, AIDS agencies managed and run by a diverse community including gay men, have delivered almost all the educational programs delivered in Australia. Gay and bisexual men have been targeted in these campaigns but so too have other ‘at risk’ communities including women and intravenous drug users, with high levels of success. The Australian needle exchange programs, for example, have prevented tens of thousands of HIV infections and must remain an essential pillar of the strategy against HIV.
In the earliest years, some of these programs were developed on the shoulders of radical protest by direct action groups such as ACT UP which sought to shame governments to speed the testing of new drugs and treatments. A feature of the ACT UP campaigns was the use of frank and readily accessible community language — not in sophisticated and glossy poster campaigns, but in protest messages screen printed onto T-shirts. So it was that this most democratic item of clothing became the urgent, angry vehicle both of protest and of education. Later, the spontaneous messages delivered by ACT UP were refined and translated into the more formally planned and increasingly sophisticated campaigns of education and awareness-raising mounted by the various Australian AIDS Action Councils.
Initially there were two approaches to the management of HIV/AIDS education in Australia. The first was coercive and controlling. The state and the medical profession combined forces to instil fear and to shock ‘at risk’ individuals to modify or to change behaviour. The ‘Grim Reaper’ appeared in posters and television advertising. This confronting image was hostile to the gay community. Placed as it was at peak-viewing times, the ‘Reaper’ raised levels of apprehension about the virus while also creating fear and stigma around HIV+ people. But it also raised awareness of HIV itself and encouraged the use of condoms. It remains the most remembered of all the campaigns.
Then there came a change. In a remarkable shift, enlightened advocacy persuaded government agencies that the gay community had the capacity to educate itself. Funding was provided for the production of safe-sex materials that drew on the real life experience of gay men and other ‘at risk’ communities and spoke their language. While the new educational programs adopted traditional health promotion techniques such as pamphlets and posters, the materials were shaped in radical and arresting ways. Educational messages were delivered in images, style, language and meaning which communicated directly in the everyday language of the street, of bars, of saunas and backrooms. The clinical phrases of medical practitioners were put aside; so too was the traditional politeness of public discourse. In words and images, posters, booklets, bumper stickers and t-shirts all dealt frankly with, for example, the dimensions of gay sexual experience or the realities of drug use. The language was direct, the meaning unambiguous. As one activist put it, ‘an arse was an arse and a fuck was a fuck.’
In Canberra, the AIDS Action Council of the ACT Inc. has played a leading role in the production of some of the most innovative and challenging of educational materials. In a campaign to encourage condom use, it has provocatively drawn on the distinctive imagery of the national capital itself. Over almost twenty years, it has also performed another service. It has accumulated a representative collection of posters as an important archival record and resource. It is a measure of the importance of this collection that it represents and documents the major phases of the Australian response to HIV/AIDS. This exhibition hosted by the Canberra Museum and Gallery and with the support of the AIDS Action Council, draws on that collection. In doing so, it reveals many of the important dimensions of Australia’s fight against HIV/AIDS.
Embedded within this selection of posters and artefacts is a history of the evolution of the Australian response to HIV/AIDS. Many of the posters stand as fine examples of individual and well-known campaigns. Included here are the first raw efforts produced in white heat by ACT UP. So too is the landmark appearance of the ‘Grim Reaper’. Later, the Sydney artist and activist David McDiarmid used ‘extravagant pro-gay and pro-sex images’ and in doing so, he marked an important shift. It was McDiarmid who pushed the boundaries of eroticism in HIV/AIDS campaigns. The posters he produced in 1992 for the AIDS Council of New South Wales placed their focus on community, drugs, discrimination, relationships and safer sex. They prepared the way for a new generation of posters targeting particular communities — the young, older men, bisexuals, Aboriginal Australians, recreational drug users and others. In every case, the same essential elements were present: the use of simple, direct language, of contemporary imagery and always candour in dealing directly and honestly with such issues as sexual attraction and behaviour.
But this exhibition is more than an exercise in historical documentation. On one level, it is a memorial to loss and to the pain of suffering and of exclusion. For all of the Australian success in fighting HIV/AIDS, the gay community especially sustained terrible and shocking losses of life, particularly in the early years. Others suffered too and in any category of those affected by the virus, lives were cut short. But many of the educational posters designed and created as tools to fight the epidemic were the work of gay men whether as artists, photographers or models. Many, indeed, represented known members of Australian gay communities. Many of those taking part in campaigns made their contribution while they were themselves infected with the virus or were suffering already the onset of AIDS. It is a sad truth that many of the men represented in these posters or were active in the campaigns which produced them or who initiated the original protests are no longer living. In this sense, the posters have their own powerful resonance, not as documents or even as art works, but as items with an enduring social and spiritual significance. For some, these posters will have a value as memorials. For others, they are statements of pride and of affirmation — images that in the words of one observer ‘speak to, empower and educate their audiences in the widest sense’.
John Thompson is a historian and writer with extensive experience in archival curatorship. He is at present a Visitor in the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra.
Sources
Eric Timewell, Victor Minichiello and David Plummer (eds), AIDS in Australia, New York: Prentice Hall, 1992
Ted Gott (comp.), Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia
William Leonard and Anne Mitchell, The Use of Sexually Explicit Materials in HIV/AIDS Initiatives Targeted at Gay Men: A Guide for Educators, Canberra: Australian National Council on AIDS, Hepatitis C and Related Diseases, 2000
Raymond Donovan and Leong K. Chan, HIV/AIDS Imaginaries, Sydney: UTS Gallery, University of Technology, 2001
Raymond Donovan and Leong K. Chan, One Risk, Diverse Responses: Australian HIV/AIDS Campaigns 1985-1999, Sydney: Powerhouse Museum, 2002
Graham Willett, Review of Paul Sendziuk’s Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS, in HIV Australia, Vol.3 No.3, March-May 2004, p.25
Frank Bowden, 5th Annual Dr Peter Rowland Memorial Address presented at the Annual General Meeting, AIDS Action Council of the ACT, 3 November 2004