The Art of AIDS Prevention in Australia

Paul Sendziuk

School of History and Politics

University of Adelaide

(Australia)

Most Australians have never met a person afflicted with HIV/AIDS, and only come to ‘know’ them through the cultural products that represent them. In Australia, the popular press, TV news, and early government-sponsored AIDS awareness campaigns such as the ‘Grim Reaper’, quickly established the dominant portrayal of people with AIDS and ‘high risk’ groups as deviant, dangerous, deserving (of their own infection) and doomed. These representations had real effects: they helped determine whether the public feel sufficient sympathy to support funding for AIDS research and medical care, and whether or not a person living with AIDS was ostracised from the community, discriminated against at work, or shunned as a lover or friend.

This paper will explore the work of a number of prominent Australian artists and cultural producers who challenged the stigmatising representations of AIDS by implicating ‘ordinary’ Australians in the epidemic, and focusing on the prospect of living with AIDS rather than dying from it.

Artists also sought to educate the public. Yet they understood that information alone – about the risk of unprotected sex and sharing needles – would be insufficient to end the epidemic.

Sociological research indicated that those who believed infection and death to be inevitable, or who were traumatised by the loss of a loved one, were less likely to heed messages regarding safe sex and safe drug use. Australian public health authorities and AIDS organisations thus became keen to foster the belief that it was possible to avoid infection and that it was worthwhile continuing to live in the midst of the epidemic. The second part of this paper explores the way in which a number of prominent Australian artists and cultural producers took a leadership role in this regard. Organisers of community cultural events such as the Art in the Age of AIDS exhibition, the Candlelight Vigil and the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt Project, sought to provide an outlet for communal grief and an opportunity to celebrate the vitality of the community that remained. Artists such as Andrew Foster, Ross Watson, Maree Azzopardi and William Yang, whose elegiac photographs, paintings and theatre works focused on the themes of remembrance and transcendence, were also important in this respect.

About Paul Sendziuk

Dr Paul Sendziuk is a Lecturer in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. He specialises in twentieth-century Australian History, with particular interests in post-war immigration, public health and the history of disease. Paul’s most recent book is Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS, which was short-listed for the 2004 Human Rights Award (bestowed by Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission). He is currently working on a project titled ‘The Art of AIDS Prevention: Cultural Responses to HIV/AIDS in Australia and the United States’.

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