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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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