Then along came HIV/AIDS. While we now know it is an infection contractible by anyone, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality, its initial occurrence was among gay men, both in the United States and here in Australia. No one knew what it was, how it was transmitted, or how to deal with it. This was at a time when male homosexual acts were still illegal in New South Wales, police violence against those of a dissident sexuality or gender persisted, and moralising politicians wanted Mardi Gras banned.

So it was clear from the outset that any positive responses would have to come from within the community. Cook details for us, in eleven comprehensive chapters, the variety of responses that occurred, often in the face of overt hostility from both the wider Australian public and various authorities, AIDS being regarded as a danger to the rest of Australia.

ACON's float the Mardi Gras Parade, 1990. Despite the pouring rain, 50,000 people gathered along the parade's route to cheer on participants (photograph by Robert French)

The book’s focus is on New South Wales, and naturally on Sydney, where a ‘gay world’ already existed, one that was active politically. A range of support networks was developed quickly. Cook traces their development after the AIDS Action Committee was formed at a meeting on 15 May 1983 (it became the AIDS Council of NSW [ACON] the following year). By 1985 several other important groups had been set up: the Ankali Project, the Community Support Network (CSN), and the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation. These groups provided a wide range of support to people dealing with AIDS in New South Wales, and Cook assiduously details the problems these groups faced and how these issues were managed. ACON provided coordination for the gay community’s varied responses to AIDS, and it later widened its purview to deal with those affected in the wider Australian public as well.

Cook allows the voices of many of the participants to speak; this gives his account a dramatic authenticity. It wasn’t always ‘plain sailing’ – there were strong differences within the gay community about what to do, the most obvious leading to the emergence of ACT UP, because of dissatisfaction over slow access to possible treatment drugs.

Cook recounts the many tragedies of the AIDS era; the tainted blood transfusions that led to the death of three babies in Queensland; the hounding of Eve van Grafhorst, a schoolgirl who contracted AIDS and was shunned locally; and the growing number of deaths, all caught in scaremongering newspaper headlines. As with Covid-19, rising death rates were a marker of the impact of the infection, and the death notices started to take up pages of Sydney’s gay newspaper, with the names of friends, lovers, and neighbours appearing. Many of these deaths were self-assisted by those in the latter stages of AIDS-related infections.

Gradually, the extent of the tragedy became apparent. This included numerous ‘affronts’: the stigma; the Medical Journal of Australia’s cover that stated ‘Depravity Kills’; the calls by some ‘moralists’ for the incarceration of all homosexuals; the hysterical panic over sex workers and appropriate ‘precautions’; and the escalating violence being perpetrated against gay men, their murders on beats often conveniently shrugged off by the authorities as either accidents or suicides.

Education about AIDS was necessary. It went into unexpected areas: dramatic television advertisements, such as the one featuring the Grim Reaper’, raised awareness, and condoms were slipped on bananas. Sex education information was directed not only at the wider Australian public; also introduced were ‘Codes of Practice for Sex Venues’. As Time magazine noted, ‘What liberals in large parts of the Western world have advocated in vain for decades, the fear of AIDS has achieved in a couple of years.’

One unusual development noted by Cook is that, on a range of issues, governments soon had to deal directly with the homosexual community – groups that had previously kept each other at arm’s length, for a variety of reasons. These collaborations were crucial. Having Neal Blewett and Peter Baume as federal health minister and shadow health minister undoubtedly influenced how the infection was dealt with in Australia. Still, it wasn’t until 1996, in what became known as ‘the protease moment’, when combination therapy became available, that people no longer expected to die of AIDS and began learning to live with HIV.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is that Cook focuses almost entirely on ACON and its work, perhaps understandably, ACON having commissioned the book. This attention to the organisation’s history can also be commended as an exercise in thoroughness, but a wider view might well have given a different context to his story.

Both in 1982 and the following decades, the impact of HIV/AIDS on the city’s gay community, and on Australia generally, was at first an object lesson in how ephemeral ‘progress’ can be. There was immense despair, but because of the community’s response and the way in which this was developed, the pandemic became a lesson in hope. Nick Cook’s book might well be useful reading for health experts and politicians today. As countless sages have told us, ‘Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.’