AIDS: The Lost Voices
BRIAN: 1987 [Photo: Andrew Rankin]
Brian Nugent was diagnosed with AIDS in October 1986 at the age of 33. Originally from Waterford, Ireland, he trained as a cordon bleu chef in Paris before relocating to Sydney, Australia, in 1979, where he carved out a career in journalism as social editor for Sydney & City Magazine and later Panache.
In 1987 Brian began sharing his experience of living with AIDS through a collaboration with journalist Jill Margo; together they devised a regular column for The Sydney Morning Herald that chronicled the personal, social and political dimensions of the epidemic in Australia, giving a public voice to a deeply private struggle at a time of widespread fear and misunderstanding. Forty years on, Brian’s diary stands as a stark, intimate testament to that era — a record that not only documents the daily realities of illness and care but also interrogates the cruelty of stigma.
His entries perform a dual work: they commemorate the quiet courage of one man confronting mortality, and they demand renewed attention to the lessons of compassion, advocacy and collective responsibility that remain just as important today.
Brian Nugent’s ‘An AIDS Diary’ was written by journalist Jill Margo and published by
Given the social circles Brian moved in, he is occasionally mentioned as being at some glittering event, glass of champagne in hand moving effortlessly between polished soirées and more intimate, indulgent events.
BRIAN JOSEPH NUGENT was born on 20 March 1953 at St. Martha’s Nursing Home in Tramore, Ireland, to Matthew L. Nugent and Mary Merrick. He was one of four children, growing up alongside his brothers Raymond, Paul and his late sister Kathryn.
Brian attended boarding school in France from the age of sixteen and later trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, honing a disciplined approach to culinary craft and cultivating a taste for exacting technique. In his diary he confided that, around the time he turned twenty-one, an inheritance came his way, enabling him to acquire a small hotel in Brighton, Sussex, and to purchase his first home, which he furnished with the finest Regency furniture, marrying his appreciation for precision in the kitchen with a refined sense of domestic elegance.
Brian then packed up and headed to Australia around 1979 and settled in the suburbs of Sydney; he quickly embedded himself in the city's social scene, becoming social editor at Sydney and Capital Magazine before being appointed the first editor of the glossy social title Panache, which launched in 1986 — only months before he received an AIDS diagnosis, a devastating turn that shadowed his pioneering work in chronicling Sydney's cultural and social life.
Once the chronicler, Brian found his own story transposed into the public eye: his diary column for The Sydney Morning Herald became a space where the observer became the observed, his sharp social commentary now braided with personal disclosure, vulnerability and an elegiac acuity that mapped both a changing city and the private toll of an illness that would reshape his final two years.
MORE VOICES IN OUR DIARY SERIES…
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