AIDS: The Lost Voices
Geoffrey Pearce O.A.M. was a prison corrections officer at Long Bay Jail in New South Wales who, shortly after completing his training at 21 he was deliberately stabbed with a needle contaminated with HIV-positive blood by an inmate from the Jail’s AIDS wing, The Malabar Assessment Unit. Geoff turned his diagnosis and the publicity surrounding the assault into a platform for education, confronting the fear and stigma by demonstrating that people living with HIV were not to be feared.
AIDS: THE LOST VOICES
Long Bay Jail in New South Wales has long been regarded as Australia’s “toughest prison,” and in the 1980s and 1990s it became notorious as the site of the prison system’s AIDS wing — initially named the Malabar Assessment Unit and grimly referred to by inmates as “death row.”
AIDS: The Lost Voices
In 1987 Brian Nugent 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.