Couchman Over Australia: Living With AIDS

In this special episode of Couchman Over Australia, broadcast in 1991, people living with HIV from across Australia speak openly about their lives, challenges, and resilience in the face of stigma. The panel includes women, men, and a child living with HIV, each sharing personal accounts of diagnosis, relationships, family reactions, parenting, discrimination in health care, and experiences of advocacy. Their stories address diverse paths of transmission — including heterosexual and homosexual relationships, injecting drug use, and perinatal transmission — and reveal the varied ways HIV impacted individuals, families, and communities in the early years of the epidemic. Rather than focusing on medical experts or policy debates, the program foregrounds the voices of those directly affected, offering a rare, public platform for positive people to speak for themselves in a climate still marked by fear and misunderstanding. Participants living with HIV Jane Melanie Peter O’Toole Lloyd Grosse Troy Lovegrove Christian Faye Martin Burbling Robert Shearer Andrew Morgan Michelle Morrison John Walden Bill Hathaway