Ross Duffin interviewed by James Waites

4 sound files (ca. 309 min.) Duffin discusses the notification laws in NSW; media campaigns; his results and testing HIV+; the Grim Reaper campaign; Gay & Lesbian Counselling Service; the Rudd government; Gay Liberation House; The Hobart Conference; Sydney Star Observer; ACTUP (AIDS Coaliton to Unleash Power); duties as First Treatments Officer and the first medications trial (AZT); his involvement in ACTUP; the 'Camp' generation before activism; ANCARD (Aust National Council on AIDS and Related Diseases); the Fifth (last) National AIDS Conference; the origins of Positive Life then PWA (People with AIDS); creation of the magazine 'Talkabout'; finding ways to manage life and work; making sense of new treatments and their impact on life choices; a need to focus on new generation of young people and let them control their own epidemic; his personal experience of ageing; returning to work part-time; working on a book on HIV and ageing; the sector at large in 2009; how public health taken over for community health; the possibility of a renewed epidemic; HIV changing and shifting; meeting with newly diagnosed in workshops, the very different needs from support groups in earlier days. Ross Duffin speaks about being in the USA when HIV (GRID) (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) was discovered; the Gay Parade in San Francisco; his childhood and family background; his education; Monash University, enrolling in Medicine which he later abandons; Gay student group; the sacking of the Whitlam government; Malcolm Fraser and Medicare; moving to Canberra; ANU (Australian National University); the first Sydney Mardi Gras; attending the National Homosexual Conference; organised crime in Sydney Gay venues; Police Vice Squad; Blood Bank and the Gay community; Gay journalists; the epidemics progress from diagnosis in early 1984-5 to the many deaths between 1990-96; the impact of arrival of testing for HIV virus (1983-84); the impact of first 'home-grown' infection; the origins of ACON (AIDS Council of NSW); being elected onto ACON Committee in 1985; his employment whilst involved in volunteer activism; HIV Support Project Work as an ACON educator with background in activism not health promotion; the debate over 'content' for safe sex campaigns; Local and Federal-level discussions; the first National HIV/AIDS Strategy.