Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS is often remembered as a national success story - one shaped by public health policy, activism and community action. The History Lab: Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis podcast series asks: how does that history change when you zoom in close? With a focus on Darlinghurst, long the centre of gay life in Sydney, the 3-part podcast series reshapes how the AIDS crisis is remembered and understood.
Remembering Darlinghurst’s AIDS crisis
Caption
A/Prof Leigh Boucher and Prof Tamson Pietsch
To launch the new History Lab series, Impact Studios held an event at Yirranma Place in Darlinghurst. Facilitated by Galina Laurie of the Paul Ramsey Foundation, the event featured a conversation between producer and historian A/Prof Leigh Boucher and historian Prof Tamson Pietsch.
Rather than retelling a national narrative of activist organising and policy success, the series foregrounds the lived experience of a neighbourhood that became the epicentre of the epidemic in Australia. Here, fear, care, intimacy and loss were part of daily life and the crisis was defined by uncertainty and dread.
“I was really interested in trying to get at and think about the actual social dynamics of the epidemic on the ground in Darlinghurst,” Leigh shared.
Before effective treatments emerged in the mid 1990s, an HIV diagnosis was widely understood as a death sentence. People lived with the expectation of loss, often caring for multiple friends and lovers as the virus tore through social networks.
While Australia’s rapid adoption of safe sex practices limited broader transmission, it also meant that the weight of the epidemic fell intensely and unevenly on specific communities, particularly gay men in inner city Sydney.
I was really interested in trying to get at and think about the actual social dynamics of the epidemic on the ground in Darlinghurst.
Whose history?
The series challenges the dominance of activist-led histories by centring voices often left out of official accounts. Through oral history interviews with people who lived, worked and socialised in Darlinghurst, the series captures experiences that rarely appear in the archives.
In each episode, gym regulars, bartenders, carers and friends speak to exhaustion, tension and grief alongside moments of connection and solidarity.
“I wanted to interview the kinds of people who hadn't been interviewed before, and whose voices wouldn't necessarily get recorded in the archival evidence or the histories that we have. These people might have had a different take or orientation or perspective on this history,” Leigh said.
The oral histories he recorded became the basis of the podcast series.
Leigh soon discovered that traditional practices as an oral historian and podcast practices are very different.
“I'd have these sorts of conversational, associative conversations with interviewees where it would take them six minutes to tell a story which just became really difficult to use in a podcast. So, I had to learn and shift my practice a bit and ask different questions,” he explained.
“Each interview changed the next interview that I did in in an historical sense. I was building historical interpretations as I went. So I would bring an historical interpretation from interview one into interview two and then see how it landed with someone else.”
“There was this cumulative effect that was created between the space of myself and all these interviewees of trying to think about this history.”
The interviews reveal a history marked by paradox. Interviewees describe the period as both devastating and formative, a time of profound suffering that also forged deep bonds.
There was this cumulative effect that was created between the space of myself and all these interviewees of trying to think about this history.
These contradictions resist neat resolution. Rather than smoothing them into a single explanatory narrative, the podcast allows them to sit side by side, reflecting the way trauma collapses past and present for those who lived through it.
“Interviewing these people was an incredibly meaningful experience. Often, I was interviewing people who had never spoken about their experiences before,” Leigh said.
“They were describing a memory that was still alive and they were in it. This created very powerful interviews.”
Documenting new perspectives
While the HIV and AIDS story is often primarily a story about gay men and their allies in the queer community, Leigh’s interviews reveal often untold perspectives such as the role of “straight women as co-producers of this queer world”.
They also raise questions about memory and memorialisation. Despite the scale of loss, it is telling that Darlinghurst has no single, defining AIDS memorial.
Leigh and Tamson discussed how this absence might reflect the difficulty of containing such an unresolved history within a fixed format, especially as the AIDS crisis did not end cleanly. Its legacies continue to shape relationships, communities and the ways histories are told.
“Yes there was a crisis. Yes it ended in 1996. But it leaves a sense of paradox and complexity, and the irresolvable nature of what people were experiencing in the neighbourhood. The available stories we might have to tell just don’t capture that,” Leigh said.
By attending closely to place, voice and method, History Lab: Darlinghurst’s AIDS Crisis offers a powerful reminder that national success stories can obscure as much as they reveal. When we zoom in, history becomes messier, more intimate and far harder to resolve.
Yes there was a crisis. Yes it ended in 1996. But it leaves a sense of paradox and complexity, and the irresolvable nature of what people were experiencing in the neighbourhood. The available stories we might have to tell just don’t capture that.
“In terms of how this experience has changed me as a historian, it made me think much more carefully about history as something we do with other people,” said Leigh.
“It's made me much more conscious of the way that any narrative that you're creating, any interpretation that you're offering, is created in relation to whoever you're encountering in that moment. It's made me think about history as much more a relational kind of process.”
About the podcast series
History Lab: Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis is narrated, written and produced by Regina Botros with story development by A/Prof Leigh Boucher and producer Michelle Ransom-Hughes. The interviews for the series were conducted by Leigh Boucher, with research assistance from Eli Branagh of Macquarie University and story and script editing by Sarah Gilbert of UTS Impact Studios.
The podcast series was made with the support of the Paul Ramsay Foundation and is part of its Darlinghurst Public History Initiative, a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios at UTS. Macquarie University also supported the series.