For anyone who missed out on the first Brisbane launch, Avid Reader is holding a second event for Gaysia because they are very lovely and also want your money. This event will be different and involve photos. One of them may feature Benjamin’s butt. Not even a joke.
Full details here.

The young men who have gathered here haven’t come to worship these bulls, but to ride them and hang on for dear life for money and glory. This is the PBR (Professional Bull Riding) Australian Cup Series’ Brisbane Invitational and riders have come from all over Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada to try their luck. Brisbane’s event is Round 2, and the match before the PBR National Finals in Sydney where the winner will score a sweet bonus $10,000 on top of any earnings they’ve made in these premilinary shows. 

Australia is one of five territories united by PBR and bull riding. Besides the countries competing tonight, the sport is also huge in Mexico and Brazil. In the United States, bull riding has become one of the country’s top ten sports in terms of audience numbers and money players can earn (think: seven digits in a year). Beyond the competitions themselves, there are lucrative2 endorsement deals, and any Australian who makes it big in the US can become a household name, far more famous there than they’ll ever be here.

One of them was Troy Dunn, 45, the most successful Australian bull rider of all time and godfather to the sport here. He’s the only Australian to have been PBR World Champion and is now PBR Australia’s president. Dunn has an ageless face, wears a cap with sunglasses pulled over it and a polar fleece-lined vest  with an embroidered red bucking bull logo over a red flannel. Dunn says he’s been pretty lucky when it comes to injuries: the worst was a dislocated hip after a bull threw him off and stomped down on his thigh, yanking it fresh out of the hip. “I’ve only broken toes and fingers, knocked teeth out, had that dislocated hip, chronic back problems and pulled groins and stitches, that type of thing.” It says a lot about bull riding that Dunn is actually known for being a professional bull rider who retired from the sport relatively uninjured.

For anyone who has reservations about the sport and animal welfare—this includes me—Dunn says it’s not an adversarial relationship between bull rider and bull. This is not Spanish bullfighting we’re talking about. Instead, Dunn says the relationship veers closer to love. “People probably don’t understand it,” he says, “but you ask any bull rider what their favourite animal is, they’ll tell you straight up it’s a bucking bull. I love the smell of them—when a bull runs up in the shoot and he’s got a big wide back and a nice set of horns—just everything about ‘em.” He almost sounds emotional.

Dunn says he’s notoriously bad for predicting winners of bull riding contests, but his tip for tonight is David Kennedy, a 27-year-old from Kyogle, NSW, who has has been twice PBR Australian champion and has represented Australia in Brazil and the US. His main competition is a barely-adult wunderkind named Lachlan Richardson. At only 19 years of age, Richardson has emerged as the dark horse threat of the competition, a kid who has seemingly come out of nowhere to spectacularly win Round #1 of this championship in Newcastle the week before.

Richardson is being groomed for success. Though he’s based in Cresford, near Newcastle, Richardson has spent most of this year riding and training in Texas. There are just more opportunities there. The third eldest in a family of seven kids, Richardson got on his first calf around the age of ten, so he has plenty of experience despite his age. He is often referred to as the Justin Bieber of the PBR, and with his boyish face he does vaguely resemble the tween superstar, except with shaggier hair, a thick drawling accent and an unmistakable teenage monobrow. He is a simple guy. In an ideal world, Richardson’s goals are: “Keep ridin’ bulls; be consistent; be world champion.”

For spectactors, bull riding is simple to follow. Riders must stay on the back of a violently bucking bull for at least eight seconds. If they don’t last eight seconds, they get no points. If they stay on, they are awarded points out of a possible 100: 50 for the bull’s performance; 50 for the rider’s. What you want is a bull that bucks violently and spectacularly, and for the rider to miraculously stay on without losing their grip or balance. Three bull fighters—who don’t actually fight, but distract the bulls from trampling the riders to death once they’ve dismounted—are paramount for safety.

When the show starts, there are an unexpected number of lasers, explosions and pyrotechnics. Over the years, bull riding has become an arena-style event with an atmosphere of a rodeo crossed with a casino spectacular. “Brisbane!” the American commentator announces. “This is the one and only … P! B! R!” Each of the bull riders are introduced like pro wrestlers, posing and taking their places on stage. The crowd roars with approval at each announcement, and each rider is introduced with fireworks or a puff of smoke. At one point, the front of the arena explodes in flame. There is a bull riders’ prayer (“As I live the Cowboy Way / Protection is what I pray”) followed by country singer Shae Fisher’s rendition of the Australian anthem complete with American twang. (It’s only later that I realise Fisher is Australian herself.) “Well the pageantry’s over,” the PA finally hollers, “so who’s ready to ride some bulls here on a Saturday naaart?”

Some of the Americans competing tonight have names that belong to the world of porn, like Chase Outlaw and Ryan Dirteater. Few wear helmets or any protective gear besides what looks like a thin bullet proof vest. When the bulls come out of the gates, I am convinced all the riders will die. The bulls—so placid before—buck like creatures possessed, performing a spastic, wild ballet. Some are violent and aggressive in their bucking; others are contemporary dancers, like a bovine Kate Bush. Ben Jones, a man missing several teeth and known as the Dancing Australian, rolls off his bull after eight seconds, and dances like a gumby for the crowd. One rider lies down for a brief moment as if reclining on a bed. Another is catapulted into the air and lands back on the bull gracefully in less than a second. Watching, I fear for all their testicles, and do not understand how they do this without being in exquisite, racking pain.

When David Kennedy appears, the PA says: “The pressure is on this young man’s shoulders if he wants to win a national championship title next week in Sydney. He needs to put some points on the board, it’s that simple. Let’s raaaahd!” Then Kennedy’s out of the gates with his bull, and is thrown off in seconds. “David Kennedy could not afford that to happen! That has opened the door for Lachlan Richardson …” A few riders later, Richardson is on. For the fist few seconds of Richardson’s ride, it is magic. Then his bull seems to tire suddenly, becoming a supermarket coin-operated version of itself. Because his bull doesn’t perform well, Richardson is given the option of a measley 72 points or the option of a re-ride. He takes the re-ride, but promptly  gets knocked off. In the end, neither Kennedy nor Richardson last any of their rides to get into tonight’s final eight.

By the time the final eight ride, none of the bulls—who have names Insane, Suicidal, Bambi’s Blood and War Chief—are having a bar of it, and spectacularly knock the riders off their backs, one by one. It looks so easy for them, and it’s easy to understand why, especially in America, a lot of people follow the bulls instead of the riders. It’s the bulls who have won this evening, and as I walk out of the arena, they eye me off, sort of smugly, as if they know it too.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike D’Arcy. In March 2008, shortly after qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, he knocked out fellow qualifier Simon Cowley, a triple Commonwealth Games gold medallist, at a Sydney bar. Cowley’s injuries were gruesome. X-rays revealed breaks to his jaw, eye socket, cheekbone and nose, as if a metal pipe had been rammed into his face, rather than a human fist. Most of Cowley’s teeth came loose.

D’Arcy was swiftly kicked off the Beijing Olympic team and barred from the 2009 World Championships in Rome. He pleaded guilty to recklessly causing grievous bodily harm and was given a suspended 14-month jail sentence. He did some searingly uncomfortable television interviews, which hardly helped his image in a sport not known for violence or machismo. In 2011, Cowley sued D’Arcy for damages. When the court awarded Cowley $180,942 plus interest, D’Arcy declared himself bankrupt.

Soon after he was expelled from the Beijing Olympics, D’Arcy stopped swimming for two months. As he puts it, he “ate a lot of shit” and experienced the fate of all swimmers when they suddenly stop training: he got fat. But that was then. At St Peters, he works his ripped body with the grim determination of a man possessed. Other swimmers are jokey – the men laugh goofily during circuit training; one of the women has arrived in pink pyjama pants – but D’Arcy pumps the stationary bike with teeth bared.

Michael Bohl is the head coach here, and trains between 15 and 20 swimmers in these morning sessions, nine of whom are on the Olympic team. As the swimmers dive into the pool one after another, Bohl calls out instructions or whistles them in at high frequency, like he’s training a pod of dolphins.

Bohl watches D’Arcy swim laps in the same lane as Rice. “Wouldn’t be too many people in the world with legs as good as Nick’s,” he says. D’Arcy’s weaknesses are what Bohl calls “skills”: his starts and turns. I mention it must be difficult for D’Arcy to maintain focus considering what’s happened to him over the past four years. Bohl is immediately wary and resorts to coach-speak. D’Arcy is an “incredibly focused guy” and “you can put up three brick walls but he’ll go through them”; he’s “very goal-driven” and has a “laser-focus resolve”. In any case, Bohl adds: “After the Olympics, that will be it for him.” D’Arcy already works part-time as a radiographer at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. “And it’s very hard,” Bohl says, “to do medicine and to swim.”

For D’Arcy, Tuesdays and Thursdays are always like this. Circuit and lap training, breakfast at home, then more circuit training “at altitude” – in a room of oxygen-reduced air. He takes a nap, does some physio if there are any injuries (today, his shoulders are playing up), then it’s back in the pool. On other days, he crams in a hospital shift. Altitude training takes place at a specialist gym in Woolloongabba, where D’Arcy rides a stationary bike with fellow Olympic hopeful Mitch Larkin. Outside, the 60 Minutes crew waits for Stephanie Rice. “It must be nice to be in the background for once,” I say to D’Arcy. “Oh, I don’t want to be background, mate,” he jokes.

D’Arcy’s ease before the media is a blessing. Australia’s swimming alumni – usually such a quiet lot – rumble at his name. Kieren Perkins has an issue with D’Arcy’s lack of contrition. Michael Klim, too, wishes D’Arcy would apologise to Cowley personally. Since D’Arcy’s qualification for the London games, the media have treated his Olympic journey as a chance to redeem himself: “Redemption for D’Arcy” (ABC News); “Nick D’Arcy’s much-publicised tilt at redemption” (Sunshine Coast Daily); “Nick D’Arcy has earned a shot at Olympic redemption” (Herald Sun). D’Arcy doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t see how a fast swim in the pool can make up for what’s happened in the past,” he says. “They don’t cancel each other out. They’re two separate issues.”

Among all the static and noise, D’Arcy surprisingly finds it easy to focus on training. “You have to control the controllables,” he says. “When I’m swimming – when I compete and I train – it’s solely up to me. I can change this; I can improve that. Or I can slip backwards, depending on how I approach the session or meets. But some of the things that have happened weren’t under my control. So I feel very relaxed about knowing that there’s almost nothing I can do to change all that.” When I say he sounds almost Buddhist, he laughs and puts on a thick Queensland accent: “Yeeeah, I do consider myself somewhat of a philosophiser-er.”

Australians like their sport simple: success makes someone a hero. D’Arcy represents an interesting conundrum: should he win gold, how are we supposed to feel towards someone so talented, who has done something so bad? We’re hardly barracking for him now. Which raises another question: who does D’Arcy think he’s racing for?

“Well, for the family definitely,” he says. “Sometimes when you’re not really sure why you’re doing it, it’s always good to have those thoughts in the back of your head – that I’m doing it for other people. But I race for myself, too.” I point out that he hasn’t mentioned his country. “Really?” he says, looking surprised. “Well, it would be nice. But I suppose it’s more of a luxury, having the public on my side.”

Welcome to Round 13 of the KRE Race Engines Sprintcar Track Championship, one of the last races left in the season. Stakes are high tonight. In the pits, drivers are strapping themselves into their assorted vehicles. One sprintcar driver has a personal motto plastered onto his dash: “Hold it wide open ‘till you see God … then lift!” Mantras  help when you’re steering a 900 horsepower vehicle with a power-to-weight ratio finer than a Formula One car, and a purpose-built 410 cubic inch engine that generates speeds of up to 135 kilometres an hour. When men talk about these cars, it’s like they’re describing something sexual.

And all the drivers are men, except for Melissa Boyes. The only woman sprintcar racer in Queensland, Boyes sports a thick black ponytail and a black jumpsuit with purple flames coming out of her boots, like a character from the Batman universe. As she prepares for her race, Boyes tells me sprintcars are in her blood: her father raced for close to 30 years. Part of the reason she races at all, Boyes suspects, is because she’s an only child. “If my parents had a boy, I reckon the boy would be in it, not me.”

It doesn’t matter: Boyes loves the sport anyway. She fondly remembers her first big dump (a nicer way of saying “car crash”) where she was barrel-rolled into the wall at a Toowoomba race. She was only 16. Another time, she was knocked out so badly she was admitted to hospital. “It’s like a rollercoaster ride,” she says, “but we have strict regulations on safety. You can’t keep fearing it. You’ve just got to do it.” When a crash happens, Boyes’ concerns are less about fractured bones and more about damage to the car. “When you’re rolling over, I just think of the dollar signs. ‘How much damage has been done?’ It’s not cheap.”

It is possibly an understatement. Sprintcars are worth anywhere between $80,000 to $100,000. Motors alone cost between $30,000 to $60,0000. Each driver can spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on tyres alone. Then there are the transports for the sprintcars (yes: these vehicles are housed and fixed inside even bigger vehicles) which are the size of small apartments, and often make nicer lodgings than the ones in which the drivers sleep. Sponsorship is crucial. Racers have to look hard to find businesses happy to fork out money to plaster their sprintcars with advertising. Sponsors tonight include patio and roofing companies, car wreckers, energy drinks and automobile part shops.

As the warm up rounds begin, I notice an ambulance has parked itself ominously by the circular speedway track, ready to accept the injured. Injuries are inevitable with a sport like this. Earlier in the afternoon, a skinny 13-year-old named Tristan who races quarter midgets (think: a raised go-kart with metal frame) proudly showed me his elbow that was completely scraped, like someone had run a sander over it. He was far less concerned about the injury and more focussed on how many YouTube hits the video footage of his crash had scored.

Kathy Kelly, a former sprintcar racer, has co-run Archerfield Speedway for the past 12 years with her husband John. Before she was born, Kelly’s dad, another sprintcar racer, had an accident where a pipe went straight through his leg. Kelly had intense whiplash after years of racing. Then in 2000, Kathy’s husband John was racing a midget—a type of wingless sprintcar—when another midget hit him, sending him into the fence and flipping him right over. “As he landed,” Kathy explains, “John snapped his neck. He’s so lucky he’s not a quadriplegic. By rights, it should have snapped the spinal cord.” For her part, Melissa Boyes isn’t too concerned. “Some people have some serious crashes and hurt themselves, and people have died in them,” she says, “but you can die playing any sport.”

At 5.45pm, the national anthem begins. Two four-wheel drives with Australian flags hoisted onto them push sprintcars into motion on track. Sprintcars don’t have gears of their own, so mud-splattered four-wheel-drives and motorised buggies resembling ride-on lawnmowers push the sprintcars from behind, like a young sea mammal being nudged by its gigantic mother. The flags wave proudly and some people sing. As soon as the anthem is over, the sprintcars dislodge from the 4WDs and race around the track noisily. It’s all very inspiring and patriotic.

As we watch the Outlaw Sedans, the Modlites, the Compact Speedcars, spectators’ eyes move around the track, like a flock of hypnotised birds. During each of the final laps, it gets so loud that the PA system becomes useless, the commentary drowned out by motors. If there isn’t dust, there’s mud, and if you get too close, it’ll fly onto you so fast that it feels like you’ve been shot by a pellet gun.

The first rollover, stack, tumble, dump—whatever you want to call it—comes just before 6pm during the compact speedcar races. Blink and you’ll miss it. Driver #47 tips over inside a vehicle that looks about as narrow as his shoulders. “Up and over! Up and over!” the commentator says over the PA. Spectators rush to the diamond-wire gates, though it’s unclear whether it’s out of concern or morbid curiosity. To their simultaneous relief and disappointment, Scott Stirling, the driver, emerges unscathed.

At 6.50pm Sprintcar #13 gets written off. A bulldozer comes onto the tracks and picks up the pathetic, sad-looking body and hauls it into the centre of the track without ceremony. After 7pm, Sprintcar #67 crashes too, veering hideously out of control. After it all stops, a tiny man emerges from the car. It’s only when I look closer that I see it’s Gary Finglas, a 56-year-old man with wispy hair who is sweating like mad. He wears glasses. “Aw, it’s a little bit outta control,” Gary tells me above the din. “Just a racing incident. You don’t wanna be in too many, because they cost too much money.”

I’ve only turned away from her race for a matter of seconds, but the next thing I know, Melissa Boyes’ sprintcar has been smashed off the track and right out of the competition. It is horrible. When she finally emerges, unhurt, some people clap. “You can’t help it,” she says with a flattened voice into the commentator’s microphone. She sounds leaden, bereft. “You were having a pretty good battle up until that point in the race,” the announcer says. “Yeah, I tried to fight back smooth,” Melissa starts, “but I just think …” She trails off. “Yeah.”

Understandably, Boyes isn’t exactly in the mood to talk. Seeing her and her mangled vehicle reminds me of elite athletes who train their bodies to just-so perfection, only to have an injury destroy it all in a sickening instant. The announcer asks a round of applause, but because of the way that the racetrack is designed, all of the clapping seems to disappear into the night sky. Melissa Boyes walks off track and back into the pits, where she knows her wrecked car will be waiting for her. She examines the damage, both business-like but with tender concern, like how a doctor would examine their own child’s broken limb. And inside her mind, no doubt, she starts doing sums.

Tracing the origins of HIV and AIDS is a slippery task. You can always go one step back. For Australia, HIV was an American import, helped along by gay men who frequented cheap Skytrain flights between here and San Francisco in the early 80s. Before that, there was so-called Patient Zero, a gay and promiscuous French-Canadian plane steward who knowingly and unapologetically infected hundreds of men around the world, triggering off a global epidemic. And we can go even further back than that, to the moment of first transmission: most likely an African hunter who contracted a simian version of HIV by accidentally mixing his blood with a chimpanzee’s while slaughtering it for food.

Whatever its starting point, Australia recorded its first official death from AIDS six months after I was born: July 1983 at Melbourne’s Prince Henry Hospital. The man was 43 years old. He was the first Australian casualty and wouldn’t be the last. Being 29 means I’m old enough to vividly remember the Grim Reaper advertisements from 1987, but young enough not to have known a single person who has died of AIDS. When I think of my boyfriend and gay friends our age, it’s unimaginable to think of us all having to fight our way through what Stephen Dunne once described in the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘that awful time’. Dunne wrote:

Australia’s experience of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 90s is thus ancient history, and so much of that time is gone: a time of the dead and the dying; vigil shifts at ward 17; watching brilliant and beautiful men sliding into garbled dementia; polite efforts to avoid funeral scheduling conflicts; two full pages of obits in the Sydney Star Observer; anger and love and screaming horror at the waste of so many lives.

It’s a litany of horror, but it’s the detail about ‘funeral scheduling conflicts’ that really unnerves me: the idea that so many of your friends could die in one hit that you would have to prioritise and schedule their funerals in your diary, like so many terrible lunch dates.

All these things happened while I was alive, but the realities of that era were largely lost to me until I saw Tommy Murphy and David Berthold’s stage adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s memoir Holding the Man in 2008. Over six nights, the play sold out each evening, with over 500 people in the audience at every show. By the final scene, the only thing you could hear was the muffled sobs of every person in the room, my mother, siblings, boyfriend and me included. It was as though the entire theatre had become a funeral, strangers bound together by grief over the lost lives of these two men – Timothy Conigrave and his lover John Caleo – who were both real people, and would have only been in their early fifties now if they’d still been alive. I had never experienced anything like it. Then I read the book.

•

Holding the Man was first published in 1995, only a few months after Timothy Conigrave died. It’s a monumentally loved book: just mention its title and it’s enough to trigger off a wave of people’s recollections of first reading it and the emotional toil it took on them. It won the UN Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction in 1995 and was issued as an orange-and-white Popular Penguin in 2009. Somewhere along the line, Holding the Manunexpectedly and quietly became an Australian classic.

As much as the book is about losing your lover – and, ultimately, yourself – to HIV and AIDS, Holding the Man is fundamentally a love story. It has the kind of premise that would sound unbelievable if it had been written as fiction. In the mid-1970s in Melbourne, high school student Timothy Conigrave meets John Caleo at their all-boys Catholic school. Timothy, a burgeoning theatre fag, falls hard for John, the captain of the football team, who has incredibly long eyelashes. Tim writes:

On the far side of the crush I noticed a boy. I saw the body of a man with an open, gentle face: such softness within that masculinity. He was beautiful, calm. I was transfixed.

It’s an unlikely pairing – Caleo is Best and Fairest of the rugby team, for Christ’s sake – but the boys fall for each other and the relationship works. As school progress, Tim and John’s relationship is subject to their parents’ ferocious disapproval – especially John’s – but some of their friends almost barrack for them. One scene that has stayed with me is where Tim and John’s straight male friends give them a friendly, blokey round of applause after they’re caught having sex together. It’s something I can’t imagine happening amongst Australian male high school students now. Teachers who discover the boys’ relationship have reactions that range from muted to tacitly supportive.

After Tim and John leave school, they build a life together and pursue their careers: Tim goes to NIDA; John becomes a chiropractor. And like most gay couples at the time, they begin to test and play with the sexual boundaries of their relationship. This all coincides with news of a gay-targeted disease, initially called ‘the gay cancer’, which becomes GRID (Gay Related Immune Dysfunction), which is then finally recognised as HIV. John and Tim are both diagnosed as positive in their mid-twenties.

•

Tim started writing Holding the Man in the early 1990s, after John had died. At a New Year’s party in St Kilda, he ran into the writer and editor Sophie Cunningham, who was then working as a publisher at McPhee Gribble. When Tim told her about the manuscript he was putting together, Sophie told him that she worked in books. For months at a time, Tim and his friend, playwright Nick Enright, would refine the chapters ofHolding the Man closely before delivering them to Sophie. ‘It was in rough shape, but I knew I was onto something special,’ Sophie says now. ‘There was something about the voice, clarity, humour and directness of it. It’s the book I’m most proud of having published.’

At the Adelaide Festival in 1994, Nick met up with Sophie and said that although Tim had nearly finished the manuscript, he suspected that when it was finally done, Tim would be too. In September that year, Tim delivered the completed draft to Sophie over lunch, then died a few weeks later. ‘It’s like he held himself together through sheer force of will,’ Sophie says. True to his character, the last thing Tim ever said to Sophie was that she looked good blonde, and should keep her hair that way.

Filmmaker Tony Ayres – another person Timothy Conigrave befriended before his death – once said in an interview: ‘If the story of the impact of AIDS in Australia was going to be told in a mainstream way, [Holding the Man] was a very good way of telling it. Because even though it’s a tragedy, it’s not a dark tragedy. It’s accessible. It’s a love story, it’s very moving and one that wouldn’t alienate a straight audience.’ Ayres is right. Holding the Man might be regarded as essential queer reading now, but Sophie Cunningham remembers that upon its release, all sorts of people in Melbourne were reading it: straight men; gay women; mothers-in-law. ‘It wasn’t big straight away,’ she says. ‘It was more enthusiastic in a low-key way and never stopped. It didn’t become a bestseller. It was actually quite a Melbourne book, at first. There was a sense of slow and steady sales which actually just never stopped. It’s quite an unusual sales pattern, really.’

In the 17 years since its release, there have been very few criticisms of Holding the Man. It’s generally harder to criticise memoir: it feels mean-spirited to dissect the written account of someone’s own life, since any attack feels personal. Those complications are of course amplified in a book like Holding the Man, a book written by a dead man, about his deceased lover. Any feelings we have towards the book can’t be disentangled from what we feel about what Tim and John had together, then lost.

One enduring criticism of the book is that it’s too simply written, or that it reads like YA fiction – as if that, in itself, is somehow a sign of bad writing. In a sense it’s true: sentence by sentence, Holding the Man is not a challenging book. It’s the type of uncomplicated read that you can finish it off in a single Sunday afternoon, given the time. But that simplicity in style doesn’t equate to simplicity in subject matter. The topics Conigrave unravels inHolding the Man – for instance, the guilt that comes with knowing you possibly infected and killed your lover – are difficult to wrestle with. The book might be romantic, but it doesn’t romanticise. Some claim it reads too much like a fairytale, but I struggle to think of a fairytale that regales readers with all the confronting mechanics of sex (semen and shit included). Recently, Tony Ayres told me that the fairytale quality of the book was exactly what he loved about Holding the Man. ‘[Holding the Man] is a fairytale,’ Ayres told Outrage years back, ‘but so was Tim’s life. He met a boy when he was 15 and they stayed together until they died.’

Sophie Cunningham says she still gets emotional about the book: she essentially read the manuscript for Holding the Man as Tim was dying in a room nearby. Timothy was the first person to whom Cunningham had been close who died. ‘The shocking thing about the AIDS epidemic was just the sense you could get a fucking epidemic,’ she says. ‘Suddenly thousands of people are dying. Yes, they happen to be gay, but next time it could be another demographic. It was that sense of having a disease where no one knew what it was. It was shocking to everyone. Still, I’d hate for Tim’s story to be seen as a kind of fairytale horror story of What Did Happen, because to some extent this stuff still happens. It was more extreme then.’

•

It does still happen, of course. The first time HIV properly came onto my radar in any real sense was in Brisbane during the early 2000s, when one of my boyfriend’s flatmates – a handsome and obscenely young gay guy, only in his early twenties – came back from the doctors with a HIV positive diagnosis and broke down in front of the entire household with the news. It was a massive shock. But looking back, this was also a period in which HIV rates amongst young gay men drastically spiked in my home state of Queensland. Here, HIV infection rates rose by 50 per cent in the past year alone, rivalling figures from the mid 1980s. The difference is, of course, that HIV is not the death sentence it was then. There is still no cure, but at least we know what we’re up against now. Back then, in Tim and John’s era, we were all just soft targets.

Everyone projects their own stories onto Holding the Man. Like Timothy Conigrave and John Caleo, my boyfriend Scott and I knew each other in high school. When I finished reading Holding the Man for the first time, it was 3am in Brisbane and Scott was away in New York for what would be three months. The book struck me as both beautiful and horrible, the way it demonstrated that so much of our luck – and our survival – depends entirely on the era and circumstances into which we were born. If Scott and I were contemporaries of Tim and John’s, it’s likely the both of us would be dead too. Wrung out and wracked, I tucked myself into bed after reading the book and silently cried myself to sleep. Part of the grief people feel when reading this book is over Conigrave and Caleo, but I suspect it’s also for themselves. Holding the Man might be a love story, but it’s also a book that forces us to confront the fact that all love stories – including the ones to which we belong, in real life – must end in death.

Still, Holding the Man is not all misery. It’s a funny book and easy to love. It stands as a reminder of our victories, too. By the time Timothy Conigrave died, Australia had resoundingly won a huge public health battle against HIV. While other developed countries saw HIV’s spread as a reason to ensure homosexual sex, sex work and intravenous drug use remained criminalised, or to restrict those practices even further, Australia’s then Health Minister Neal Blewett worked across partisan lines to implement strategies that engaged with at-risk groups to ensure gay sex, paid sex and injecting drug use could continue safely without spreading HIV. Public education about safe condom and needle use was staggering. Our AIDS situation was effectively cauterised by a bipartisan urgency rarely seen in politics nowadays. The Australian Model is still regarded as one of the world’s swiftest and most successful responses to HIV. It’s a history of which more Australians should be proud, but so few of us even know it happened.

It’s one of the reasons why I wish there were more friendships between Gen Y queers and their older counterparts, especially ones who lived through HIV and AIDS. There is something about mainstream gay culture that almost tacitly discourages interaction between gay men from different age groups, or at least considers it suspect. It’s a shame, because there is a lot to share. I only have a handful of gay friends who are in their forties, fifties and sixties, but I’m making more of them as time passes, and I value how our conversations educate, humble and embarrass me, revealing how appalling little I know about my own community.

One of my newer friends, George, recently recommended a book to me called And the Band Played On (Randy Shilts, 1987). I still haven’t finished it, not because it’s boring, but because it’s so engrossing that it could possibly take over your life if you let it. It’s a blow-by-blow account of how the AIDS crisis developed in America and the world, and it reads like a thriller. It includes a dense cast of characters at the start, as if the book is an operatic play or an epic. It’s the type of book that’s so huge that it could kill someone with a well-aimed throw to their head. That’s what history is: big.

And here’s one final shameful admission. When a mutual friend introduced me to Dennis Altman some years ago, I didn’t even know who he was. Here was the godfather of the Australian gay rights movement, and I just smiled at him and turned a blank, because that’s youth for you: we just don’t know shit. Dennis and I are now friends, and when he recently signed his reissued copy of Homosexual: Oppression & Liberation for me, I found myself thinking that it would be fair if members of his generation felt a howling frustration towards mine: Don’t you know what we survived? Those cross-generational conversations can still happen and they’re important. Reading Conigrave’s Holding the Man for the first time, it felt like he and I were having one of them. Those conversations can be kind, too. It was only days later that I read what Dennis had inscribed in my copy of his book: for Ben, who was not born when I wrote this.

Winter can be one brutal bastard of a season. It humiliates us and renders our behaviour ridiculous. In the mornings, we stay absolutely still in bed, knowing that the slightest movement can dissipate the warmth afforded by the just-so equilibrium of body, blanket and bed. From bed, we rush to the bathroom with the grim determination of a Russian widow facing the snow, before spending the rest of the day dragging an oil heater from room to room, like a hospital patient attached to an IV drip.

And sometimes we end up on such a drip. Hospitals are inundated in winter, with staff having to adjust to drastically changed working conditions due to the cold (“winter illness impact”) and an increased demand for beds. All around the country, we contract influenza, last year in record numbers, and suffer from something delightful called “winter vomiting”, also known as viral gastroenteritis or stomach flu.

And even if we don’t get ill, we get unhealthy. Our until-now-disciplined several-kilometres-a-week swimming regimen is swiftly replaced by other non-traditional, non-Olympic sports such as extreme soup making, marathon hot showering and competitive sleeping. At night, we cling more closely than ever to our partners (or pets, or children, or strangers off the street), not because we love each other more in winter, but because other people are a great source of body heat and we could, hypothetically, kill them and use them as a protein source in an extreme survival situation, should it ever come to that.

Australians just aren’t made for this kind of weather. We live in complete denial that it ever gets cold at all. Central or in-built heating is rare, and come June, we’re always caught off guard by the sudden necessity of wearing, say, trousers.

Many countries have far more brutal winters, of course, the kind that make you reassess humanity’s collective wisdom in thinking any of these places were fit for human habitation. Take the remote Russian village of Oymyakon (population: fewer than 500), to which Stalin’s regime exiled political prisoners. Now regarded as the coldest permanently inhabited area on earth, Oymyakon boasts average yearly highs of minus 8.5°C and average lows of minus 22.7°C. (Its record low is minus 71.2°C.)

It isn’t just the environment that changes hideously in winter: our bodies transform in magical and revolting ways, too. For a start, we get fatter. Even the fittest people gain an extra kilogram or two during winter.

This fat rarely helps our cause: it’s a myth that our bodies are designed to pack on the kilos to feel warmer (as Slate magazine has noted, women tend to have more fat, and therefore a higher core temperature, but colder extremities). Instead, the fat we gain is most likely due to an evolutionary tic whereby we associate the cold with famine. We essentially hold on more tightly to any energy reserves we don’t use. Some research also suggests that melatonin – the sleep-inducing hormone activated by darkness – comes into full force in winter and makes us hungrier. Other studies hypothesise that if we are lacking exposure to sunshine, and therefore have lower vitamin D levels, we retain more fat.

I just hypothesise pudding.

If you think you’re rushing off to the toilet more often, too, it’s not your imagination. During winter, we pee a lot. Partly, this is because we tend to perspire less in winter, but in low temperatures we also undergo something called peripheral vasoconstriction. To minimise heat loss in cold conditions, blood vessels in our skin narrow to stop blood flowing to outer tissues. Blood pools towards the core of our bodies, which pushes up blood pressure in our arteries. Our kidneys – which regulate blood volume and pressure – reabsorb or shed water according to our hydration and blood-pressure levels, and, voilà, more pee.

And, contrary to the myth that we become bear-like in winter to insulate our bodies, our hair grows more slowly in winter. Lower body heat means slower cell division and blood circulation, which makes our hair growth sluggish; the rate usually drops by about 10 per cent.

We yawn more, too. Studies have been done (God bless those scientists, whoever they are) that suggest – counter-intuitively – that people yawn more in the cold to suck in outside air and ensure the brain is kept cool and functioning. We yawn less in summer, only because we would be sucking in hot air that would cause our brains to overheat. Apparently, our brains function better in winter.

Or maybe not. Because all the mental gains we enjoy as a result of yawning are probably cancelled out by the fact that winter makes us more depressed. Winter will always flatten out our moods, since the lack of sunshine wipes out our vitamin D production and affects our serotonin levels, which in turn alters our alertness and moods. Most people adjust to this as winter ploughs on, but some suffer from fully blown seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Originally labelled “seasonal depression” in the 1980s, seasonal affective disorder is notable for having symptoms – such as weight gain, increased sleep, carb cravings – that are seemingly opposite to some more common signs of depression.

In any case, we probably shouldn’t complain. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Australia is Oymyakon’s average low. Plus, most of this story was written in luxurious conditions: under a doona, wearing a beanie, with the heating jacked up to roughly simulate a Finnish sauna.

Still, I know I’m not alone when I say, “Bring on spring, already!” It’s that brief interlude between mind-shattering winters and summers of natural disasters, where the heat destroys us and we’re forced to lie in bed moaning and nude with ice packs over our foreheads. By then, we might be sweating out our weight in salt and water again, and our minds will have turned to mush.

It won’t matter, though. We’ll be fitter, happier and hairier than ever.

During this period, some people were godsends. My best friend sat in the emergency room with me, bringing me fruit, juice and crackers, somehow knowing that I hadn’t eaten properly the entire day. She gasped over my arm’s wrong angles, before we joked and gossiped about other stuff to take my mind off things. Back home, my sister put fresh sheets on my bed. Friends SMSed their concerns, insisting that I needn’t reply.

Others expressed their concern in odd ways. Horrified by what they’d heard through the grapevine, they called me in hospital – at night – although I’d only just come out of surgery and the anaesthetic was just wearing off. When they finally got me on the phone, they insisted things could have been a lot worse. Others sent urgent emails pressing me for details about the accident, forgetting I had shattered my elbow and could not type. Still, one of the worst things was acknowledging that I probably would have reacted the same way: expressing concern while somehow managing to make the situation worse.

When faced with someone’s trauma or horror, we often find ourselves brain-stumped and tongue-tied. What is it about other people’s catastrophes – accidents, death of a loved one, breakups, major illnesses, shocking revelations – that sometimes makes us say or do things so searingly inappropriate it’s as though our lines and actions have been scripted by Larry David or Ricky Gervais?

Years ago, one friend tried consoling his recently dumped housemate by saying, “Don’t worry, even the ugliest people find true love.” When my partner’s father died, a mutual friend tried to lighten the mood by joking, “Well, I guess he wasn’t a hypochondriac after all!” A girl named Cassie told me about her inexplicable blurtings, too: “When my friend was leaving for her grandfather’s funeral, I shouted, ‘Have fun!’ as she drove away in tears.”

If a propensity towards faux pas is genetic, my family definitely carries the gene. I’m still trying to work out why I recently farewelled a devout Christian friend by merrily calling out, “See you in hell!” My younger sister once told a friend that her newly shaved scalp made her resemble someone with leukaemia, only to later discover this friend’s brother had died of the illness. Another time, my eldest sister infamously bemoaned her “corpse-like complexion”, somehow forgetting she was: (1) at a funeral; and (2) talking to the dead woman’s daughter. For my family, it’s less about foot in mouth than jamming our entire thigh into our oesophagus.

But we are not alone. Scientifically at least, there is a very basic explanation for this sort of behaviour: our brains are hard-wired this way. In 2009, Harvard University psychologist Dr Daniel Wegner wrote a paper for the journal Science called, “How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for any Occasion.” Wegner found it’s not only possible but very likely that our brains will sabotage ourselves in tense situations. As our brains become more watchful and alert, monitoring our thoughts, speech and actions, that very process increases the likelihood of making the errors we’re trying to avoid. It’s what Wegner calls an “ironic error”.

Sometimes ironic errors can be smoothed over easily. Other times they can almost get us fired. In her forthcoming nursing memoir, Get Well Soon!, Brisbane’s Kristy Chambers recounts the first time she had to examine a patient’s prolapsed anus with a fellow nurse. They found it so distressingly awful that after examining the woman’s posterior, both nurses became helpless with laughter and had to leave the room. “It was an involuntary nervous system response, rather than malicious enjoyment,” Chambers writes. “I knew where my uncontrollable giggling was coming from, and that it didn’t originate from a place of evil, but that didn’t make it any easier to explain to other people.” After a doctor chastised them both (“She could die from this, you know!”), Chambers had to go to the bathroom and splash cold water on her face.

Gold Coast-based Patsy Rowe, who has been an etiquette coach for the past 16 years, remembers one party where a guest told a small group of women that her son had committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in eastern Sydney. Upon hearing that, another guest remarked, “Oh, if I was going to knock myself off, I’d never do it like that! Too messy.” Rowe recalls a stunned silence. Sensing the situation, Rowe softly said, “Oh, I’m sure you didn’t mean that to sound the way it sounded.” Mortified, the guest said to the grieving mother, “Oh no, I’m sorry. Oh dear, that was awful.”

Rowe says that while faux pas are inevitable, you can rectify the moment just as easily. “There is nothing wrong with indicating you know what you’ve said at that particular moment was inappropriate and unfeeling,” she says.

Rowe adds that if you see other people who have made a horrible misjudgment, it’s kind to throw them a lifeline, too: “It’s important to teach people not to speak immediately. When you’re confronted with any situation that has potential embarrassment to it, don’t say anything for the moment. You only need two or three seconds to compose yourself.”

Of course, everyone’s needs are different during a catastrophe. It’s tricky: most of us want both company and privacy. We want kind words and jokes to lighten the mood. Doing and saying the right thing by other people requires sonar-like sensitivity.

Most of the time, though, we don’t need to say anything at all. When the American writer Joan Didion lost her husband to a heart attack, her friend Calvin knew her well enough to anticipate that she wouldn’t be able to eat properly in her grief. “Every day for those first few weeks,” Didion wrote, “he brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.”

Similarly, following my accident, one of my favourite people unobtrusively dropped off freshly made chicken broth to my home. Even if you don’t know what to say during hard times, it’s easy to know what to do. You might starve a fever, but you always feed a disaster.

Now, I’ve always been a fan of Greer. The woman has had her own goddamned postage stamp, for starters. Plus, anyone who has: (1) written such fiercely intelligent volumes of polemic; (2) blisteringly communicated complex ideas to global audiences; (3) posed nude in their youth with their ankles behind their head; and (4) posed nude in old age while looking magnificent, gets my vote. Sure, Greer has said some ridiculous stuff in her time, but when people dismiss her as a mad old cow, Greer wins, not the nay-sayers. Plus: people seem to forget there’s never been a time when Greer hasn’t said ridiculous things. She’s cantankerous and contrary, wild and rude. Even if those traits are considered negative, why should they cancel out all the times she’s been incandescently brilliant?

Needless to say, I was scared shitless about meeting her. There’s a difference between admiring something from afar (a mountain lion, say, or a kraken) and having to engage with it directly. Plus, the idea of having to sit alongside Greer and somehow present myself as an intellectual equal on national television made me want to cry. I asked around for help. “Meeting Germaine Greer tomorrow,” I tweeted. “Do we shake hands? Kiss cheeks? Spoon?” It was a plea for mercy disguised as a joke.

Some people tweeted back, mostly with good-luck, sucks-to-be-you jokes. (Bastards.) One person who took me seriously was Jenny Brockie, host of Insight on SBS TV. She had dealt with Greer before. “Take it slowly,” she said. “Shake hands.” When I thanked her for the advice, Brockie happily said: “It was clearly a cry for help.”

On the day leading up to Q&A’s live filming, I walked around Sydney dry-retching. This always happens when I’m nervous. I tried eating some fruit, but kept daintily having to put it away, like some frail waif unable to stand the sight of food. In the studio’s green room I chatted with fellow guests Toby Ralph (a marketing and political strategist) and Craig Gross (America’s ‘porn pastor’), until Greer finally came into the room. We men were uniformly terrified. “Shall we go and introduce ourselves, then?” Ralph asked. I swallowed.

Greer is terrifying when you first meet her. She eyes you up and down silently, with a magisterial expression that says, unmistakably, why are you talking? She lets you ramble on and on horribly (“Hello, Professor Greer!” I heard myself saying brightly), talking yourself in knots, while she sips red wine slowly. Finally, I remembered we had a mutual friend who had given me a pre-prepared icebreaker. “Uh, I’m friends with Wendy Harmer and I believe you’re friends?” I said. “She told me to give you a kiss, so this is coming from her; not me.” At that, Greer lit up. She let off a small coquettish smile, shrugged one shoulder as if she were about to receive bluebirds on it, then gave me a look that said, Oh, alright then. We kissed.

Reader, I kissed her. And then it was time for the show.

During the filming itself, Greer was wonderful. Watching her in action, I was reminded that some people are so monstrously intelligent, so mentally superior, that you could study until you died and still not even come close to their brainspan. Being on the same panel as her felt made me feel like a 1997 IBM desktop PC running on Windows. I would never match her sleek machinery, no matter how many RAM upgrades I received. It was humbling and wonderful to see her in action. Then, when I spoke, she laughed at my horrible jokes. Even when she clearly disagreed, she always made eye contact with me, as if what I said actually mattered.

By the time we finished, everything was a blur. I remembered she said something about Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s butt, blah blah blah… Sure, I laughed at the time, and was as mortified as anyone else later, but I thought the resulting brouhaha the next day was predictable and boring. “She’s jumped the shark!” people said. “An awful representative of feminism!” others crowed. Come on, people. As if she cares. She’s Germaine frickin’ Greer.

And we were young too, a motley crew of 20 to 40-something nurses, writers, architects, artists, journalists, musicians, academics, students and public servants, all united in our desire to see the back of prime minister John Howard’s Coalition. Our reasons differed. They ranged from the practical (we were employed under WorkChoices), scientific (climate change), ideological (Iraq) and that small matter of – you know – deceptively persuading the public into believing asylum seekers had thrown their children into the ocean. And right before an election too!

Some of us loathed Howard on an emotional – almost cellular – level, but for what it’s worth, I felt Howard was capable of genuine courage and decency. Even now, the post-Port Arthur image of our short, slightly deaf PM in a bulletproof vest, spruiking gun laws to a sea of apoplectic rifle lovers, is undeniably kind of awesome. But as a young Chinese-Australian guy, seeing Howard turn multiculturalism into a dirty word and insisting we indefinitely detain asylum seekers – people who had travelled to the ends of the earth to find safety – left me cold. It was time.

By the time then Queensland premier Anna Bligh introduced Kevin Rudd on stage, everyone at the Paddington election party was beside themselves. Here was our first elected female premier, introducing our first Mandarin-speaking prime minister, along with his independent, modern, maiden name-keeping wife whose name sounded vaguely French. God, his family was attractive. No one was surprised Rudd had won. All polls had suggested Labor would win in a landslide; we just didn’t know the landslide would be one those freak ones that annihilates entire villages. Elated, we drank that evening until we merrily vomited in garden beds, and woke up the next day with hickies from people who weren’t our partners. After 12 long years, it felt cathartic.

Four and a half years on, the party is well and truly over. It has become an epic hangover that refuses to go away. In the sobering daylight, those people we took into our homes look far less attractive than we remembered. The idea of revisiting last night’s activities (voting) ever again again makes us want to barf. Rudd doesn’t have a portfolio, let alone the prime ministership. Watching stoushes between Rudd and Julia Gillard is torture. For all the policy wins – and we’ll get to them soon – the overarching narrative of Gillard’s government has been one of Malaysia Solution / Pokies-Wilkie / Slipper-and-Thomson-style blunders / and ad-hoc wound cauterising.

We now seem to have reached a point so low: a turncoat speaker of the House of Rrepresentatives accused of taxi misuse and sexual harassment, an MP who quite possibly misused half a million dollars worth of union funds – some of which may have gone to sex workers – and a prime minister deft with policy but not public relations, bamboozled by how to deal with the fallout. Instead of discussing policy, we’re caught up in allegations of paid sex and whispers of open bathroom doors. In late April, Labor’s primary vote hovered at just 27 per cent in the opinion polls. As newmatilda.com’s Ben Eltham recently pointed out, you’d have to go back to the Depression or the Liberal’s Billy McMahon to find similar levels of widespread public loathing. The once-laughable prospect of having Tony Abbott as prime minister isn’t just likely, it’s inevitable.

Up here in Queensland, we’ve felt this shift towards the right pretty sharply. Our state has become a sort of ground zero for progressive politics in Australia. Anna Bligh and almost all her state Labor colleagues have been so obliterated. I’m surprised there aren’t crows hovering over their spiked heads on George Street’s fences. Among Campbell Newman’s new LNP ranks are a 23-year-old who still lives with his parents (previous job – working at a Woolworths deli) and a Speaker of the Legislative Assembly who says Christian therapies can deliver people from homosexuality. Literary prizes were Newman’s first casualty; now it’s prison counselling services for largely indigenous and illiterate women. Fun times ahead, people! And to think, we’ve only just begun.

Queensland’s Labor opposition has been reduced to a pitiful team of seven. After the LNP booted them from the parliamentary grounds, they are now forced to work in exile from a Department of Housing and Public Works building across the road. If those Labor MPs find this humiliating, think about the people who actually voted for them, myself included. In Queensland, young progressive voters are starting to look elsewhere. Right now, the light on the hill feels more like that cheap torch you look for during a blackout, the one you know is hiding somewhere, only to find it with a dead battery inside. When you reach those kinds of lows, it’s time to reassess things.

It’s not difficult to guess my voting habits. I’m a relatively young (29) inner-city, tertiary-educated child of migrants. I’m a homosexual with an arts degree. Some would say this is enough reason to dismiss my politics as the views of a sickle-wielding red marching alongside Wayne Swan (come on: my ancestors fled the Communists), a member of the latte class (I’m lactose intolerant) or a champagne socialist (I drink beer). My father is an entrepreneur, so I strongly believe in robust capitalism and enterprise, coupled with fair regulations and taxes designed to meet shared needs and support the vulnerable. If any of this sounds like radical socialist boogedy-boo to you, then colour me red and put me on a commune already.

Honestly, I just don’t think my voting priorities are particularly niche. Sure, I’m not a Howard battler or part of Gillard’s working families, but I am one of the 40 per cent of Australians who live in households that don’t raise children. I’m also one of the 66 per cent of Australians under 30 who are permanently locked out of the housing market, which means we tend to care less about interest rates for our imaginary mortgages (which are, incidentally, lower than any of the Howard years) and prioritise other issues instead: environmental sustainability, same-sex marriage rights, indigenous welfare, green investments, public infrastructure, fair working conditions and the decent treatment of asylum seekers.

That the major parties consider most of these issues boutique or peripheral shows a depressing lack of imagination. Connect the dots. Environmental sustainability equates to economic sustainability, innovation and security. Supporting same-sex marriage is essentially a conservative, pro-family stance once you consider at least 20 per cent of lesbian couples and 5 per cent of gay couples are raising children (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005 census). And 53 per cent of Australian Christians are open to same-sex marriage, according to a 2011 Galaxy poll (commissioned by Australian Marriage Equality Forum). How we treat asylum seekers and indigenous Australians cements our international reputation, and after months of travelling overseas, I can tell you we’re still largely seen as a nation of racist drongos.

Labor might still champion some of these issues close to my heart, but they’re not doing great on many them. My friends and I are finding it difficult to vote for them any more. “I [still] vote Labor,” one friend recently told me, “but Christ, they make it hard.” Another said, “I used to be a staunch Labor supporter. I loved Hawke and Keating and the Creative Nation policy, but now Labor resembles nothing of that”. We’ve been burned too many times. It started when Rudd put a rain check on the great moral and economic challenge of our time. It continued when Gillard announced she was atheist, but still against same-sex marriage, alienating every Australian voter who respected logic.

It’s why many of us have turned to the Greens, not always because we expect – or even want – those candidates to win, but as a preferential protest vote to send Labor a message: You are failing us. “Not the Greens!” some might gasp. “You can’t vote for the Greens! They’re a party of abortion enthusiasts, communists and lesbians who have sexual relations with old growth forests!” And you’re right, of course. The Greens are clearly a party of catastrophe and anarchy. One only has to look at what happened to Melbourne after Adam Bandt won his seat, and how swiftly that city became a Stalinist basketcase, sort of like Pyongyang but with laneway cafés and street art.

Of course the Greens are attractive: they’ve never had to govern outright. It’s easier to remain ideologically pure when you’re a small party. But as much as people want to dismiss the Greens, you can’t ignore that, ideologically, Labor is now sitting further right than the Liberal Party of the 1980s. For voters like me, the Greens don’t seem radical any more: they’re simply occupying some of the political space Labor left vacant years ago. Plus the Greens have professionalised, filling their ranks with level-headed, media-savvy, intelligent MPs and candidates who have backgrounds in law, agriculture, design, social science, science, public health and medicine. They have become votable. Which is why I’ve voted for them, and probably will again. Looking at the voting data, I know I’m not alone.

Still, let’s give credit where it’s due. Labor has pulled off some acrobatic feats. There has been no more elegant, decent political act in my lifetime than Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations. Rudd mightn’t have championed same-sex marriage, but he did oversee – with Gillard by his side – the dismantling of roughly 100 laws that actively discriminated against me and my lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender friends. Under Gillard, we have the beginnings of a national disability insurance scheme and the foundations of a national broadband network. These are monumental achievements.

Plus, the ALP has damn fine talent in its ranks. Few people could complain about Tanya Plibersek as Health Minister, Nicola Roxon as Attorney-General, Penny Wong as Finance Minister or Bob Carr as Foreign Minister. Criticisms of Wayne Swan are valid but comically overblown. His relationship with big business is too adversarial, and his one decent shot at winning their love – a mining tax-produced tax break – was a bungle and then withdrawn.

Weirdly though, we willingly forget it was Swan’s all-guns-blazing response to the global financial crisis that allowed us to dodge an economic bullet that will haunt most developed nations for a generation. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s cash rate is 3.75 per cent, lower than it was at any time under the Coalition and former treasurer Peter Costello.

And yet, Labor is accused of economic mismanagement and is unable to communicate that not all debt is bad debt. The media is sensationally hostile and the public has clearly forgotten all about John Howard’s core and non-core promises. But all this shows how far Labor has lost control of its narrative. Labor needs to learn that good governance isn’t just about strong policy, but about having the ruthlessness to maim critics and the skills to communicate successes.

Maybe it’s more than that though. For all the criticism that Gillard is a bad communicator who speaks like a wound-up automaton, here’s a thought: remember how the former Greens leader Bob Brown spoke? Brown had the oratorial skills of a regional bank manager fumbling his way through a Powerpoint presentation on Windows 2000. On camera, the new leader, Christine Milne, has the sometimes unnerving look of a sedated calf caught in headlights. And yet, none of this matters to Greens voters, because the party itself inspires them.

No one can remember the last time Gillard or Labor actually inspired anyone, and for a sitting PM, that’s a deal breaker. Gillard is a brilliant facilitator. An incredible negotiator and deal broker. A brutal and often breathtaking warrior in question time. She concedes an issue like same-sex marriage is inevitable, but doesn’t want to align her name with it. This suggests a weird myopia I can’t even begin to understand.

Many of my friends have stopped voting for Labor and a few have stopped voting altogether. As young voters, we despair, primarily because we’re, well, young. Being young means we constantly think about our future, and it’s been a while since anyone has floated a long-term aspirational vision. Gillard doesn’t offer one. Abbott has somehow managed to achieve the remarkable feat of offering even less.

Still, we needn’t despair. Labor’s stocks are low right now. Anyone with keen investment instincts would know that’s a great time to buy stock. If you’re young and still believe in the party that gave us solid IR laws, allowed women control over their reproductive rights and gave indigenous people native title and an apology, now is the time to sign up. God knows, they need new blood and fresh eyes. For all we know, after a hopefully brief Abbott administration, you could very well be our next prime minister.

But the Northern Rivers is also a public-health black spot, notorious for flash outbreaks of infectious, preventable diseases. In August and September 2010, measles infected 14 people, mostly high school students, in the Tweed area, after an unvaccinated teenager returned from an overseas holiday. Last year saw a big jump in the incidence of whooping cough in the region, with 493 cases reported between the Tweed and the Clarence rivers.

Childhood immunisation rates here are among the lowest in the country. Many parents distrust conventional medicine. One in 10 kids aged under 10 doesn’t have a single vaccination recorded against their name. Similarly low vaccination rates can be found elsewhere in Australia, but the Northern Rivers can claim the dubious honour of having the highest percentage of parents who don’t immunise their children on purpose, believing vaccines may do their kids harm. In the Byron Shire town of Mullumbimby alone, a fifth of all parents identify as conscientious objectors to vaccination.

The Northern Rivers is also home to the woman who has spearheaded the vaccine rebellion in Australia for nearly two decades. Expat American Meryl Dorey has been called a lot of things over the years: an idiot, a dangerous liar, a hazard to children’s health. Yet with her sensibly cut greying hair and a necklace of braided fake pearls, the founder and president of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) resembles a kindly aunt or a politician’s wife from another era. Still, she is well aware many people loathe her.

“I so get where they’re coming from,” she says. “Because until my own child reacted [to vaccines], I never questioned vaccination. And I thought anyone who did question it was crazy and irresponsible. It’s a passionate issue, because what are we more passionate about than our health and our children?”

We are talking in a cafe close to Dorey’s home in Bangalow, part of Byron Shire. She sheepishly apologises for being boring with her choice of lunch (chicken schnitzel, cappuccino), before handing me copies of her slick monthly magazine, Living Wisdom. Alongside alternative-lifestyle-themed headlines such as “Ayurveda for Children” and “Free Range Pigs: Healthier and Happier”, each issue also boasts blunt headlines about the perils of childhood vaccinations: “A Jab in the Arm or Much More?”, “The Needle and the Damage” and “A Voice for the Vaccine Injured”.

Dorey believes her eldest child was one of those “vaccine injured” kids. He was an unusually unresponsive infant from birth, “a really floppy baby” who would sleep the entire day if left alone. After Dorey took him for his two-month triple antigen (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus)† vaccination, he ran a high fever within an hour. After another four or five hours, he woke from a nap screaming, then developed a weird chest rattle and a deep snore.

Two months after his initial shot, Dorey took her son back for his boosters. Her GP asked whether her son had had any reactions from the last shot. Horrified by the implications, Dorey asked whether the last vaccine might have been responsible for her son’s resulting health problems, and he said it was possible. Years later, Dorey heard this GP hadn’t even vaccinated his own children. After reading DPT: A Shot in the Dark - a still-controversial 1985 book about the apparent dangers of the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine – Dorey was certain her son’s vaccination was linked to the fact he was now on the autism spectrum. “And it made me angry,” she says. “Really, really angry.”

Of Dorey’s four kids, only one – her eldest son – is fully vaccinated. Her second child is “partially vaccinated” and her third is vaccinated only against polio. Dorey’s youngest child has never felt the sting of a vaccination needle.

I suggest that leaving her fourth child completely unvaccinated shows a huge degree of faith. “No,” Dorey says. “Vaccinating shows a huge degree of faith.”

And Dorey is determined to push that message. In early 2009, after their four-week-old baby, Dana, died from pertussis (whooping cough), Toni and David McCaffery – who live in the same region as Dorey – went public and urged others in the area to immunise their children. Soon after, the McCafferys received letters, emails and blog comments from AVN members, questioning the exact nature of Dana’s death. “Isn’t it incredible,” Dorey wrote on a Yahoo website forum, “how they have made Dana into a martyr because she supposedly died from whooping cough?”

Such actions have attracted the attention of health authorities. In 2010, the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) ordered the AVN to place a warning on its website stating its information “should not be read as medical advice”. When the AVN refused to comply, the NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing (OLGR) revoked the AVN’s charity status. As a result, Dorey says, AVN membership eroded from 2500 or so members to between 800 and 900.

When we meet, however, Dorey, 54, is cheerful and upbeat. For the first time in ages, the AVN has scored some major wins. Over the Christmas break, Dorey was invited to speak at Queensland’s Woodford Folk Festival. In February, Dorey won an appeal against the HCCC ruling in the NSW Supreme Court, which found the HCCC did not have the authority to issue a public warning about the AVN. In mid-April, the AVN also had its status as a legitimate charity reinstated by the OLGR in response to their Supreme Court win. Dorey and her supporters are delighted. Others are horrified.

Fear of vaccines is nothing new. in 1721, the US city of Boston was hit with a smallpox epidemic, a hyper-contagious horror that covered its victims with reeking, weeping boils before killing them. A local reverend named Cotton Mather spearheaded an experiment with a local physician named Zabdiel Boylston that would, theoretically, make people immune to the disease. Boylston milked pus out of existing smallpox patients, stored it in jars, cut a slit into healthy people with a quill and applied the putrid liquid. To begin with, Boylston variolated his six-year-old son, his slave and his slave’s toddler. All of them ran intense fevers for days, but survived and became immune to smallpox.

Horrified by the idea of purposeful infection, other physicians in Boston demanded Boylston stop immediately. This was an age when plagues were seen as divine judgment, and the idea of variolation seemed not only counter-intuitive but sacrilegious. When Mather and Boylston continued to variolate, someone threw a firebomb through a window of Mather’s house with a note attached: “Mather, you dog. Damn you, I’ll inoculate you with this.”

The reasons why we fear vaccination have changed but remain strong. For Diane Bigg, a clinical nurse consultant at Tweed Hospital, an average day might involve vaccinating between 25 and 30 children. In more than 20 years of nursing, Bigg has immunised thousands of children and has never encountered a single adverse reaction. But of the parents she sees, many are still anxious that the standard MMR vaccine will make their child autistic.

“Often parents have heard stories, none of them validated,” says Bigg.

Marianne Trent, the immunisation co-ordinator for the North Coast Public Health Unit, sighs when she hears this. Trent often finds herself educating and placating concerned parents who have heard that combined vaccines – like MMR – can overload a child’s immune system. Babies have a thymus gland that, in proportion to adults’, is far bigger and more capable of producing T-cells than they are. “It will never, ever be in a position to develop immunity better than it does now,” she tells parents. “By giving vaccines, it’s actually developing their immune system, not depressing it. You’ve got parents who are looking at pages and pages of stuff on the net, but not being able to read them in the right context.”

Theories promoting possible links between vaccines and autism have been floating around for years, but were popularised in 1998 by British researcher Dr Andrew Wakefield, whose paper on the subject was published in British medical journal The Lancet. That same year, London’s Royal Free Hospital held a press conference of five doctors, including Wakefield and led by virologist Professor Arie Zuckerman, to discuss Wakefield’s initial findings that potentially cast doubt on the safety of the MMR vaccine.

Wakefield’s theory was that when you combined three vaccines – measles, mumps and rubella – it altered a child’s immune system, allowing the measles virus in the vaccine to infiltrate the intestines; certain proteins, escaping from the intestines, could then reach and harm neurons in the brain. Before the conference, however, all five doctors had agreed to recommend that parents continue using the MMR vaccine, pending further research.

“Tension rose as the event progressed,” wrote British journalist Jeremy Laurance, “and by the end Wakefield was coolly urging parents to give their children single vaccines at annual intervals, while Zuckerman was on his feet, banging the lectern in frustration as he insisted that the MMR vaccine had been given to millions of children around the world and was safe.”

In the years following, MMR vaccination rates in the UK plummeted to below 80 per cent in some areas, triggering measles outbreaks. Then, in 2010, the UK’s General Medical Council declared Wakefield’s research fraudulent and unethical: it wasn’t just misleading but also subjected children to unnecessary procedures such as unapproved colonoscopies. Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register. In 2010, the editors of The Lancet formally retracted the paper and, after a comprehensive review, the BMJ medical journal in 2011 declared Wakefield’s research “an elaborate fraud”.

Meryl Dorey had been spruiking Wakefield’s claims as gospel. After the BMJ story broke, journalist and broadcaster Tracey Spicer interviewed Dorey on radio. On air, Dorey still insisted the link between vaccines and autism was “far from put to bed”. Spicer rebutted with statistics, and when Dorey tried directing listeners to the AVN website, Spicer furiously hung up on Dorey.

“I didn’t come at it thinking, ‘This woman is a crackpot,’ ” Spicer says now. “I came at it thinking, ‘This woman has a child who’s had problems, but perhaps she’ll now realise that she herself has been misled as well.’ So I was surprised when she was so vigorous in her defence of Dr Andrew Wakefield … I thought, ‘How could you, in the face of all this, continue to spread this misinformation?’ ”

Mia Freedman, publisher of the parenting and news website Mamamia.com.au, has run numerous stories slamming Dorey’s claims and encouraging parents to vaccinate their kids, but is reluctant to talk to Good Weekend. As she explains over email, “It’s like profiling someone who believes the earth is flat or that gravity doesn’t exist. There aren’t two sides to this story. On one hand there’s science. There is no other hand.”

Dorey won’t have a bar of that. “I don’t see what having a medical background has to do with it,” she says. “Is Bob Brown allowed to make comments about nuclear energy even though he’s not a nuclear physicist?”

I ask Dorey whether there could ever be a situation that would throw doubt on Wakefield’s conclusions for her. “Oh, absolutely,” she replies. “I try very hard when I read medical research to keep an open mind.”

Did the Wakefield case cause any doubt in her mind about his research? “No, not at all,” she says. “I knew he was being scapegoated, because there is so much money involved in vaccination.”

One of Dorey’s chief concerns is that big pharmaceutical companies have made fatal mistakes before. In his book The Cutter Incident, American paediatrician and vaccine expert Dr Paul Offit recounts what he calls the worst biological disaster in US history, when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with a live virulent polio virus manufactured in California’s Cutter Laboratories in 1955. Seventy thousand people became ill, 200 were permanently paralysed and 10 died.

More recently, in 2010, the West Australian Health Department offered parents a free influenza vaccination for their children to protect them against a new strain. That April, Perth mother Kirsten Button took her four-year-old son, Cooper, and 11-month-old daughter, Saba, for the flu shot. That evening, Saba had a temperature of 40.2 degrees and was admitted to intensive care. After a series of seizures, Saba acquired a brain injury and is now disabled. It is possible she will never walk un­assisted. It was later revealed more than 100 other children in Perth had allergic reactions to the same Fluvax vaccine, including high fevers, vomiting and seizures.

Eventually, it was found Fluvax had triggered febrile seizures at 10 times the expected rate. It was then banned for any child under five. Unlike its predecessor, Panvax, Fluvax had not been clinically tested in children before the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved it for mass vaccinations.

Last November, pharmaceutical giant CSL – the makers of Fluvax – added a warning for the 2012 batch of flu vaccine.

But Offit tells me allergic reactions to vaccinations are rare and often overstated. Offit co-invented the rotavirus vaccine, and his wife is also a paediatrician. Both recall the time she assisted a nurse in administering a standard vaccine to a four-month-old baby. “While my wife is drawing the vaccine into the syringe, the four-month-old
has a seizure and goes on to have a permanent seizure disorder,” Offit says. The baby was later diagnosed with epilepsy. “If my wife had given that vaccine five minutes earlier, there is no amount of statistical data in the world that would have convinced that mother of anything other than the vaccine caused the problem, even though it didn’t. The question every parent has to answer is: ‘Do the benefits of this procedure – clearly and definitively – outweigh its risks?’ For vaccines, that is true.”

Still, australian parents are expected to subject their child to more than 30 vaccinations
before his or her fourth birthday. For many parents it is a big ask, and not all accept the orthodoxy that it’s necessary. Antonia Hayes, 29, is one mother who is reassessing her child’s vaccination options. Hayes lives in inner-city Sydney and is mother to Julian, who will turn 11 in October. Just after Julian was born, he had a brain haemorrhage and had to undergo neurosurgery. When Julian turned four, he was due for a polio booster shot and Hayes’s GP explained the possible side effects: fever, flu-like symptoms. Immediately after the doctor vaccinated Julian, he went pale, fainted, then had an irregular heartbeat that persisted for a fortnight.

Hayes says she regrets going online to find information (“It makes you paranoid about everything”), but adds that she was able to quickly dismiss theories surrounding vaccination and autism, as the links – at least to her – seemed tenuous. Now Julian is due for another booster, and she’s decided against vaccinating him again. “I know that’s quite selfish, because if nobody vaccinated their kids, polio would still be around. But I definitely think there’s an over-zealousness in watching kids get four vaccinations in the first 18 months of their lives.”

Among some parents who don’t vaccinate their children, there is a logic that goes like this: if your child is vaccinated, why is my unvaccinated child any of your business? Your child will be protected from disease anyway. Offit says vaccinations do not work like that. “One: some people can’t be vaccinated,” he says. “Two: no vaccine is 100-per-cent effective.”

Statistically, Offit adds, it is more likely for a vaccinated person to get measles in a largely unvaccinated population than for an unvaccinated person in a highly vaccinated community. In other words, vaccines rely on everyone getting vaccinated to work. Vaccination is less about individual protection than entering a social contract to protect the entire community. It is not just about your own child. And for parents, that is a hard sell.

People who have reservations about vaccinations are not stupid or uneducated. In 2004, an Australian Childhood Immunisation Register survey of 462 parents whose children weren’t completely immunised showed that these parents were, on average, more likely to have had a tertiary education. Still, to accept what Meryl Dorey says, you also have to believe the following things. That there is a networked, disciplined conspiracy among doctors, government health bodies and vaccine-makers, who will do anything to earn money even at the expense of children’s health. That pharmaceutical companies are not concerned about harmful reactions to the vaccines they develop, and would allow PR nightmares surrounding injured children to continue, unchecked and unaddressed.

Arthur Allen, an American vaccine expert and author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver, finds this all rather sad. “Most people in the vaccination community are really interested in any risks of vaccination and immediately investigating it,” he says. “They’re not closing their ears to it. People who investigate these things are looking for something to go wrong, because they do
really want them to be safe.”

On the whole, however, Australians are doing okay when it comes to vaccination uptake. Globally, says Dr Julie Leask of the Sydney-based National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, our vaccination rates are relatively robust. Of today’s two-year-olds, 94 per cent will receive complete vaccinations. Of the remaining six per cent, Leask says half of their parents are concerned about safety, while the others have been delayed due to practical issues, like access to doctors. If the AVN is having an impact, it’s not a particularly impressive one.

Still, Leask says conscientious objectors do pose a real threat to their own communities. “The problem is that the parents who refuse vaccinations cluster in certain regions of Australia. And if you want to control a disease – measles, for example – you need to have more than 95 per cent of people vaccinated against it. If fewer than 95 per cent are vaccinated, then measles can take hold.”

Marianne Trent says that after years of having to deal with the AVN and Dorey’s demands for public debates (“I’d rather spend my time talking to mothers,” she says), she reckons the AVN’s influence is overrated. “They’re a little organisation in a big world.” Trent may have a point. Dorey’s magazine might look great, but during their Supreme Court case – which gave the AVN huge amounts of publicity and internet interest – the AVN website remained “down for maintenance” for months.

At the cafe, I suggest to Dorey that the conversation we’re having right now is an incredibly privileged one. Dorey nods, having heard this before. “We can take vaccines for granted,” I say, “while Bill and Melinda Gates raise money for vaccinations in the developing world …”

“And they believe in it, I’m sure,” Dorey says.

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. What the developing world needs is clean water, good food and an end to the wars that are killing people.”

“What are you more afraid of,” I ask, “whooping cough or its vaccine?”

Dorey smiles. “I’m more afraid of ignorance.”

When I tell her that doesn’t answer my question, Dorey laughs brightly. “I think it’s a really good answer!” she says.

In any case, Dorey gives the impression whooping cough isn’t all that bad. She says it can be treated with alternative remedies. When her husband and all their children contracted it years ago, they treated it homeopathically. I am quietly appalled. Two years ago, I contracted whooping cough (even though I had been vaccinated as a child; immunity recedes as we age). For three months I suffered from an uncontrollable racking so intense I wept and almost vomited every night. Surely in babies, I suggest to Dorey, the disease is far more dangerous and warrants vaccination.

“If it were me,” she says, “I would use homeopathy.”

“What is in it exactly?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says, a little mysteriously. “It’s energy medicine, like quantum medicine.”

She pauses, then laughs. “I’m not a homeopath, so I’m probably not the best person to tell you exactly how this works.”

But because she is Meryl Dorey, and because she’s here to help, she proceeds to explain it to me anyway.

†Note: the original version of this story in Good Weekend ran with an error that incorrectly identified this two-month vaccine as the MMR vaccine. Good Weekend ran a correction in its pages and I further apologise for the error, which is corrected in this version of the story.