Blood, prejudice and nursing

It's the 1980s, and the first devastating decade of the AIDS pandemic. A young student nurse tests positive for the virus. and this information ends up on the front page of his local newspaper. A tale of fear and prejudice. but also of great courage, and love.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to ABC Rewind. Hilary Harper with you. If you picture the 1980s, you probably see gelled hair, electronic drum kits and power suits for women. But it was also the time when the world was hit by the AIDS pandemic. In today's episode, the story of Barry McCluskey, the first nurse in Australia to test positive for HIV. Producer Geraldine Feller is author of the first ever history of HIV and AIDS nursing in Australia. Here she is with Blood Prejudice and Nursing.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  The year was 1985. Dance parties, ecstasy and fluoro were in and some bad laws were out. One by one, Australian states and territories began legalising sex between men. It was an age of new freedoms, but a spectre haunted the clubs, parties, beats and bedrooms.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  AIDS, or required immune deficiency syndrome, has apparently caused the death of three babies in Brisbane. All the babies received blood transfusions from the same donor, believed to be a male homosexual who's donated blood 15 times.

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  New South Wales has two thirds of the AIDS cases reported in Australia and four of the 11 deaths so far.

• 1:27Speaker 05

  Don't be nice about it, they're poufters, right? So that's rule number one, no poufters.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  HIV wasn't just hitting the bars and clubs of Sydney's Oxford Street. In January 1985, Barry McCluskey, a young student nurse at Warrnambool Base Hospital in regional Victoria, tested positive for what the doctors then called the AIDS antibody. Panic over this mysterious new illness was on the rise. And in a small Catholic town like Warrnambool, there was nowhere to hide.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Barry's story is a window into a different time. A time of panic and fear. A time when you could lose your job and be run out of town for having HIV. But it's also a story about courage and solidarity. About nurses protecting one of their own and taking a stand against discrimination. All right, well, maybe we'll get started, Anthony.

• 2:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, my name's Anthony McCluskey. I'm Barry McCluskey's brother, younger brother by five years. We grew up in Warrnambool together. There were four of us in the family. We were all adopted. And, but we had a really loving family and it was a great childhood we had together. Barry was a, was a very generous man. He was, he was a very good looking man, very fit man. He rode a bike to work every day, very many kilometres. And tremendous smile. He loved history, had an absolute fascination with history. He always, as a child, talked about being an archaeologist. That never eventuated.

• 3:02Speaker 06

  But the fact he became a nurse, I think, talks something to his caring nature and the kind of person that he actually was.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Warrnambool, where Barry and his three siblings grew up, is a small regional city in South West Victoria, along the Great Ocean Road, about three hours south of Melbourne. In the 70s and 80s, it had an active beat near the Breakwater, where men could mate for sex, but no open gay community. Looking for other people like him, Barry moved to Melbourne in the early 1970s, where he lived for about 10 years. But sick of his job in the public service and looking for a change, Barry moved back to Warrnambool and started working at the local hospital as an orderly. By 1983, he was training to be a nurse. In mid 1984, Barry did what many young gay men did then. He took a trip to the US.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  He advertised for accommodation in gay papers and he met friends and maybe even some potential lovers via pen and paper. He spent a few months immersed in the gay heartland of San Francisco. With his thick dark curls and bright blue eyes, I imagine he was a pretty popular guy on the dance floor.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  He had a great time, but Barry could also see that this virus everyone was talking about was serious. There were a lot of sick guys in the US. He came back home and, feeling anxious after a hookup, he decided to get tested. This was early days of AIDS in Australia and the known caseload was still low. But in January 1985, Barry received his test result. He was the first nurse in Australia to test positive to HIV and one of a growing number of gay men across the country. Barry kept his news close to his chest. His family was a loving one and they knew he was gay, but he wasn't ready to tell his mum and dad about this scary new virus.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  AIDS was something happening in San Fran and New York and maybe Melbourne at a stretch. It didn't seem possible that it had come to small-town Warrnambool. But that private, personal decision about when to tell his mum and dad was quickly taken out of Barry's hands. No-one knows exactly how it happened, but word got out about the positive result. And on January 22, 1985, the local paper, The Standard, ran the headline, 'Local AIDS Suspect'.

• 5:27Speaker 06

  The first that the family knew was when the Warrnambool Standard went to town, I call it the country rag, went to town and really crucified Barry as being an AIDS suspect. I think they spoke about, which was incorrect, he had HIV, he didn't have AIDS, but that was the hysteria then. I remember my parents, and they were really good living people, had the paper delivered every morning and there it was. And I think it talked about a Warrnambool nurse contracted AIDS, something like that. But there were only a couple of nurses at the hospital, so it was pretty easy to work it out, who it was, even though they didn't name him. And I know that my father went to Barry at the time, it was early in the morning, and

• 6:10Speaker 06

  went in and said to him, 'Is it true Barry?' And Barry said, 'Yes'.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  When I visited Warrnambool in April, it was cold with grey clouds hanging low.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  In 200 metres turn left, then you have reached your destination, Warrnambool Town Centre.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  The town sits over a rough and tumble stretch of beach on the shipwrecked coast. It's country that's been cared for for many thousands of years by the Eastern Ma and Gundich Mara people. In the 1850s, after most of the land had been stolen from the Gundich Mara, Irish Catholics fleeing British rule and the horrors of the potato famine arrived and began farming. Warrnambool grew around them. Barry and his four siblings grew up in this tight-knit community, one of the city's many Catholic families. He went to school here at the Christian Brothers College and was remembered well by Cheryl Durston, who trained with him on the wards at the local hospital.

• 7:09Speaker 07

  Hello. Hi Cheryl. Hello Geraldine.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Can you tell me a little bit about Barry and how you knew him?

• 7:20Speaker 07

  Oh, now you're taking me back a long time. Over forty-odd years ago, I knew Barry. Barry was one of those, if he could see that you were busy up your end, he'd come and help. And whether that help would be, you know, as in doing the suppers or doing the bat washers or whatever, he would come and do that.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  When I visited Cheryl at her home in the back streets of Warrnambool, I brought along a copy of the front page article that broke the news of Barry's positive test.

• 7:51Speaker 07

  Okay, the headline. Local AIDS Suspect. A young Warrnambool homosexual is the first member of the nursing profession in Australia to be identified as an AIDS suspect. God, isn't that awful?

• 8:13Speaker 07

  It was an interesting time when Barry was diagnosed with HIV. And it came out in the hospital and I guess in the community setting in a very abrupt manner. We knew nothing about it. And then suddenly it was like this rumour that spread around the hospital. Barry's got HIV.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  For me, it came across with, oh, that's not great. But that's all I thought.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  But with other people, it was almost like, oh, he's the walking dead. Should he be here?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  The treatment that I saw Barry receive was appalling. It got to a point where Barry was almost ostracised from the hospital. Certain surgeons said, they didn't say, they demanded, he is not to be in our theatre.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  We do not want him near any of our patients. And what they said, they got.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Barry wasn't sick, but he was put on sick leave by the hospital. Waves of fear and prejudice washed through the town. Remember, this was the same year that Eve Van Grothurst, an HIV-positive three-year-old, was hounded out of her childcare and then the country. If a three-year-old with HIV couldn't attract much community sympathy, things could only be worse for a gay nurse in regional Victoria.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  The Standard, 23rd of January 1985. You don't leave a small child at risk with tiger snakes. A Warrnambool city councillor last night called for all known homosexuals working in hospitals to be transferred to duties not involving patient care. Councillor McCarthy's concern was sparked by the revelation that a local nurse at the Warrnambool Hospital had reacted positively to an antibody test for the AIDS virus. McCarthy said the council had a responsibility to care for and protect sick people. You don't leave a small child at risk with tiger snakes, he said.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Richard Goodwin was the local paper's editor in 1985, and he wrote the front page article breaking the news of Barry's HIV-positive status. He didn't remember Barry's story, but he did remember councillor McCarthy. Or as he put it to me, McCarthy by name, McCarthy by nature.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Frank McCarthy was a rabid, religious, right-winger. And their words I probably wouldn't have had in my vocabulary 40 years ago. But I understand a bit more. I suppose that, I think that's a good contemporary description. And he wasn't alone. Warrnambool's very... Was a very, I'm reluctant to say right wing, but certainly conservative to ultra-conservative place by and large. And a large Catholic population. And they were influential. They always had voices on the city council. And they made themselves heard.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Barry was only 30 years old, the same age as I am now. I can't imagine dealing with a diagnosis that meant, at the time, terrible sickness and most likely a shortened life, as well as the public shaming and rejection that Barry received.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  About a week after the article came out, Barry left Warrnambool and headed for Melbourne.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  My name's Tom Carter. I'm a nurse, I should say retired nurse. I started work in 1984.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Tom worked at the Melbourne Communicable Diseases Centre, which, as he put it to me, was a brand new trendy name for VD clinic. Nurses like Tom played an extraordinary role in responding to the emerging HIV and AIDS epidemic. They worked with communities to develop public health campaigns, ran testing clinics out of spas and saunas, advocated for their patients, and as the disease progressed, cared for many of them in their final days. Tom first met Barry at Club 80, a popular gay bar in Collingwood. He was running his usual clinic, offering testing and information to the bar's patrons when Barry showed up.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  He spoke to a gay friend in Melbourne, and this was on a Thursday. And that friend told him that I went to a gay club, Club 80, on Friday night for blood tests and education and stuff. So he drove from Warrnambool to Melbourne, came and saw me at midnight.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  Until about 3.30 in the morning. And we both had a long talk and he was very brave. But once he realised he was talking to another male nurse who knew how hospitals could be so nasty. And I knew enough to know that what happened to him was very unethical. Um, we laughed a lot and we cried a lot.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  In Melbourne, Barry stayed with his brother Anthony and sister-in-law. His mum and dad back in Warrnambool were having a tough time of it.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  I know for somebody like my mother, it was hard work. Um, and she'd lived in Warrnambool all her life. She would have been a woman well into her sixties. And um, she talked about people crossing the street when they saw her coming. Now, whether they were just too embarrassed or they were scared, I'll never know. But it really, it was really hurtful to her, the people that she thought were friends would cross the street to avoid contact with her.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  What Barry and his family were subject to is a devastating example of what life could be like for gay people living in regional small towns in the mid 1980s. But there's also another side to this story. Some of the strongest support came from some very surprising places.

• 14:25Speaker 06

  Warrnambool in the seventies and eighties and before that, of course, a very traditional Irish Catholic community. So back then, you know, the church would be full for five or six masses every Sunday. But I can remember um, mum and dad talking about a time that the priest got up from the pulpit and really went to town. And I don't know the words, of course, but it was about, you people, you come here to mass and you're out there gossiping, spreading malicious rumours, judging people, turning your back on good living people. You have no right to do that. He really went to town. And I, I don't know whether there was a change for mum and dad, but by cer- certainly he, he backed Barry. And he backed the family and he really let the community know.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  And remembering, you know, you'd be talking about hundreds of people would have heard that that day.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  After recuperating in Melbourne and with the support of his union, Barry bravely returned to Warrnambool to complete his nursing training. But the fear and prejudice had not gone away. It was a painful memory for his colleague Cheryl.

• 15:30Speaker 07

  Because it got out into the community then, and it was almost like, "Don't go to South West Healthcare, there's a male nurse up there who's got AIDS."

• 15:41Speaker 07

  So people started to think, "We can't come up there." And then South West Healthcare, the management started to say, "Now you'll see what's happening. The community's got this understanding. We can't even get the people to come up here now, and it's all because of this one person." And it wasn't because of Barry. It was because of the lack of knowledge. And a number of us went and approached the Director of Nursing at the time, and we stood up and said, "Hey, look, this is not fair. This is discriminatory. This is causing heartbreak. It's also causing a lot of disruptions in the hospital setting itself. We're trying to get through our studentship, to complete our training.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  We're trying to give some confidence and trust to the community. What are you guys doing? Just what are you doing?" We were dismissed. We were told to go back and do what we should be doing, looking after the patients. It got to a point where even when Barry sat down, you had a cleaner come and wipe down the chair after Barry got up. And it was so deliberate. So what a lot of us did, and when I say a lot of us, in my group, there was about eight of us, and in Barry's group, there was around about the same number. When we saw that happening, we actually took our little wipes down, and we wiped our own chairs too. And we raised our fingers and said, "Hey, look, we did it for you. You don't have to run around and do that now."

• 17:09Speaker 07

  I guess what we were trying to do was to make it so damn obvious for them that this was ridiculous.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  The Director of Nursing may not have stood by Barry, but his colleagues did. They took matters into their own hands, challenging discrimination when they saw it.

• 17:27Speaker 07

  There was a number of male nurses up there, and a few of them...

• 17:31Speaker 01

  For to take the heat off Barry. They decided, no, we're not going to deny it. We're not going to admit it. Let them think it. Trying to get the heat diverted off Barry.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  So the other male nurses in the area let people think that they were HIV positive. The solidarity of his colleagues and the union's backing meant that Barry was able to complete his training. But he didn't stay long. Barry moved to Melbourne, where he started working at the Fairfield AIDS Unit, the centre of hospitalised AIDS care in Victoria.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Hello Geraldine, how are you? I'm good. Nice to meet you. Good thanks. Great to meet you. You too.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  I mean, just even being here today, I can, the whole experience floods back, everything about it. And it was a very special place with very special people, as in the staff, and we provided very special care. There's just no doubt about that.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Right till the end.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  This is Grant Hamilton, who nursed with Barry between 1986 and 1992. We're on the grounds of the old Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, which was closed by Geoff Kennett's Liberal Government in 1996. But the buildings remain and you can still wander around the grounds, which roll down to the coffee-coloured Yarra River.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  We're sitting in the AIDS Memorial Garden at the back of the property. It's a rocky grove with a ramshackle pagoda, and it's dedicated to those who lost their lives to the virus.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Can I just ask you, Grant, about Barry McCluskey?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. I remember Barry quite well. I remember he came to work at Fairfield and I do, he must have disclosed that he was HIV positive at the time because I knew. He was a lovely, lovely man, a very gentle sort of person, very caring, bit of a sort of quieter cheever. A little bit intense, but in a positive sort of way. You know, he was really well respected by everybody. And thinking back now, it must have been pretty challenging for him to work in that environment, having made the choice to work in that environment when he had HIV.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  HIV care began at Fairfield in 1984. Grant worked there between 1986 and 1992 alongside Barry and through some of the worst years of the AIDS crisis in Australia. The vast majority of the people that Grant, Barry and their fellow nurses cared for were young gay men dying painful deaths well before their time.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  I can pretty much remember the names of all the people I looked after here. And the ones that I really liked and the ones that were really challenging that I would often see as ones that I was gonna... How would I say? Like, you know, you'd come to work and you'd hear about the difficult person in whichever room and I would always make it my mission to, at the end of that shift, we'd be best friends. I didn't ever feel uncomfortable with the people that came in that were experiencing significant trauma and being very difficult.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  We had this man who I'll keep his name anonymous, but he'd been very active in the fashion sector for a very, very long time. He was quite an iconic person. Anyway, he unfortunately developed AIDS. He was pretty much in denial the entire time. He was really difficult. And he did annoy a lot of the nurses, but for whatever reason, he and I got on really, really, really well. And there used to be this big annual event called Fashion, whatever the year was, Fashion 84, Fashion E5. And he would often be quite pivotal at that event. And he was really, really sick on this occasion, by this stage.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  And, you know, he was pretty traumatised about the fact that he couldn't go and I said, "I'll take you." So I organised the wheelchair and the transport and everything and I took him to that event. And that was probably the last time he went to an event like that. And put on lots of make-up and made him look as best as he possibly can and that was pretty special for him. And I felt quite honoured and privileged to have been able to achieve that for him.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  It's not conventional nursing care, is it? It's something else.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  No, it's not. It's a bit like what I said earlier, you know, it's, it's very holistic. And I was feeling very fru-, I mean, I was only 26 and I was already feeling very frustrated with nursing, that it was just medical model, treat the person with this condition and just get them better and whatever. And this was different because there was so many social and emotional, political aspects to the whole issue of AIDS and the experience people were going through. And to truly look after these people well, you had to become involved in all those aspects of their life to really provide the care that you felt was the best care.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  We can't ask Barry what it was like working at Fairfield, but Grant's experience of the very special care he and his colleagues provided their patients gives us a pretty good idea of what Barry was doing in his final years. From talking to his brother and others who knew him, it sounds like Barry was pretty happy in Melbourne and in his job, but he never lost his connection to Warrnambool. He was deeply attached to his family and to the rugged landscape of South West Victoria. While he was still well, he returned regularly to walk and camp on the sandy cliffs and jagged headlands that punctuate the shipwrecked coast. By the early 1990s, about six years after he tested positive, Barry's body was starting to slow down.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  He couldn't go hiking anymore and he moved off the wards at Fairfield and settled into the hospital library. A great lover of books and cataloguing, this suited him nicely.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  And he worked on the wards like any other nurse, but then time came and he got sicker and sicker. And he kept wanting to contribute and he used to go out there and they'd moved him to a job in the nurses' library, which in reality meant he laid in a comfortable beanbag and just drowsed most of the day.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Barry was well loved by his fellow nurses and in his final years and months, his colleagues would drive him to and from work each day. When he was no longer able to work, Fairfield nurses cared for him in his home. In Barry's final weeks, his mum and brother Anthony spent a lot of time with him.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  And in February 1992, at the age of 37, Barry died.

• 24:45Speaker 06

  I remember his death very clearly, I just really do. It was a beautiful death, and if you can say that, but he'd been probably unconscious about 24 hours. And it was a Sunday afternoon, about 3 o'clock, and he sat up in his bed, just an amazing burst of strength, said, "Where's mum?" And, um...

• 25:11Speaker 06

  Yes, and I went to get mum, and she came in and sat down with him, and he asked her to give him the cuddle, and she sat in the bed and he sort of leaned on her chest, you know, leaned down on her, and he went like that, just like that.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  I've just pulled up to Moonlight Head Cemetery, which is just off the Great Ocean Road, and this is where our story ends and where Barry's story ends, he's buried here.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  "He loved it around here," that's what his brother said, and everyone that I spoke to talked about how much the Great Ocean Road and this landscape was important to him. So it's really nice that he gets to rest here and it's looking out over at the water, it's just beautiful.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Moonlight Head is a midpoint on the road that links the hometown Barry loved, even though it didn't always love him back, and Melbourne's vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods, centres of gay culture and life. Barry's final resting place speaks to how he lived his life, belonging to both of these places.

• 26:22Speaker 07

  It would have been so easy for Barry just to toss it in and go and hide, and he didn't, he confronted it. I just hope that people who are listening to this take on board. What has been said and to know that at times we will encounter things that we don't understand and that we have minimal knowledge. But to be a little bit kinder to people and also just remember it could be you or a member of your family or close friend and how would you like to be treated?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  You've been listening to Blood, Predatus and Nursing: Barry's Story. It was written and produced by Geraldine Feller with sound engineer Brendan O'Neill. And a big thank you to Barry's family and friends who opened their hearts and their archives. If anything in this story has caused issues for you, you can call Q Life on 1800 184 527.

• 27:25Speaker 00

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