Sendziuk deals with the major controversies. He offers the best account yet of Australia’s early, but still tragically belated, response to securing its blood supply. I think he underestimates some of the forces for inertia in this mailer: the Red Cross dependence on young male donors; the fears of alarming donors; the misplaced confidence in a blood supply based not on payment but on a voluntary gift; and the reluctance of specialists to confront the threat that factor VIII, which had so transformed the lives of haemophiliacs, might itself be tainted. In the chapter entitled ‘Is It Safe to Go Bowling?’, he has a well-balanced discussion of the controversies over the notorious television advertisement of the Grim Reaper loose in a bowling alley. While rejecting many of the facile criticisms made of this campaign, he is ultimately critical of the oppressive message the advertisement conveyed to victims of the disease.

Sendziuk is tempted at times to succumb to the myth that Australia’s liberal, non-judgmental, inclusive, community-based approach to AIDS was imposed by the minister – and a dubious coterie around him – on a defiant medical profession, which wished for a more explicitly medical model. The only alternative was the authoritarian, control-and-contain model deriving from traditional public health, with it. emphasis on identification of the infected, contact tracing and, if necessary, quarantine. Yet, outside Queensland, this model was never a real possibility in Australia, given that most of the leading AIDS specialists thought it inappropriate – at least in the early stages of the epidemic. The clearest evidence for this is the almost universal resistance by the AIDS specialists to Neville Wran’s proposal in mid-1985 to put in place the first plank of a contain-and-control policy – the identification and compulsory notification of those carrying the virus.

In his otherwise comprehensive account, Sendziuk perhaps neglects the difficulties in AIDS policy-making due to our federal system. He does note the cold war on AIDS that existed between the Commonwealth and the government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in Queensland – it would be hard not to notice it. But he pays insufficient attention to the cooperative and creative relationship in policy and programmes between the Commonwealth and the states of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, stemming from strong state health ministers backed by supportive Labor premiers. The New South Wales case is also worth further exploration: where a powerful premier, subject to bouts of populist passion, brought about a more ambiguous relationship with the Commonwealth.

Sendziuk cannot decide whether the politically difficult policies that we adopted resulted from an idealistic belief in ‘the tolerance and goodwill of ordinary people’ or were simply a pragmatic response to the nature of the disease. I would like to say they derived from the former, but the pragmatic guess is more likely. The critical public policy dilemma in HIV testing was the conflict between the community and the individual. It was plainly in the interest of the community to be able to monitor and assess the spread of the disease. But there was little or no incentive, other than an altruistic one, for the individual to be tested, since at that time there was no treatment of any kind for the otherwise healthy person who tested positive. Indeed, there were disincentives for testing, given the innumerable tales of discrimination against those suspected of carrying the disease. If there was a single imperative driving government policy it was the pragmatic determination to resolve this dilemma between community and individual by winning the confidence and the cooperation of the affected individuals in order to ensure community monitoring and assessment of the disease.

But these are minor quibbles about a splendid book. The author deserves the final word, and the penultimate sentence of the book encapsulates its spirit. Talking of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, he writes: ‘[A]s it tours the nation and displays the lives of gay men, drug users and children, stitched side by side, it stands as a testament to the fact that all people with AIDS are innocent and equally deserving of our remembrance.’