For those of us at the centre of the storm, Sharleen – the demonised HIV-positive Sydney prostitute, the tragic Eve Van Grafhorst – and ACT UP and its often surreal activities are all familiar memories from the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in Australia. All feature in this first book-length account of Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic. National histories of the epidemic have already appeared in Britain, the Netherlands and the US, and Paul Sendziuk’s work bears comparison with them. Indeed, in the breadth of its sympathies, the sophistication of its conceptual approach and its focus on the working out of policies on the ground, it is the best national study I have read. For a book that originated in a PhD thesis, it is well written, with challenging illustrations, mostly drawn from AIDS campaign material. I should, of course, confess an interest, since this book provides an eloquent defence of the policies I pursued on AIDS during my period as the Commonwealth minister for health.

The book is subtle both in its structure and approach. Rather than a straight chronological narrative, it is built around a series of themes, reflecting the sequential development of the national responses to AIDS. Thus Sendziuk begins in the early 1980s with the construction of the disease as ‘the gay plague’, an accidental characterisation due to the fact that the epidemiology of the disease was originally charted in the First World and not in sub-Saharan Africa. If Africa and not the US had been the identified epicentre of the epidemic, the emphasis might have been different. The book ends in the early 1990s with the appearance of a new pressure group: People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA).