FAIRFIELD

Photo credit: Darebin Library

 

David Menadue:

Without Fairfield hospital I've got my doubts about whether I'd still be here. And I don't want to sound like a drama queen, but, um, the fact was that they worked on the stigma. They understood the HIV stigma was stopping people treating, and stopping people wanting to leave, to be honest. It was so intense in the 80s particularly, and into the 90s even, that people wanted a kind of refuge. They wanted somewhere that would accept them totally for who they were. And Fairfield worked on that. You know, the doctors there were clued up. They understood stigma because they dealt with polio patients and all sorts of people that have had a hard, you know, diagnosis to deal with. HIV came along and, you know, I think it was about 50% of their patient load in the 90s. So, it was a very important part of who they were was HIV medicine. 

 

What I would say about Fairfield was, it wasn't judgmental, unlike a lot of the other GP clinics at the time. But of course, in the 80s when I started going to Fairfield Hospital there were no treatments. So you can understand a little bit of the reluctance of doctors to, you know, be in the same room even to the person with HIV. But this wasn't something I felt with the nurses at Fairfield. It was a truly special thing that those people were prepared to treat you as just a normal patient, do the same things they would normally. It's a beautiful sanctuary. Now that's one of the other reasons I think Fairfield had that special quality about it. You know about the peacocks of course, I mean they used to shit everywhere, but they were pretty, you know, and it added to the sort of unusualness or specialness or whatever the word is. 

 

It was – you can walk down, down the back, down into the almost to the riverbank, actually, because it was a Yarra riverbank. Um, you could do that. And we developed our own park, as you know, the AIDs Garden. I actually planted a tree there. It is the tallest tree almost in the garden. And it has no foliage until the very top. So it's the skinny tree which people say lets you take it. It's taken you off. And I don't know what year I planted it, but I planted it to sort of acknowledge that it was the AIDs garden, and that people like myself, who were survivors, appreciated the fact that this was a soulless space. That we could go down there with friends and, you know, because we were losing a lot of friends and you went through really sad times. And we did, you know we're not supposed to talk about this, but the truth of the matter is, we had quite a lot of funerals down there. We were told not to, and we're told not to spread ashes. But of course, you know, we were people of that particular vintage, we weren't going to follow any rules. And well that's what happened, you know, there's ashes spread all over the garden. And that was what we were acknowledging by putting that tree there. We weren't saying, look, this is in memory of all the people we know. Ashes have been put in this garden. But that's what we decided. 

 

It was our own space, you know, like, the HIV community meant something. I think it still does. But then for people like me with HIV, to have other people who accepted us that wanted to spend time with us, that wanted to do things like share our funerals or share our birthdays or whatever. It was like, it was an acceptance into a community. In the early 90s, maybe 1991, the government thought, look, it's an expensive hospital to run. We're thinking that current

hospitals like The Alfred and the Royal Melbourne can do the infectious disease just as well. Why are we putting all this money into a special infectious disease hospital? Because, you know, hospitals now know how to manage infectious disease. And so, because people like myself, and Susan, and others really relied on that hospital for their sanity, really, as well as our good health. We weren't prepared to just lie down and let that happen. And so we did a march to the steps of Parliament House and made a big fuss and made Maureen Lester cry and say, “all right, well, we'll, you know, keep it open a while longer.” And we kind of knew we were a bit on borrowed time, but, you know, we made such an impact and the AIDs Council was behind us. It wasn't a small group of us. It was the AIDs Council and all their volunteers and everybody trying to make sure it stayed open. So, it really lasted to maybe 1994, I can't remember, but we made a huge fuss a second time as well. But we lost this time. They closed it. 

 

 

Susan Paxton:

It was like – it felt like the only place in Melbourne where you could go and not face any discrimination, because it was only for HIV positive people. It had that unique character to it even further, so that we knew that we were all in it together, kind of. When it eventually closed down in the mid 90s, would have been, it just seemed like we were being deprived, you know, being ripped up of our identity almost. It was a sensible thing to do to, to put Fairfield Hospital into within a larger infectious diseases, um, hospital. But it felt – it felt like we were losing our identity when that happened. 

 

It was a unique, um, hospital. It was incredibly caring. Um, and I think that the people within the HIV sector in those days were the most compassionate healthcare workers around, because they face a lot of stigma working with us. A lot of people thought, oh, you can't work with those, you know, AIDs people. You get you know, you get AIDs yourself. Fairfield was like a sanctuary in a way. It was a scary place because often people went there to die, but people didn't treat you with any stigma. And that was the, that was the unique thing that we were all bonded in our freaky-ness, in a way. 

 

And it was strange for me because there weren't many women around at all in those days. It was like one sphere where I felt completely comfortable with my HIV. I mean, there were very few gay men that ever ostracised me. Couple did, as if to say, what are you doing here? It's like, sorry I’ve got HIV too, it does happen to women. Um, but on the whole it was always a very welcoming place. It was also a place where we had a lot of, um, a lot of joy and a lot of sadness because so many people did die. And, um, I remember during the period when Fairfield Hospital was going to be closed down and, um, people, we were doing, um, protests at one point was a couple of guys, one of them's passed away, I don't know what happened to the other one. But one of them rang me and said, “Oh, we're going on the roof of Fairfield tonight to protest.” I said, “Who, you and Robert? No,” I said, “Don't do that. The two of you by yourselves aren't going to achieve anything. Hang on. We'll get a whole group of people out there.” So there was a lot of activism around in those days because it was kind of like on the tail end of Act Up. I came on the tail end of Act Up. The Garden started later on. It was almost towards the end of Fairfield's life. 

 

But the thing that I enjoyed about Fairfield, it sounds weird that it was a place of so much death, was also a place of so much solidarity. Um, Positive Women had got their first office space there. It was called the, uh, Matron’s Cottage, that's right. It was a lovely little space. And I remember going in there and being the first one to write down minutes by hand with our meetings and try and start, you know, creating a, um, uh, filing system and stuff. And just people started popping in. So, it was really the beginning of developing that Positive Women's community for us, for sure. Having a physical space where women could pop in made such a difference. 

 

As a person who’s not religious in any way; I think it's important to keep the memory of those who've inspired us alive, to be able to tell other people how inspiring this person was, to go and remember. It's also about creating pride in where you've come from, pride in the community that have, you know, moved us along to the point we are at now. I mean, I think a lot of those guys who were the early legends, I mean, my God, they could never have imagined the future that we're living in today.