Victims of the insidious AIDS epidemic at the height of its rampage, both men gallantly fought a disease that terrified the world. Now, after 30 years of the global response to HIV and AIDS, the battle continues.

EMMA SWAIN reports.

The lives of Mark Tindall and his brother Brett could not have been more different.

While Mark was head of a Christian school and brimming with fundamentalist views, Brett was a brilliant gay man who lived his life tenaciously and without fear.

“My brother truly challenged my views on life which came from a very narrow point of view,” Mr Tindall, of Tenambit, said.

“I was principal of a Christian school visiting my brother in the school holidays and we’d always have to drop into a STD clinic and then head off to a gay bar.”

In 1994 Dr Brett Tindall died. He was 34 and AIDS stole his life.

Before his death, however, Dr Tindall forced himself to the forefront of the hugely confronting and deeply terrifying AIDS epidemic. Both as a researcher and sufferer.

“In 1980 Brett developed a fever that burned the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet,” Mr Tindall said.

 “At the time he had gone to listen to a doctor who had come out from San Francisco where the AIDS virus had been detected and Brett virtually diagnosed himself.”

During the mid-1980s Dr Tindall worked as a research assistant with the centre for immunology at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. By 1987 he was appointed scientific officer.

As part of the Sydney AIDS team, Dr Tindall spoke worldwide about HIV and his final paper included a foreword by one-time commissioner of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Commission on AIDS Justice Michael Kirby.

But all this did little to quell the Tindall family’s fear.

“When Brett was confirmed HIV positive we went out for dinner and I couldn’t eat from Brett’s plate,” Mr Tindall said. “My parents would sit and eat with plastic knives and forks because everyone thought they would catch AIDS.

Following his diagnosis, Dr Tindall and his partner were bashed, while Mr Tindall was also attacked outside a Maitland church.

“I was held down and hit until I was black and blue. Really, Brett’s life challenged every part of my being and he taught me many lessons.”

Before his death Dr Tindell wrote a letter to be read at his funeral.

In it he wrote:” I have died as a result of a disease that has brought a great deal of pain and suffering into my life, my friend’s lives, and humanity in general. Although not at all welcome, my demise is at least a relief from the physical aspect of that pain.

“This is, unfortunately the end of a journey that has been filled with many adventures, great friends, fabulous shared times and not nearly enough French champagne.

“As my parting words, I offer you this reply: ‘Things Change’.”

A little more than a decade before Dr Tindall’s death, Robert ‘Bobby’ Goldsmith returned home from the first Gay Games held in San Francisco.

Two years later – in the June of 1984, aged 37 – Bobby died of medical complications caused by AIDS.

“Robert was the fourth or fifth person in Australia to die from AIDS and it was horrendous because people were scared stiff of it,” Bobby’s sister Wendy White, of East Maitland, said.

“Undertakers would not touch bodies, things like that. We didn’t tell people for quite a while what was wrong because there was that stigma and we didn’t want Robert to have that as well so it was a really nasty time.” 

In the months before he died, Ms White and a group of Bobby’s friends nursed him while the former swimming champion withered away to 34 kilos.

“I knew Bobby was sick when we went to pick him up about a year after the games,” she said.

“He had done a bit of travelling as well so I hadn’t seen him for a while but as soon as I saw him I knew he had AIDS because he had changed so much. Basically Robert just wasted away and it was just horrendous because we just couldn’t do anything. It was a ghastly time.”

Following Bobby’s death, Australia’s first AIDS charity – The Bobby Goldsmith Foundation – was established to help those living in poverty because of HIV/AIDS.

“This was a great thing to do “This was a great thing to do and Robert would have been over the moon I think,” Ms White said.

“I was very impressed with the brotherly feeling of the gay community when Robert was sick because otherwise Australia really threw up its hands in horror. But Robert was fortunate in that his family knew about his gayness but it was terribly sad for some men whose families didn’t know. 

Many of them were tossed away which sometimes remains the case today.”

As of December 2010 an estimated 21,391 people were living with an HIV diagnosis in Australia.

From the start of the epidemic in the 1980s until the end of 2010, there had been 30,486 diagnoses of HIV and 10,446 diagnoses of AIDS. Australia has recorded 6776 AIDS deaths.

“I think AIDS awareness is actually beginning to slide, not so much perhaps with the gay community but certainly with the heterosexual community and in Africa there is an awfully long way to go,” Ms White said. “I don’t think people see AIDS as an instant threat of death anymore but the quality of life must certainly go down as the disease progresses and, still, there is no cure.”