(L-R) Michael Dwyer, Tobin Saunders and Brent Beadle at the 2005 Rural HIV conferenceHIV conferences bring together people from different communities for a few days to meet, hear and be heard. MICHAEL DWYER reports back from the 2005 NSW HIV Rural Forum.
I left Sydney on a sunny Wednesday morning with two men who are known in some circles to hold gay community ‘icon’ status. Brent (the former Miss New Zealand) and Tobin (perhaps better known as Vanessa Wagner). We were on our way to the 2005 NSW HIV Rural Forum: the ‘Mudgee Muster’.
I don’t know why, but every time I travel to the Blue Mountains I think of those three intrepid explorers — Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson — who in a time long past ‘opened up’ this country to white settlement. While thinking this my thoughts went to the two guys I was travelling with and I felt good to be in the company of two ‘intrepid explorers’ of another type.
We travelled over the mountains, noting the beauty of the landscape and the smoke from what must have been a fairly large bushfire. How good it was to be getting out of town for a couple of days.
An important part of attending these conferences is the social aspect. The rural conference has a very relaxed feeling right from the start just because of its location in the country. The forum kicked off with a cocktail party where we all wore cowboy hats handed out on arrival and watched a performance by the Mudgee line dancing association.
No conference cocktail party would be complete without the launch of a report, and this was no exception. Northern Exposure: HIV in the Northern Regions is a new report from the National Centre in HIV Social Research looking at treatment side effects and the health of people with HIV in the Northern Rivers regions, around Lismore in NSW.
It was then off to a local pub for a meal and a glass of Mudgee red and on the way we were mesmerised by the red glow of the bushfire on the range combined with a striking lightning display. Nature! don’t you love it?
The next morning, following a ‘welcome to country’ ceremony conducted by a representative of the traditional owners of the land, the conference proper got underway.
The first speaker was Rob Lake, president of PLWHA (NSW), who spoke about being at the end of a collective reflective period of how we as positive people are living. He emphasised that we are not just health service users, that we are many things: employees, employers, ratepayers. He felt that discussions over the next two days would show where people are at and would identify the difficulties and benefits of living in the country.
Dr David Templeton of the Macquarie Area Health Service spoke about the current challenges for people with HIV/AIDS and their clinicians in rural & remote Australia. The main issues he identified were access (lack of doctors in rural areas), confidentiality (the pharmacist dispensing drugs at the hospital pharmacy probably knows everyone for a hundred miles), and stigma (that one speaks for itself).
Jenny Douglas from Justice Health spoke about provision of services to prisoners with HIV and said that at any one time there are 35-40 people with HIV in jail in NSW. ACON president Adrian Lovney suggested that this was a time to reflect on successes and to identify challenges, including the increase in HIV in rural and remote areas and issues of access to services, HIV clinicians, transport and housing.
Even in a small conference like the Mudgee Muster, it’s never possible to get to all the sessions you’d like to. The eighteen sessions for this conference were scheduled into six timeslots over two days. I managed to get to ‘HIV prevention with MSM and gay men’; ‘There’s more to it: Living with HIV in Rural NSW’; ‘Growing older and wiser with HIV’; a series of presentations about lipodystrophy; a comparison of HIV positive men living in rural and regional NSW compared with Sydney men; making health promotion initiatives count; and ‘Dimensions of diversity: Ethnicity, HIV and rural NSW’.
My sixth session was a massage provided by a Mudgee natural therapies centre for PLWHAs attending the forum.
Some of the other sessions on offer were a women’s discussion forum, a treatments update and a session on creating positive futures for positive people.
I came away from Mudgee with a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by people living with HIV in the country. The average age of positive people in rural areas is higher than in the city, and the country has a higher proportion of ‘late presenters’ — people who are unaware of their HIV status until they present to a doctor with symptoms of illness. It would seem these people are more likely to be men who have sex with men but who don’t identify as being gay.
At a session facilitated by PLWHA (NSW) (‘There’s more to it: Living with HIV in rural NSW’) participants were asked to identify the good and not-so-good things about country life, with the information captured to go towards the production of a new resource. I identified some good aspects of growing older and also made the point that the health of indigenous Australians living in rural and remote areas and migrants to Australia who are being located to regional areas must not be compromised by cultural difference. The services that are in place in the bush need to be maintained and improved and new services must be implemented.
I should also add that the conference dinner was very entertaining due to the trivia session presented by the AIDS Treatment Project Australia and hosted by Vanessa Wagner.
The weather was chilly and wet for the two days, but with the bush affected by drought, the rain was welcome. As I lay in my warm bed listening to the rain teeming down on the roof I could sense the whole of the Mudgee community doing the same thing and being happy with this good, heavy rain.
My couple of days in the country convinced me of the importance of this two-yearly rural forum. It’s an ideal opportunity for networking and socialising (bringing together positive people, health professionals and service providers), for sharing skills and knowledge and actively looking for solutions to problems.
So, if you’re a positive person living in the country, a city boy thinking about moving to a rural or regional area or just someone interested in travelling to a new place and meeting new people — head to the next NSW HIV rural forum — you will be rewarded.
