Qtopia founder David Polson was one of the first people diagnosed with AIDS in Australia. He died today

DAVID POLSON AM November 23, 1954–February 10, 2025

When he celebrated his 70th birthday last year, David Polson was one of only 28 left of the first 400 men diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Australia in 1984. It appeared then to be a death sentence. Worse, given the widespread ignorance, fear, distrust and discrimination, he was advised to tell no one. For a decade, only two cousins and two friends knew.

His first response was that, despite the odds, he would not die. He formulated his own plan.

David Polson spent 30 years of his life undergoing clinical trials to help find a cure for HIV/AIDS.Credit: Wolter Peeters

“I adopted a very healthy lifestyle and I started exercising, had a great diet, took hundreds of vitamin supplements, used positive visualisation and meditation. I just stayed very positive and surrounded myself with laughter and humour. It was probably a little naive, but that was all I had. There was nothing, really, in terms of treatment.”

Secondly, having seen a poster at his GP’s surgery calling for gay men to come forward for a study, he resolved that he had a duty. “Because no one knows about what this is. I said to my doctor, ‘I will do anything I can to help medical science find a treatment or a cure. Whatever I can do, I will do’.”

David Polson was born on November 23, 1954, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the only son of a head teacher. A happy childhood (“full of love and family”) ended when David’s father was transferred to the provinces and he was sent to boarding school, where the country boys made his life hell – he was beaten and abused as “Poofter Polson”.

Polson (in sunglasses) with other Qtopia supporters (from left) City of Sydney councillor Lyndon Gannon, Ian Roberts, Ita Buttrose, Qtopia chair David Polson, chief executive Greg Fisher, and gender diversity educator Katherine Wolfgramme. Credit: Edwina Pickles

He later revealed being molested by a priest. He never came out to his parents, but his sympathetic father allowed him to board privately in town. As soon as he left school, he jumped at the offer of a scholarship from Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre.

A year with a musical cabaret in a Neutral Bay theatre followed, and then a few years in London doing temp work, among them sending medical personnel to Saudi Arabia.

He returned to Sydney in 1981 and became a barman at the new five-star Regent Hotel. By the time of his diagnosis, he had become manager of the Don Burrows Supper Club.

In response to that poster, David came under the care of Professor David Cooper at Sydney’s St Vincent, whose research, with Professor Ron Penny, would lead to the first description of the seroconversion illness which accompanies initial HIV infection in many people.

A portrait of David Polson by the artist Alun Rhys Jone arrives at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2023.Credit: Brook Mitchell

Professor Cooper’s National Centre for HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (since 2011, the Kirby Institute) proceeded to take a leading role in most of the key trials that ultimately led to the optimal use of life-saving combination treatments now widely available to people with HIV throughout the world. Over the next 30 years, David Polson underwent more than 28 drug trials with Dr Cooper, who became a close friend.

The trials left him with nausea, lipodystrophy, hearing loss, imbalance and kidney disease, yet as he fought his own battle, he assumed a public role to support his fellow sufferers and to dispel the ignorance and fear.

Walking through St Vincent’s Ward 17 South for AIDS patients – four beds to a room – in the early days as the virus took hold, he recognised 90 per cent of patients as friends. New infection rates would peak at 2400 in 1987 before declining to a low of 719 cases in 1999. Eight thousand Australians would succumb. David would attend a funeral a month.

He gave up a career and dating. By 2011, he was taking about 48 tablets a day. “I keep swallowing those tablets and I don’t mind because it’s better than the alternative.” By about 2020, his condition was confirmed as undetectable, which also meant it was untransmittable.

After Professor Cooper’s death in March 2018 and a conversation with his widow, Dorrie, David took up his vision to establish a space to honour the history of those affected by HIV/AIDS. With an endowment from Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch, support of the state and city, the patronage of journalist and businesswoman Ita Buttrose and former High Court justice Michael Kirby, with David as founding chair, the old Darlinghurst Police Station was transformed and, on 24 February 2024, Qtopia was born.

Long-term HIV survivor David Polson AO poses for the Good Weekend magazine. Credit: Joshua Morris

Adopting Michael Kirby’s counsel that the museum should also embrace “queer people who had been oppressed, persecuted and discriminated against over the decades”, the museum took on a broader remit centred around three principles: memory, celebration, and education.

The first – a stark, immensely moving AIDS memorial which houses a reconstruction of St Vincent’s Ward 17 South with much of the contents of the original, and the contribution of the Catholic Sisters of Charity “who cared without judgment”. Their mantra was “we are here to look after these people, to love and support and care for them.”

A wall of love remembrance garden has been planted in David’s honour, in what was once the police station garden.

David’s passionate, eloquent and unrelenting advocacy led to him being made a Member of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day 2023 honours “for significant service to community health through HIV education and advocacy roles”.

He is survived by his sister Ruth Henning, two nephews, William and Edward, his beloved terrier, Rosie, and a galaxy of friends who knew him as Polly.

To the end he was true to his mantra, which was H.O.P.E. – humour, optimism, perseverance and energy.

Mark McGinness

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