Ward 17 South is presented in partnership with St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney and recreates a room from the first dedicated HIV/AIDS treatment and care centre in Australia.
It focuses on the period between the first AIDS diagnosis in Australia in 1982 and the closing of Ward 17 South in 2007, presented in the context of the emerging medical crisis and the political and social change of the time. It is shaped by the lived experience of those who remember the first days and years of the AIDS crisis and how the community mobilised in the life and death circumstances.
Told through interviews, images of day-to-day life and special occasions on the Ward with objects from the St Vincent’s Hospital Collection, this room contains materials from the time of the Ward’s renovation in 1995.
